Good Advice

Yasmine's new therapist said: "Have you tried just sitting with the feeling instead of analysing it?"

Yasmine wrote this down in the notebook she kept. Not because she planned to act on it. Because she kept a notebook and she was polite.

She had been sitting with feelings analytically since she was approximately seven years old. The analysis was not a defence mechanism that had developed in response to trauma, which was what the previous therapist had suggested. It was not avoidance, which was what the therapist before that had called it. It was simply how her mind worked — not instead of feeling, but at the same time, as a parallel process that she had never been able to separate from feeling any more than she could separate her left hand from her right.

She smiled at Dr. Fouad. She said she would try.

On the drive home she reviewed the advice she had received from professionals, friends, family and the internet over the past fifteen years.

Don't overthink it. You're too much in your head. Just be present. Stop looking for problems. Go easier on yourself. Lower your standards. Find the joy in simple things. Stop trying to fix everything. Let people in.

All of it was well-intentioned. Some of it was technically correct. None of it had ever produced a change because none of it had been designed for a mind that did not have a switch marked "less".

The overthinking instruction was the one that had always confused her most. As if overthinking were a behaviour she was choosing, rather than a perceptual mode she had always been in. As if she could simply decide to perceive less.

She had tried, honestly, for many years. The most she had achieved was a performance of underthinking — showing the surface of someone who had taken the advice while the actual process continued, unchanged, underneath.

She made dinner. She ate it in front of the news, which was a habit she knew was not advised.

She thought about Dr. Fouad, who seemed kind and was probably excellent for most of her patients. She was not going to stop going. She would go, and she would take what was useful, and she would smile at the instructions she could not follow and write them in the notebook.

What she actually wanted — the thing she had been trying to find language for long enough that the search had become background noise — was a framework that started from where she actually was rather than from where the advice assumed she should want to be.

Not less thinking. Different thinking. Not silence in the mind but a different relationship to the noise.

She didn't know if such a thing existed. She suspected it might. She had not found the book or the person or the room where it was explained.

She turned off the news. She cleaned her plate. She made a note in the notebook: what would it look like if the advice were designed for me?

She left that page blank for now.