I’m meeting with a new therapist for the first time tomorrow. Feeling quite nervous about it, and also, for some inexplicable reason, I’m worried about jinxing it by writing about it now. Magical thinking..

Hopefully it’ll be ok. It would be so nice to just have something good like that happen. I really want to work through my issues, but, I want to do it with the right person. In fact, I think it’s impossible to do it with someone who isn’t the right person, because you’ll end up telling half-hearted versions of what you’re actually feeling, and so you end up achieving very little.

I don’t see therapy as something you do once, and then you’re somehow magically cured for life, but, rather, I believe it’s an ongoing process to help you find a way to understand how you work, where certain aspects of your behaviour/ways of responding stem from, and – hopefully – having some insight in those areas will allow you to manage these things in a better way.
To feel more at ease with who you are.

And I could certainly do with that.

I’ve had a few rough nights recently, where I’ve fantasised quite a lot about both suicide and self-harm. Not in a “this is something I want to do” sort of way, but nonetheless it has been occupying my thoughts at odd hours, and I’m not particularly comfortable with that. Even though I am determined to find a way to deal with the dark memories that keep pushing through, I can’t help to, if only for a few minutes, allow myself to think about how easy it would be to simply choose not to deal with them. To just let go of life and sink into some sort of nothingness.

What do I do when that happens? Well, in all honesty, for the most part I just accept that having these kind of thoughts might be something I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life, and I allow myself to stay with those thoughts for a little while. And then I decide that enough’s enough, and I pull myself together by reminding myself of all the things I’ve got going for me. I switch the light on and look at the inside of my left wrist, where I’ve had the word “imagine” tattooed.

I chose that word, because it serves as a reminder to imagine what I might be missing out on. The people I haven’t yet met, the conversations yet to be had, the aspirations still waiting to be fulfilled.

I remember D. quoting Heidegger to me in a session [although, I think she struggled to remember who she was actually quoting and may even have suggested it was Kirkegaard] – “Death; the impossibility of further possibility”, and, I suppose, in many ways my “imagine”-tattoo bears the same meaning.
To remind myself that if I choose to let go of life, I also let go of all the things I could have been, all the things I could have done.

And that’s a pretty compelling argument.
To hold on.

xx