Counselling and Creatures

I had my second session of therapy today. It feels a lot like wrestling with bears.

It’s time to do it. To be fair, it’s way past time to do it. I know it’s absolutely the right thing to do, and yet it is still bloody awful. It is so, so hard.

I love my therapist. I worked with her a few years ago on some major stuff I had going on and she helped me so much that I knew exactly where to go when it all fell apart this time. She is clever and funny and smart. She has a mass of qualifications but wears her wisdom lightly and is very human and humane. She is rather wild and unorthodox, which I like. The word ‘fuck’ happens a lot in our sessions and it’s not just me saying it. I believe in a woman who says fuck with such integrity, she is not messing about. Also, she loves animals, not in that cutesy, instagrammable way. More in that; ‘This chicken is called Wittgenstein. We like our chats,’ kind of way. I find that more reassuring than all the letters after her name.

In the last week I have been wrestling with the bear of where I learned that learning is a fear inducing nightmare that I never do right and attempting to unpick some of it. This week’s homework is on self-sabotage and shame. I need bigger boots. Possibly waders, as I trudge about in the swampy hinterlands of self-loathing and shadow selves.

All of that has combined with some other equally difficult work I have been doing in another area of my life and culminated in ten days of migraines, headaches and what I think may be a low grade eye infection or blocked tear duct. You wouldn’t think it would be possible for me to have a blocked tear duct, the amount of weeping I have indulged in, but there you go. I am taking it to the doctor to be prodded tomorrow morning, because I haven’t been to the doctors for at least a fortnight and I don’t want them to think I’m dead.

In other, non health related news, Jason and I ran away to Whitstable for the day on Sunday. We had delicious lunch at the Whitstable Oyster Company followed by a brisk trot along the windswept beach. We rounded the day off with a trip to Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey. It’s 3,200 acres of marshland inhabited by ten sheep, a handful of cows and a huge number of birds. I had wanted to see an owl. Instead I startled a disgruntled pigeon trying to sleep on a tractor tyre and possibly saw some kind of hawk. Everyone else there had cameras with zoom lenses so big you’d have thought they were trying to spot birds on the moon. People were huddled together in corners muttering about chiff chaffs.

We were obviously interlopers, but we had a nice time wandering about in a clueless daze and I made up several ghost stories on the fly because it seems like a place that would be dripping with ghosts come nightfall. On the way back we saw an empty baby buggy, which proves my point. That buggy is going to be perambulating about with the ghost of a drowned toddler in it by tea time.

We left before tea time. Just in case.

In marina news, Monty the corgi went missing and was found swimming in the marina. There was quite a to do until someone tracked him down, doggy paddling by the laundry room. I saw him yesterday. I think he’s had a wash and blow dry. He looked extremely fluffy and none the worse for his dip. To be honest, he looked like he’d do it again, given half a chance.

We had a thief break into the stern the other day. A dog I think of as David Bowie, because he has one brown and one blue eye, broke in and started nosing through a bag of Derek’s cat biscuits. We could hear tip tap, tip tap and then wuffling noises. When Jason went out to see what was happening, DB leapt over the door and hot footed it down the pontoon. I suspect that if it was actually David Bowie breaking into our boat, he would have done the exact same thing.

Cats are thin on the ground at the moment because it’s too cold and wet for them. The marina clearly belongs to the cats all summer and then the dogs take over in winter. It’s a system and I have no complaints so far.

Birdwise, I had a very sad coot honking at me one morning last week. I went over to see what he was honking about and it looked like he was trying and failing to eat a baguette. It turned out that he was actually trying and failing to eat a parsnip. No wonder his honking sounded so sad. ‘Leave it,’ I said. ‘You’ll only bruise your beak.’ ‘Honk’ he said, sadly and paddled off. If only I could give such wise advice to myself.