You don't have to love yourself to live the life you want.

When I was nineteen, a month into moving to London, I went out to gay bar, and then went home with another man.

Once we were naked he told me that I had to let him fuck me, and I didn’t know how to resist.

He was older, I didn’t know where in London I was, so I let him. When he was inside me, I changed my mind and told him to stop.

He didn’t.

A lot happened in the years that followed.

I dropped out my university a year too early, barley scraping my degree.

And then found that I couldn’t think more than five minutes ahead in my first graduate jobs.

I was fired from three in a row.

For years I’d wake staring into the soundless dark, as if the ocean was pressing down on my chest and my capillaries would scream at the pressure that the darkness would bear down on me.

I am haunted by an easy life denied to me.

I know, in my bones, that it’s a fantasy.

Nothing feels as frictionless as the fantastic.

Your life simply does not operate on tracks, whisking you from one room of life to the next with no effort from your self.

I know that.

Nobody jumps perfectly from stone to stone, never getting their feet wet.

Still I can’t let go of the past.

You remember your mistakes as funny stores, as anecdotes.

Especially once you get out the other side, and being feeling good about yourself again.

Memory is a funny thing: you remember everything exactly as you are now.

And it must be so good to go about life without an event that happened to you: like a black hole sucking you alway back to a single, superlatively objective moment.

One thing stories require is an inciting incident, a moment that unambiguously delineates before from after.

The bigger it is, the more life changing, the better.

And it must, absolutely must, happen to the protagonist.

Everything else can be a choice they make.

In fact it’s better that way.

Another feature of stories is that they end.

Ideally by tying up all the threads that spooled outwards from the inciting incident.

You are left with a chain of cause and effect, action and reaction, all choices apart from one.

Life is not like that: it goes on.

There are bills to pay, and investments to make.

I have to plan a holiday.

Decide whether I will retire in Germany.

In the quiet moments I feel like I’m living through a nuclear fallout.

My past gives me meaning, however awful. I can’t write it off as a mistake. And I always have something to blame how my life is going on.

The only way I could have the smooth railroad life would be a lobotomy.

It wasn’t until I had a stable income from my PhD that I saught out help.

Mostly becuase I was failing at academia as well.

My therapist, who I’ll call J because I can’t remember their name, was inscrutable and remote.

J was short and birdlike.

Her limbs were long levers and stooped her back when she walked.

In sessions the pearl of her eye glinted from behind a well maintained bob of grey hair.

She didn’t offer the kind of pat advice that everyone else I’d turned to had offered.

You know the sort; look on the bright side, be grateful for what you have, leave the past behind you.

She agreed with me that things were terrible.

She regarded everything I told her from a distance.

Which was a good thing.

You see, depressed people are liars and you shouldn’t believe a word they say.

They’re not very good liars: they only need to convince themselves.

But she took my money and gave me what I wanted: which was to have my pain taken seriously.

I’d sought out therapy after having unprotected sex with a stranger in a sauna.

Yes, I knew it was bad.

And then I had a scene familiar to millions of gay men.

I sat in the GUM clinic being prescribed medicine thinking “what the fuck?”

I don’t need to live like this.

So I looked up therapists and J’s profile stood out to me.

Each session would go like this: I would come in and complain for fifty minutes.

About anything and everything bad that had happened to me in the previous week.

After I’d got it all out I felt tremendous relief.

Then J told me we were out of time.

And smiled when she took my money.

This went on for several months.

I’d come in, and I’d complain.

(I want to say that I’m smarter than that, and that I didn’t pay thousands to complain to a stranger for months; but that wouldn’t be true).

(Look, my mom won’t sit and listen to me complain for eighteen months so I had to pay someone to do just that).

I’d complain about all the little things in my life until my lungs were exhausted.

But when I expected J to say that time was up, she just sat there in silence.

‘So, uh, what do we talk about,’ I asked.

She fixed me with her eye and shrugged.

‘Whatever you want. This is your time.’

I didn’t know what to say – wasn’t she supposed to help me?

This therapy business didn’t seem all that impressive.

Where were my prompts?

I thought there’d be prompts.

So we sat in silence for a few minutes, and I perceived this vast chasm of grief uncovering beneath me.

‘You came because you were having sex you didn’t want,’ J said, ‘why don’t we talk about that?’

It was the one thing I didn’t want to talk about.

In fact, since it happened, I’d told exactly nobody.

Not even my parents.

Mentally, I’d put it away and left it.

And quickly fell apart.

The weekend after it happened I went to my first house party.

I took two bottles of red wine, which I drunk directly from the bottle.

When I finished I drunk a quarter litre of vodka, this time mixed with diet coke.

And when I finished that I vomited in the bathroom so violently I somehow took the shower door off the bath.

After that I don’t really remember, but I’ve been told that I cried down the phone to my parents, resisted being put to bed, and finally passed out on my host’s floor.

I was not invited to another party.

So that’s the story I told J.

She didn’t seem phased by it at all.

“Plenty of people get that drunk,” she said. “Has it happened again?”

“No, I don’t really drink.”

“Then I don’t see the problem.” J paused and pushed the sides of her mouth down, and shrugged like she always did. “I don’t see what you’re beating yourself up about.”

I hadn’t thought of it like that at all.

That party branded me.

Inside my own head.

Therapy isn’t a magic bullet.

It just gives you a relationship to model the rest of your life on.

You don’t get better alone, you have someone alongside you.

Every step of the way.

I’ve said before that I found J remote, but that’s not strictly true.

I was remote, and I was holding her at bay.

I paid J to listen to me complain, becuase my mother wouldn’t put up with my bullshit.

Putting up with my complaining let me trust her.

And that led to my healing.

Giving your past meaning in the present is a way for you to keep moving forward.

It provides the ground over which you can walk, scorched and gouged with grooves you can wander through.

You never have to learn to look as you always know what you’re going to see.

This is usually thought of as a downside, but it lets you get on with the business of life.

Bills have to be paid, and collections agencies look down on ‘I didn’t love myself enough’ as an excuse for inaction.

And this can go on for a long time until you realise that it’s you who is the ghost: you are in the train on the smooth track of your life, and it’s passing you by.

You’re dead, frozen in time, and watching your life pass you by as you travel outwards into some infinite horizon.

In stories this is the moment of revelation, the insight that changes everything.

A character is transformed through the perception of pure truth.

They can no longer inhabit whatever state of being went before.

Life isn’t like that.

Instead revelation comes slowly, a needle in your brain that you don’t have to ‘be’ like this.

Nothing has to change outwardly, but the lens through which you see the world needs to be ripped out.

To be oriented means to have a bearing and direction in the world.

And to see anew, things have to go out of focus.

Everything has to be disoriented, directionless, metaphorical darkness.

You have to be at odds with the world.

Literally.

That process is not easy.

For a long time you no longer trust you reactions, your thoughts, your feelings, your self.

You move forward, but into ever deepening doubt.

You are sustained only by the faith that it will get better.

Which it eventually does, but the a sense of lingering uncertainty never fully goes away.

What’s it like ‘on the other side’?

As it turns out, self-pity, whining, and misery are perfectly compatible with healthy psychological functioning.

There’s no requirement to love yourself to live the life you want.

Nor is a sense of wholeness, or a oneness with the universe.

Things come slowly into focus, you aperture closing and your depth of field increasing.

You being to see your own value in toto, and you focus less on your shortcomings.

You’re not perfect, but then you don’t need to be.

You can get on with the business of living.