Patient zero.

If everyone needs therapy, then we are in hell.

I

Three years ago, I went to therapy for the first time.

Cut me some slack; it was a very particular point in my life. I know you’re not judging, and I apologise for assuming so. The outcry says more about me than you, anyway. I just haven’t quite wrapped my head around why everyone apparently needs to go to therapy, and if so, what kind of world do we live in? Are we in purgatory?

It’s irrelevant right now, but also don’t forget I said that. I can be right and wrong at the same time. I don’t resonate with my own words today, and I need to emphasise once more that I’m talking about a very particular point in my life. There’s a perfectly good reason why I felt the way I did.

For starters, I’m doing good. Genuinely. I’d say I’m doing greater than good. Life no longer revolves around the quest to be happy. I’m content, and I hardly relate to the circumstances largely discussed here. Thank God for that. I think the fervour for life I have today stems less from some quantifiable achievement, but rather a newfound appreciation for life’s fragility. The odds are forever stacked against us, and yet if you’re reading this, do you realise how many sunsets you’ve been an observer to? How many times you’ve quenched your thirst? Missed the train? Fell in love? You’ve probably lost count at this point, and what a blessing that is. Every day that I wake up despite astonishing odds is a day worth celebrating. The opposite would be indifference, and indifference is pretty much synonymous with death. You might as well be.

That being said, I wasn’t fond of therapy one bit. I’d go as far as to say it felt more concerned with my participation than my outcome. I say this while completely respecting the sanctity of a service that has lifted millions out of the darkness of circumstance. Both opinions can coincide, so don’t come for me. I can be right and wrong at the same time. One would just think the obvious central aim of a therapist is for me to no longer need their services, right? On the contrary, I feel like my little molehill became a mountain before I even knew what was happening.

Sure, therapy did solve a lot of my problems, just in ways it wasn’t designed to do so.

It all started on the most ordinary day ever. It always does. For some reason, the cosmic lottery had decided it was my turn for upheaval this time. I woke to the mirage of my entire life up in flames. Even more so, I kind of understood why it had to be burnt down; I just hated the uncertainty of what lay beyond its smouldering embers. Even a cage can feel like a roof above your head sometimes. To be honest, I didn’t need closure. I had the why. At least, a part of me knew and understood why all of this had to happen. Sure, I would’ve gone about it differently, but that’s just me, and they are just them. A mirage is a mirage regardless, and it was about time I saw it as such.

No. My concern wasn’t what happened, nor was it why. My concern was that I played absolutely no role in what happened. I stood by and watched the only life I knew take place without my participation. I was given two choices, and in the folds of grief, I somehow picked the third.

In turn, I inherited a narrative. I began to feel like I couldn’t trust myself. That I somehow fell short of defending my own interests. It crept slowly at first, but in time had matured to a thundering voice of its own that smirked with every step I took. It was so exhausting. A personal jester whose life mission was to sow doubt into every decision I made. I sought refuge from its endless jeering in cold plunges, long walks, under blaring speakers and strobe lights, with buckled knees and a sore forehead, embracing the ground in the submission of prayer. Yet every night, there were two of us with heads on my pillow. I missed when it was just me.

Immobilised by fatigue, I was eventually driven to seek help through your typical big tech therapy partner, courtesy of my employment at the time. The type of corporate company whose main goal above all is to keep making sure you’re productive, and that they’re earning. I’m sure we’ve all seen some form of it before. Talk Time, Spill the Tea, Feel Good Inc. These are just names I made up, but I’m flying real close to the sun right now. We both know what I’m talking about. For me, it was just an easy option given that I had full coverage for their services.

I’ll never forget that intake appointment. Even more so, I’ll never forget the reflections it made way for understanding my emotions altogether. I had clicked into the meeting on their lime green website and waited patiently, staring into my own sunken eyes and lowered brow that peered back through the video box. Hers was just a grey silhouette on account of her absence. I sat with my own digital reflection in deflated silence. The wind was battering the city outside, and I was busy adjusting my desk lamp to contour as much of my obvious exhaustion away. I felt as if I was preparing for a job interview. That somehow, my likability would matter in this exchange. I shook my head in quick bursts, thinking it could detach some of the brain fog. I brandished a smile; basic corporate decorum. Her video box glitched, went dark, and opened up to a young German woman sitting in front of the company logo. She didn’t smile, she didn’t frown, but wasted no time in introducing herself, and we were on our way.

I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say a solid two months of consultation later, I was no step ahead from where I started. On the contrary, I felt like I had arrived with one problem, but was leaving with a hundred more. Suddenly, my heartbreak was a secondary concern to a much more primary scrutiny of the self. A sadomasochist dissection of every human experience I’ve ever had, and its contributing factor to a life of supposed trauma. In one of our last meetings, I was advised to pursue psychiatry, cut off my mother, and continue consultations to truly reach the core of my ailments. I was quite baffled, really. Was it that serious? I didn’t think it was. I knew it wasn’t. Even in the daze of a mind so preoccupied with self-reflection, there was a humorous absurdity to the predicament I found myself in. It was like going to the dentist for a checkup and being told that you need all your teeth removed or you’d die.

Safe to say, I evoked my right to change therapists at that point and reluctantly scrolled through the headshots of alternative professionals, algorithmically chosen for me based on my needs. The irony, though, was that I hardly knew what I needed. I’m willing to die on the hill that we don’t know what’s best for us most of the time. I eventually found my mouse lingering over the headshot of a Mediterranean man, beaming with a toothy smile. He had mid-length wavy hair, messy stubble, and a white button-up, carelessly left open. He had clearly spent a lot of time in the sun, as the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes signaled the need to squint often. On account of an unspoken familiarity and hopes to be culturally understood, I went ahead and booked my first consultation.

II

Here is where I need you to remember what I said in the beginning. About purgatory and all that. If everyone truly needs formal therapy, then I think we are seriously in hell. If we’re willing to be honest, I think for many of us it’s less a need and more a desire to escape some sort of obvious, mundane discomfort. It took just a single consultation with the right person to finally get that.

As usual, I started my introduction by explaining to him how this awful thing had happened to me a couple of months ago. How I struggled to not feel helpless about it, and how it made me play the role of an observer in my own life. He listened intently as I moved on from my core rationale and began parroting the talking points of my previous therapist. I wove a grand web of association between each and every node of experience I’ve ever had; how that one time I was scolded in school for something I didn’t do, that really creepy recurring nightmare, how I lost my mom at the mall. Somehow, everything could be intellectualised into this final communion of defeat. If you try hard enough, at least. A part of me recoiled, yet I felt as if I owed myself the evidence that I, a man of my father, was able to express my thoughts and feelings.

My therapist paused, always brandishing that sun-baked grin and squint. I think he was sitting facing the window, and the sun must’ve been shining through. I missed the sun. He nodded as if there was something I had skipped out on. Something that I was meant to share that he knew and I didn’t. Then, when he got no response, he simply said.

So you’re feeling sad because a sad thing happened? Wow, who would’ve thought?

He grinned ear to ear, leaving me to sit with the weight of a single sentence that rendered my hour-long performance obsolete. I knew exactly what he had done, and it was nothing short of genius. It just happened so fast that I hadn’t collected my thoughts into a response yet. He had just tapped me on the back and told me that the cage was always unlocked. I just had my back to the opening for so long that I had totally forgotten. The cage was all I had come to know.

I’m going to ask you again, why are you here?

Because I’m sad.

Who’s I?

I as in me.

You are sad? No, you are Akif. At least that’s what my file says.

I paused again, and then I let out a wry laugh. He grinned back. He never stopped grinning, to be honest. It was genuinely the first heartfelt expression of positive emotion I had been able to muster in many months. He taunted me with the absurdity of a situation that I was, ironically, the master architect of. The only architect if I was willing to be honest.

Akif, the sun doesn’t rise for us, and that’s okay.

III

I feel like Western psychology places a unique value on personal mood as a ubiquitous guiding principle in decision-making. One in which your ability to discern whether or not you’re doing the right thing is largely dictated by how you feel about it.

That is the most insane thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.

Maybe I’m wrong, but the fruits I bear in my hands say otherwise. More often than not, the harvest I’ve enjoyed stemmed from a back-breaking labour that is as necessary as it is uncomfortable. So much of what has been achieved rested on my willingness to ignore the feeling and stick to the plan. I guess the real value lies in being able to discern whether a discomfort is caused by healthy resistance or misalignment. That I can’t answer. I’m not sure you can.

I guess sometimes, just on occasion, maybe what you really need to do is get over yourself. Maybe sometimes, you just have to say “I’ve had better days”, laugh through tired eyelids, and keep it moving. I come from the get over it part of the world, so I guess it wasn’t the toughest of adjustments, and you don’t have to do anything I tell you. At the end of the day, you put your own head on your own pillow. I just think there’s a lot of value in stating the obvious. Feeling sad about a sad thing is as rational a reaction as eating when you’re hungry or sleeping when you’re tired. When did that become an illness to cure?

Deeper so, this affinity for “I am” statements comes across as convoluted to me. I am not sadness. Sadness is sadness, and it is passing through me, just as joy, curiosity, fear, love, and hate have done so many times in the past. You’ve got the evidence. Remember that one toothache that had you thinking death might be sweeter? Yeah, neither do I. It’s sort of pathetic how quickly we are to identify with a sentiment that is as fleeting as the wind.

I am just the universe experiencing itself, nothing more, nothing less. By detaching from the equation, I become the observer, not the victim. Or at least, I give myself the best fighting chance in that regard.

I never did see that psychologist again, but he left me with a teaching so simple yet so profound that I guess I do owe some degree of appreciation for the service itself. Sure, he largely stepped out of the bounds of contemporary services, but that was a cold shower I definitely needed. Life no longer revolves around the quest to be happy.

The goal isn’t to feel good. It’s to feel more.