‘This week has been a bit of a balancing act. I’ll start with the good news. I got an e-mail on Sunday, and yesterday celebrated my first publication in two years.’
‘Congratulations!’
‘I originally pitched the piece to the Huffington Post, and they wanted it, but apparently not enough to help me get set up on the site, and you know what I’m like… I won’t say “Excuse me, can you give me a hand?’
‘No… How does it feel to be published?’
‘That is the other part of the balancing act. It feels great, but it is difficult to allow myself to feel that.’
‘It’s a new experience for you. Something you haven’t allowed yourself to experience before?’
‘It feels great, but it doesn’t change anything.’
‘You say it feels great, but great is not an emotion. Can you try to name the emotions you’re feeling right now in relation to being published? I sense pride…’
There was a pause as I checked in with myself.
‘There is a gap where emotion should be.’
‘‘There is a gap where emotion should be? You aren’t feeling anything?’
‘It is as though this experience has brought home the extent of my holding it together. All of my energy has been going into ‘Hold it together, keep it together, hold it together…’ and I am tired.’
‘As you said that, I got an image of you treading water…correct me if I am wrong, but I feel as though you have been doing that for a long time now, and that takes a lot of energy.’

‘You seem to have given meaning to two years. The first thing you said was ‘It’s the first time in two years.’

‘Yes, and when my grandmother asked me why so long, I said that I had been writing but not sending things out, which is true. It was like feeding the inner critic. The last time this happened, the last time I was published…I’m not a coffee drinker, but I felt that extra energy, that perkiness.’

‘Yes.’
‘And this time, that isn’t there. Last time, it was two weeks after everything went to rack and ruin.’

We talked some more about my belief that true creativity cannot exist without emotion, and you can tell when it is absent…and yet I believe that these people (my abusers?) do not deserve my emotion.

‘But if I put all of this into a box and come back to it later, at some point it will explode, and that will be square one.’

‘You will be back at square one, you mean?’
‘Yes.’

It gets a bit hazy now, but I talked about the pain, anxiety and anger I feel at night being emotions that I couldn’t deal with at the time.
‘And yet you’d expect that at some point my shoulders would release from around my ears.’

‘You’re holding a lot in your shoulders.’

‘My choice was taken away from me multiple times, with the first medical email, the January 2011 email and the photographs, and then finding that it was all ********…’

‘I wonder whether that was breaking point. I don’t mean to put words in your mouth.’
‘That was one breaking point. The other was in January 2011, but if I had broken then, I think it would have been even more fragmented and less safe.’
I said to R that the way for me to overcome this fear is to turn towards the thing I am scared of without input from the critic, and by keeping the conversation going.