# 1 – No thoughts, just erroneous vibes
Swapping harshness for play on the psychoanalytic couch
‘I’ve got nothing for you, Barry,’ I tell my therapist as I plonk down on his couch.
I’ve been staring at the cream-coloured carpet of his office in silence for at least a minute or two now, waiting for my breathing to settle after I’ve legged it up the stairs. I’m late most weeks to see Barry. And while tardiness doesn’t feel like a quality I want to associate myself with, it does stop me from nervously pre-empting what we might talk about, to prepare and mentally rehearse clever little phrases in my head and anticipate how the session might unfold. Instead I breathe, sweat, and stare at the floor while he tries to decode my dull facial expressions. Too bad sir, there is nothing in there, not one thought – which is rare for me.
Without fail, the session flows in an entirely unexpected direction each time. For me, this is part of the strange, magical quality of being in analysis. The unexpected thoughts, desires and neuroses which come to the fore, then having a warm feeling of bemusement wash over me toward the end of the session. I love discovering new ideas that I didn’t know were swimming around in my head, or indeed new fears waiting to be discovered like angry pimples baking underneath the skin.
At some point, I tell Barry about this nerdy mental tick, saying something about how tiring it is, how not very present it makes me feel. It’s an irritating, but once useful defensive trick I dolled out in childhood.
We come to an agreement that I try and not do this before our sessions, which feels like trying not to think of an elephant. (Are you seeing the same cute and mahoosive creature I am right now?)
Over the past few months, I have figured out that this little bit I do is all about my relationship to error, my batshit fear of expressing something which might be entirely wrong. To sound silly, unintellectual, to expose my inner workings as having little substance or logic, and to have that be some permanent perception of my inner world, stamped onto the real world, forever! Obviously, this is completely unhinged, and it has stopped me from writing for so long, because in writing you are revealing yourself, every iteration of your thinking at one point in time. God in heaven.
One of my lightbulb moments with Barry has been to observe how much I have been emotionally wedded to some principle that there is a correct way to think, and a correct way to express one’s thoughts. Obviously, this is boring and punitive, a directive to never do, say or risk anything. To remain completely idle. I also thought about how fun it was to work things out with my sixth form peers, to blab out wrongly pieced together phrases in Italian class and have Mrs Malik’s eyebrows bend at my, uh, creativity. Or to poke holes in each other’s arguments in Philosophy and forget about it instantly with good humour. I think university eroded my desire to share my curiosity, though this is an essay for another day (#pedagogy of the depressed, am I right?).
I thought this substack could perhaps be a place for me to share my errors, an ode to silliness, a digital service station, a place to refuel, to take some joy in fumbling and floating thoughts, to carry them somewhere and let them develop longer than 60 seconds on my phone’s notes app. To let it be some sort of affirmation to myself that there is no right way to think and feel and be – another magic tidbit that is baked into psychoanalytic philosophy. Here is my crush, Adam Philips, talking about why that is a tedious and cruel way to live.
I didn’t know how to sign this off so I will freely associate my way to this image, a digital resting point. Until next week.
