Tena Štivičić
WHO Felix, thirty-five, a businessman.
TO WHOM His therapist.
WHERE In a therapy consultation room.
WHEN The middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED Felix, an outwardly successful businessman, is married to Ann. Felix wants to have a child, but Ann is worried it will interfere with her career as a nutritionist. They have stopped having sex. Felix is unhappy and has sought the help of a therapist. In the speech that follows he tries to explain his depression.
WHAT TO CONSIDER
• | Felix works for a company that builds wind farms. These are the ‘turbines’ to which he refers. |
• | Felix suppresses a lot of anger over which, when it erupts, he has no control. |
WHAT HE WANTS
• | To articulate what he is feeling. Notice how he struggles to find the words. |
• | To be heard and to be understood. |
• | To recapture that moment of happiness. |
• | Reassurance that he is not a bad person. |
KEYWORDS sink miserable gloomy despairing struggling tears tired happy dream/dreams beautiful/beauty dissolved pathetic
I would look at those turbines and they seemed like blenders to me. Like I’m stuck in some kind of… dough and it’s revolving really fast and I’m in it right up to my chin and I can’t come out.
He trails off, struggling to find words.
I find it difficult to feel happy. If I’m on my own, I find it difficult not to sink. Being around other people tends to lift my spirits. But then, I suspect that might be simply because I’m too insecure to let them see the real me. The miserable, gloomy, despairing me. I feel confused a lot of the time as to what my goal is in life. I can work sixteen hours a day but then simple tasks, simple obstacles like having to speak to a phone company or going around roadworks… or Tube delays or… or even struggling to open a bag of nuts can bring me to the verge of tears. I wait for the weekend to have a life and then I can’t get it together to get out of bed.
Every… every so often… on a regular basis… I need to remind myself of the good things in life. Health, income, a loving partner, a comfortable home, living in the most exciting city in the world. You tire of London, you tire of life, isn’t that how the saying goes? Well… of course I’m not tired, I’m thirty-five. How can I be tired?
So I remind myself how all of this could be gone in a second, I could be diagnosed with some terrible illness tomorrow. Which I’m sure I will be. That makes it even harder. That makes me feel like I really really need to grab these times by the horns… and I feel like… sleeping.
Sometimes I’m happy in my dreams. I remember there was this one dream. I was in a cottage, somewhere that resembled Switzerland. Never-ending green and deep clear water. It was the most beautiful… I can’t explain to you how beautiful it was. Maybe that’s how beauty feels when you’re happy. There was a woman. It wasn’t Ann. It was a woman I didn’t know and yet she felt familiar. She came up to the porch, she was carrying a bunch of bright wild flowers. And she gave them to me and she said: ‘I love you.’ I don’t think I have ever felt that intensely happy in my whole life as I did in that dream. And in those few seconds when I woke up before it dissolved.
Am I not the most pathetic man?