Dolly Alderton, «Everything I Know About Love»:

Every week I went in and we did detective work on myself to answer the question of how I came to be who I was in twenty-seven years.

We did a forensic search of my past, sometimes discussing a thing that happened the night before, sometimes a thing that happened at school in a PE lesson twenty years ago. Therapy is a great big archaeological dig on your psyche until you hit something.

We talked and we talked until she posed a cause-and-effect theory that fitted; then, crucially, we worked out how to change it. Sometimes she set me tasks – things to try, stuff to work on, questions to answer, thoughts to mull over, conversations I had to have. For two months I cried every Friday afternoon. Every Friday night I slept for ten hours.

The big myth of therapy is that it’s all about pointing the blame at other people; but as the weeks passed, I found the opposite to be true. I heard about some people’s therapists who took on a sort of defensive, deluded mum role in their patients’ lives, always reassuring them that it was not their fault, but the fault of the boyfriend or the boss or the best friend.

Eleanor rarely let me pass the accountability on to someone else and always forced me to question what I had done to end up in a particularly bad situation, which is why I always dreaded our sessions. ‘Unless someone dies,’ she told me one Friday, ‘if something bad happens in a relationship, you have played a part in it.’

When I got into my third month, I had my first tear-free session. The box of Kleenex went untouched. A therapy milestone.

While my closest friends were encouraging of the process, soon it became apparent that self-examination made me boring to the wrong people. I started to drink less and less – always questioning whether I was doing it to have fun or doing it to distract myself from a problem. I tried to put a stop to people-pleasing, aware that giving my time and energy away so freely was what was chipping away at the void that I didn’t want to turn into a quarry.

I was more honest; I told people when I was upset or offended or angry and valued the sense of calm that came with integrity, paid with the small price of an uncomfortable conversation. I became more self-aware, so inevitably I made a tit of myself for the amusement of other people far less.

I felt like I was growing week by week; I felt my insides photosynthesize with every day I put new habits into practice. I developed an indoor plant obsession; a sort of verdant pathetic fallacy. I read up on what I should put in every corner of light and shade and I filled my flat with an abundance of green; pothos plants crawled down bookshelves, a Boston fern sat on top of my fridge, a Swiss cheese plant fanned against my bright, white bedroom wall.

When I didn’t drink as much, I experienced the brand-new sensation of waking up with a linear recollection of the night. The things people said; the way they looked; the signals between each other that they thought were discreet. I noticed that whenever I turned up to a social event, people wanted the bad stuff. If it was at the pub table, they wanted another bottle of wine, they wanted to call a drug dealer, they wanted to sit outside and chain-smoke, they wanted to drunkenly trade nasty gossip about someone we knew. Without realizing, I had become a black-market tradesman on a night out. I was everyone’s green light for bad behaviour – and I hadn’t realized until I stopped.

#книги