The night I cremated myself.
On my last night in Paris, I cremated myself. Under cover of darkness, I stole down to the Seine armed with a sleeve of matches and a sturdy metal mixing bowl borrowed from our vacation apartment kitchen. Perched on the damp stone wall of the Quai with the towers of Notre Dame lit in the distance, I placed two sheets of paper in the bowl and set them aflame.
On those sheets was written an obituary for the Former Me. The me that took over from my Old Self when I was in the clutches of stress- related depression and anxiety. I had lived with her for eighteen, raw months and I did not enjoy her company. In the end, I became glad that I had met her, but still, it was time to say goodbye to her.
I knew her as scared and sad and lonely and she said some really nasty things to herself. You are a freak. You are boring. You do not fit in. You are doing nothing worthwhile. There is no point to you. She felt powerless and silenced and overwhelmed by the simplest things. She felt small and vulnerable and broken and put in a box with the lid on tight.
She began to visit me in the late Spring of 2017. At first she was just a wisp of a presence. A blue, misty wraith curling around the edges of my days. I’d feel her cold movement around my heart, her damp tentacles of doubt and inadequacy stroking me as she passed. Then, she started to sit a while with me, gaining a suprising solidity that hunkered down in the pit of my stomach. Gradually, she expanded, filling me to my mind, squeezing out my rationality and replacing it with a wringing-out misery, dread-fear and paranoia.
You can’t be yourself, she whispered to my Old Self, you’ll get into trouble. People are watching you. They will be talking about you. they will think you mad, stupid, or worse, mediocre. Then, when I stopped expressing myself through art, stopped writing, stopped being my fullest self, she would switch round and attack me from the other side. You are lazy. You are wasting your life. You are not truly achieving anything. When you are no longer here you will not have mattered. You have no idea why you were even born. I knew she was sick and I tried to help her, but there was no living with her in harmony.
Eventually, my tired body tried to just wash her away. I would cry in the shower in the morning. I would sob my heart out in the car on the way to work. Some days I sat on the floor in my private bathroom at work, my face pressed into a towel as I listened to the staff walk in and out of my office leaving yet more files, more demands, more requests to meet other people’s needs on my desk. Then, I would repeat the whole process in reverse at the end of the day. Yet, it pleased me to do my job, to try to mediate conflict, find solutions, improve matters. As long as I was having some positive impact, I could argue back, brandishing the evidence. I AM useful. I CAN make a difference. You are not so powerful you can stop me doing my job.
But she held her own and refused to be dissolved. You call THAT a difference? Is that it for a full life’s attempt? Under constant siege, my body tried a new tactic. It tried to shake her out. At work one day, dealing with yet one more dispute, my hands started to tremble so badly I could no longer write. I stood up and my legs quaked. I went home and she followed me. There was no getting rid. She demanded to be listened to.
I took her to meet a counsellor. I sat next to her on a cheap, metal framed sofa as she introduced herself. I am plain vanilla. I don’t know what I am for. I don’t have anyone like me. For week after week that counsellor and I sat in a small distraction free room and concentrated on her. Gently, he probed her, Is that really true? Is there something more? Why are you telling me these stories? He looked her in the eye, not flinching at her ugliness, leaning forward towards her, accepting her for who she was. His message was clear. I am not sure what you say is true, but it’s well worth listening to. I disagree, but what you say is fascinating to me. I don’t think you have the evidence for that assertion, but I really want to know why you feel the need to put it forward.
Together, he in the session, I in a journal in the days afterwards, we paid her attention. We stopped dismissing her and instead strove to understand her. We fed her books to read. Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Lucia Cappacchione, the entire, wonderful works of Irvin Yalom. She saw that she was not alone, that a whole field of psychology existed because other people — many other people — went through this. She came back to session after session, but now she had a companion. Behind her sat Old Self, at first observing, then, tentatively offering some original thoughts of her own, then pushing forward to assert herself.
As the Former Me became interested in the academic material, the Old Self began to seem interesting once more. As Former Me turned the pages, entranced with the theory, Old Self read over her shoulder and thought, I can live this. As the pile of thumbed books grew taller, Former Me diminished in stature. Old Self came forward, grew, flourished. As Former Me relaxed under the counsellor’s relentless unconditional positive regard, she stopped ragging Old Self around and we could see that the abrasive self talk, the forceful rubbing up against had in fact polished Old Self. The facets of her had been examined and cleaned and found, underneath the silt of stress and self-doubt, to be beautiful. Gradually, she began to shine once more.
Living as a writer in Paris for a month was the culmination of a year of work, of weeks of despair and determination, days of thought and study and analytical conversation. It was the reward for going deep, for hanging on in, for walking a path in the dark trusting that it led to light. I filled it with art, wallowing in rooms full of Basquiat, peering at Picasso and identfying with the alter ego states of Grayson Perry and his ride-along sidekick Claire. I sketched the Sacre Coeur, walked above the city along the Promenade Plantée, read more psychology and took my MacBook on a regular date at Le Pain Quotiden on the edge of the Marais, where Old Self nibbled on viennoiserie and re-found her voice .
When, in the face of the power of all this creativity and self -care, my Former Me’s energy to deny the truth of my capacity sapped, I did not feed her. When her frame diminished, unable to bear the weight of my true worth, I did not support her. When her voice was croaky and distant and drowned out by the clarion cries of new ideas, new understandings, I did not bend an ear to listen. I let her slip away. And then, I marked her passing.
Energy cannot be destroyed, but it can be transformed. Dirty fossil fuel thoughts, all black smoke and lung stopping tar can provide the heat to form new, graceful windmill attitudes, their faces staring cleanly at the sun. Paper, bearing testimony to mean, acrid self-talk can burn up into a passion to spread the word, to share with others the possibility, not of mere survival but of glorious improvement.
I tossed the ashes of the charred obituary in the Seine. Light as they were, they formed only a tiny ripple. But a ripple there was.
