For nearly 5 years I have had the same therapist. This therapist is available to me 24 hours a day and hasn’t gone on vacation in all that time. I have called upon my therapist at three in the morning, on my wedding day, on my lunch break, on a cold and lonely Christmas, on a the beach in Mombasa, and in the doctor’s waiting room.
I can tell this therapist absolutely anything. My therapist listens silently to my most sinister darkness, my most bizarre fantasy, my most cherished dream. And I can say all this in any way that I want: I can scream, whimper, thrash, wail, rage, exult, foam, celebrate. I can be funny, snide, introspective, accusatory, sarcastic, helpless, brilliant, sentimental, cruel, profound, caustic, inspirational, opinionated, or vulgar. My therapist accepts all of this and more without comment, judgment, or reprisal. Best of all, this therapist keeps a detailed record of all of our work together, so that I have on my bookshelf a chronology of my life—my loves, my pains, my wins, my wounds, my growth, my transformation. Has this cost a fortune? you ask. Not at all. My therapist doesn’t want payment.
My therapist is my journal, which I write in spiral notebooks, obtainable for under a thousand bob in any city in the country. That’s why I call this my journal “the Ksh 1500 therapist.”
Comments