Potential

For Solst's competition.

There’s a therapist in my head who I talk to sometimes. She mostly asks questions and I respond in monologue form. I don’t know if it counts as therapy, because she is me and I’m me too, so really we’re only getting one perspective on things, but she seems to stem from the rational department of the brain and tells me off when I’m being deliberately obtuse or negative or just plain stupid. She doesn’t yell though…obviously. They’re not supposed to yell; it’s part of the unconditional love thing. So I guess I should say she directs me away from the negativity and irrationality, rather than reprimands me for it. We cover more in twenty minutes than I ever did in three years of counselling, because my mind is a better articulator than my mouth, but the fact that nothing’s being said out loud kind of makes it all redundant. Nothing’s accomplished. If thinking accomplished things then the world wouldn’t be full of intelligent people with mental health issues. For some reason, human interaction renders it all official. So, instead, the world is full of crazy people arguing with themselves inside their heads…like the skull is an amphitheatre, which it isn’t, and even I’m not too stupid to know that - but having to consider where the voices are actually coming from and where the silent conversation is being held is a total mind-f**k, because technically none of it exists. You probably have to have a phD in philosophy to be capable of understanding stuff like that.

 

                It burns me up thinking about how I wasted the opportunity to be a better person, pulling my Good Will Hunting crap for three years. The thing is, when there’s just the two of you sitting in that little room, the atmosphere is oppressively expectant and I really couldn’t handle that. I was just a kid, really, and however profound I might have reckoned my thoughts were back then, I know now that they weren’t – and I know that in another four years, when I look back on my current thinking, I’ll be aware none of it was as interesting as it seemed at the time. I guess that’s how humans go through life, re-defining their comprehensions and raising the intellectual bar at every stage, and I know I should just accept it, but it makes everything feel pointless because by the time we’re experienced enough to stand a chance of getting it ‘right’, our minds and bodies begin to deteriorate and we die, i.e. we’ll never be content with any of our thoughts because there will always be room for improvement and we can never regard any topic as completed. Scientists must get frustrated with this situation, having learnt from history that the accepted theories of one century tend to be laughed at in the next, so all they can ever do is add a stepping stone to the journey and wait until someone disproves what they discovered and adds a sturdier stepping stone further along. I’m still waiting for this to happen to Newton; surely we understand more about the nature of gravity by now than some Tudor bloke who got hit by an apple?

 

Anyway, what I was trying to say about counselling sessions is that it didn’t used to matter how good or rational my intentions were outside of the room; as soon as we got in there, I’d feel over-exposed and clam up, gripping the armrests and staring desperately at the wall, hoping a vision of dignity would appear upon it and allow me to sort out all the mess in my head. The longer that went on, the more habitual the hour of despairing silence became…and the more intense the despair itself, because the opportunity to better myself was ticking away into a void of waste.

 

A fear that may have prevented me from ‘opening up’ [alongside my inability to say things like ‘opening up’ without placing a sarcastic emphasis on them] is that I’m not sure whether I’m genuinely a good person or whether it’s due to low self-esteem. Constantly trying to be a good person is one of my few attributes – and if that’s due to low self-esteem, something that counselling and other therapeutic processes aim to eradicate, I felt it would be better to maintain my low self-esteem…otherwise I’d end up hating myself more than I already did.

 

                To go back to the idea of recondite thoughts…I think there was some notion of intellectual superiority wiggling around in my brain at the time. I was in the middle of A-Level Psychology, so was aware of different psychological approaches and stuff like that, and I kept circling the counselling process with suspicion, trying to sniff out the tricks. I couldn’t stand the thought of being caught out. I guess not wanting to seem stupid and naïve is fair enough…but when it’s at the expense of remaining frustrated, confused, scared and suicidal, you think I’d have stepped up and made the sacrifice. It just shows how immature I was, because it had been the same with magicians at kids’ birthday parties; once I’d realised that they were only acting oblivious to the rabbit popping up behind them, I refused to join in with the excited yelling and pointing - no one must be allowed to think I’d been taken in, they had to be shown I was too smart to be patronised. Thus, the idea of my whole deformed personality being a result of deterministic, cause and effect psychological factors would have been a huge blow. Thus, the attitude of ‘the less you say, less chance of anyone seeing through you and discovering the predictable transparency of what’s wrong with you’.

 

Author's Note

It's kind of a semi-fiction essay/ramble...I think.

Reviews

[Emily B]

There is much here to ponder. The feelings you describe are probably more Universal than you know. If we could only capture the conversations in our heads. Snatches of wisdom and sometimes foolishness that goes on behind closed curtains. . . we are all the great and powerful wizard--in our own minds--still hiding behind the curtain.

[Emily B]

Potential
Somewhere in the Center
of a Universe
too broad for reckoning
is one pea-sized thought
I have yet to find.

I don't know what it is but you read it here first.

[Constance]

You strike a nerve here, because I spent the first 19 years of my life "waiting to be crazy", literally. My mother was schizophrenic. They say sometimes it doesn't show until your late teens. So I would over-analyze my own thoughts every night before sleep. Perhaps, it is, in fact, what made a writer out of me. Maybe I would be considered crazy, if I weren't a writer, with all of the ideas I spill on any given day.
I have never (nor will ever) sought out a counselor. I choose who I want to talk things out with, usually just myself. To have someone be paid to listen to my problems, when I can always just write it down, go back, ponder, and read some other things on my own, seems a waste. :)
At any rate, I love this write, because there is a therapist in my own head, too- a good one, who got me through poverty, homelessness, domestic violence, and having to witness many ugly things in less than three decades so far. I rather like her, and I intend to keep her. I think you need to keep yours, too.
Rambling isn't rambling when it's this good. It's simply... sharing. You do it well.

[Solst Rapture]

Recondite thoughts! This is full of substance and material that could lead absolutely anywhere in this kind of collaborative process.

The first person narrative challenges the reader with subtle accusations that create conversations in the mind, almost perfectly illustrating your points...Fascinating to say the least...

The opinion you are giving seems clear: you are saying pretty much that although people THINK they have these recondite thoughts, with age and maturity comes the recognition of perhaps inscrutable meaning, or logic, or something else, and that at any given moment your perspectives, based on abstract thought and practical consideration, are always different? I'm not here to analyze it, but the interesting thing is that I almost have to try and decipher your main opinion in order to wrestle with my own...I'd say this is exactly the kind of thing to get a conversation going on.

Thanks for submitting. If there are any changes you ever consider making, ensure you do it before the closing date, but I really think it is exactly the kind of thing we are looking for, something raw and real that keeps the reader fully engaged with the potential of human experience...and the importance of thought...