Coming Out

 

 

No, I'm not LGBTQIA+. And if you don't know what that means, shame on you click on the letters to find out. 

 

 

[...waiting for the Flintstones to find their way back from the link...] 

 

Ah, I see you're back.

 

Sit down. 

 

Let me tell you a story. 

 

At the beginning of this globally conspicuous year a scorpion killed my kitten. I had loved the little critter - the cat, not the scorpion - and I was devastated. Hannes had been given my Dad's name in a hubristic temptation of fate and fate answered. The small, soft, patched body that used to perch on my shoulder and purr into my ear while I sat at my desk lay lifeless under the Oregon pine kitchen cupboard where he'd crawled in to die. I sat outside on the gravel and howled like a mother who'd lost a child, because I had.

 

His favourite place

I thought expressing grief during the loss meant I wouldn't stuggle with depression afterwards. But I stayed listless in the darkness for so long that I resolved to see a therapist. I'd spent roughly a decade in therapy before moving to the country seven years ago. I credit my urban psychologist with nothing less than my survival. Thanks to her I am able to thrive in a healthy, mature relationship with Buurman after twenty years of marital dysfunction. These days, wanting to live is mostly stronger than wishing to die. It wasn't always like that.

So it wasn't difficult to make the appointment with a mental health professional. Local, this time, to simplify life by eliminating avoidable travel into the city. We fitted in four sessions before lockdown and four after. I hadn't planned to continue after the first few appointments, but the oh-so-efficient practice administrator had wrangled fifteen sessions from my medical aid instead of a 21-day clinic stay and I returned to counselling after lockdown. 

 

Like a lot of other people I found myself in flux owing to COVID-19: the guesthouse, in the absence of guests, was just a house standing shut; an ongoing legal battle with neighbours became a chronic stressor and my urgent need to do creative things instead of domestic drudgery for a living needed a sounding board. I thought a few more sessions couldn't hurt.

   

Random counselling room from the internet

"Has anybody ever suggested that you might be neurodivergent?" the psychologist asked me near the end of the sixth session. 

 

"Obviously not, since I don't even know what the word means," came my only half-sarcastic answer.  

 

To be continued...