She thought of her grandfather, her father’s father, who nobody talked about because of what he’d done. She would have liked to have at least seen a photo of him. ‘Why would you want to see his photo?’ her younger siblings said, disgusted with her because their grandmother made extraordinary apple crumble and palmed five-dollar notes into their sticky little hands, as if she were tipping them.
He just interested her. Did he regret what he’d done? Did he ever do it to another woman? She assumed her interest in her dead abusive grandfather indicated a pathological attraction to bad men.
Sleep, Amy, sleep.
She heard a door slam downstairs, so that meant one of her flatmates had come home, which was good, no need to imagine robbers in black balaclavas wandering through the place and getting frustrated when they couldn’t find anything to steal except forty-dollar biographies.
Breathe in for four.
Hold for seven.
Out for eight.
Supposedly people in the military used the four–seven–eight breathing technique and got to sleep in under a minute.
‘Let’s start with sleep,’ her latest therapist had said. His name was Roger, and she wasn’t too sure about his qualifications. He probably read about the breathing technique on the internet. She liked the fact that there was something a bit dodgy about him. She felt more comfortable in his slightly dingy office than she did in the softly lit, plush-carpeted offices of the expensive psychiatrists and psychologists, who she felt were judging her hair and clothes.
She didn’t actually expect Roger to ‘cure’ her. It was just so that when people said to her, as they inevitably did, ‘I think you need to get help, Amy, professional help,’ she could answer, ‘Sure. I’m getting help.’
She moved through therapists like she moved through boyfriends. She dumped both boyfriends and therapists when they offended her, enraged her, bored her.
The boyfriends said she was a head case, a nut case, a drama queen, a psycho. The therapists said she had ADHD or OCD, depression or anxiety or most likely both, a nervous disorder, a mood disorder, a personality disorder, maybe even a bipolar affective disorder. The word ‘disorder’ was a popular one.
There was one guy who announced there was nothing at all wrong with her, she just needed stress relief, and then he texted her the following week and asked her out for a drink, which he said would be fine now he was no longer treating her. The fact that she said yes to the unethical sleazebag probably demonstrated that there actually was something very wrong with her.
‘Medical diagnosis isn’t in my scope of practice,’ the new guy, Roger, said anxiously when Amy asked, mildly interested, which particular diagnosis took his fancy. ‘I’m a counsellor. I work alongside the medical profession, and I work alongside you.’ Then he smiled and leaned towards her, confidentially, as if he were sharing a secret, no longer anxious, ‘You know, sometimes labels are a distraction. You’re not a label. You’re Amy.’
Hokey but sweet. It actually did feel like he was sitting shoulder to shoulder with her, on the same team, rather than simply observing her with the cool, professional eyes of some of his colleagues.
She liked him. For now, at least.
She only sometimes took the tablets the good psychiatrists prescribed and she only sometimes took the pills the bad boyfriends offered.
Every now and then she pulled out the hopeful, obligatory ‘mental health plan’ she and her GP had worked on together, and she did her best to keep up ‘strategies’ and ‘techniques’ that made her appear semi-normal to the world: Poetry. Journalling. Exercise. Mindfulness. Nature. Meditation. Breathing. Berries. Vitamins. Superfoods. Probiotics. Gratitude. Baths. Conversation. Sleep.
Sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t.
‘It’s just that your feelings are too big,’ her dad’s mother told her when she was a kid and cried for so long her parents lost their tempers. ‘You’ll grow into them. My feelings used to be too big too. Have a lemonade, sweetie.’
Apparently her grandmother didn’t so much grow into her feelings as flatten them with alcohol, but alcohol and lemonade only amplified Amy’s oversized feelings.
‘Oh, Amy is just nervy,’ she once overheard her other grandmother, her mother’s mother, say. ‘Like Auntie Edna. No need to get your knickers in a knot, Joy, she’s fine. Gee, those nervy types do get on your nerves, though. Should we ask her to cry somewhere else?’
Auntie Edna spent the last days of her sad nervy life tied to a chair, but no need to get your knickers in a knot.