Day 1: The hole
— Bob Goff
“Just how hard is it to find a paper in this office?”
I wondered, as I was growing impatient. The woman in front of me looked like she was taking her sweet time. I wasn’t a fan of that. My time is running out.
Finally she grabbed one of the papers from the printer — she could’ve done that instead and saved me the agony of boredom — and she started talking while scribbling
“Imagine you were in a desert, carrying a heavy bag, trying to find your way out of this Tartarus ( she didn’t say that verbatim but I couldn’t repress my dramatic retelling ), and suddenly you fell into a deep chasm, what would you do?”
“I guess I would look inside the bag I had and look for something that would help me out?”
“Alright, you found a pickaxe and a long rope, what’s next ?”
I paused a little. For some reason, my hypothetical dehydrated self was carrying that pickaxe on his back his whole journey . He could’ve at least gotten something more useful, but I guess he has his reasons.
I caught myself thinking too much about that and I laughed. I then said as I exclaimed eureka, thinking i would humor myself and my companion if I would go along and stop showing my boredom.
“Well, I guess I would use that pickaxe dig upward then”
And for a moment, I saw a glint in her eyes, as if everything had gone as rehearsed
“You dug upward on one of the walls and found a hard rock that you couldn’t break, what are you going to do?”
“… Dig elsewhere ?”
“You dug elsewhere, you tried every nook and cranny, every time you tried you found hard rocks or water leaks, which makes it impossible to continue digging”
I got irritated as I saw her enjoying herself with this “game”. I had grown already tired of the fact that she had the answer, and I didn’t.
“I’ll throw the rope then and perhaps scream for help so someone could pull me out”
“There is no one but you around”
As I’m drawing a blank, visibly irritated by the thought that this game could easily have a very simple solution that’d make me feel like an idiot, she took a big breath and said as her tone went serious
“Listen to what I’m about to tell you. After digging around, the only thing you succeeded at is making your hole bigger, and your situation direr. You only realized that after you had put your pickaxe away and looked around, and it’s then that you would realize how much you’re sweating and out of breath,. Adding to the fact that you’re already dehydrated, you’re now exhausted, desperate and done for.”
She must’ve realized the anxiety on my face, the way that I already accepted my fate and mourned my imagined self
“What can I do now ?” I said, crestfallen.
She took the pencil and drew something that looked like a ladder
“You could climb that”
She paused a little to see the look of discontent on my face and said:
“The ladder was there all along, you haven’t checked for it. Matter of fact, your first course of action was to check in your bag and to use your pickaxe, a tool that would put in a hole instead of getting you out of it.
The rope won’t help you since you can’t rely on anyone outside. You had to go out by yourself.
You see, you get stuck in your dark thoughts and you keep overthinking, dwelling, living in those thoughts, hoping that you’d get unstuck eventually, but all you’ve been doing is digging deeper and deeper, till that hole you’re in became your grave.
Today, you’ve discovered the ladder, tomorrow you might climb the first levels and the day after that, you might find yourself out. It’s not as easy as I make it sound but it would be you believed in yourself, and let go of that pickaxe and that rope for a change.”
That was my first psychotherapy session three years ago, more precisely the first cognitive behavioral therapy session. I had learned to climb ladders by the time I’m writing this, and I would be lying if I said it was easy. I still take my pickaxe and dig around from time to time. It has always been the easier option for me and climbing the ladder wasn’t fun. But one thing for sure, I didn’t stay so long in those holes like I used to be. I hated them, I always did and I wish I didn’t fell into every single one of them throughout my journey in Tartarus.
