Therapy

fact I get pretty depressed if they don’t esteem me. But I get depressed anyway, because I don’t esteem myself. I want everybody to think I’m perfect, while not believing it myself. Why? I don’t know.
    I.D.K.
     
    Early on in my treatment, Alexandra told me to take a sheet of paper and write down a list of all the good things about my life in one column and all the bad things in another. Under the “Good” column
    I wrote
     
1. Professionally successful
2. Well-off
3. Good health
4. Stable marriage
5. Kids successfully launched in adult life
6. Nice house
7. Great car
8. As many holidays as I want.
     
    Under the “Bad” column I wrote just one thing:
     
1. Feel unhappy most of the time.
     
    A few weeks later I added another item:
     
2. Pain in knee.
     
    It’s not so much the pain itself that gets me down as the way it limits my scope for physical exercise. Sport used to be my chief form of therapy, though I didn’t call it that. I just enjoyed hitting and kicking and chasing balls about — always did, ever since I was a kid playing in a London backstreet. I suppose I got a charge from showing that I was better at it than people expected me to be — that my thick, ungainly body was capable of a surprising agility, and even grace, when it had a ball to play with. (There has to be a ball: without one I’m about as graceful as a hippopotamus.) Of course it’s common knowledge that sport is a harmless way of discharging tension, sluicing adrenalin through the system. But best of all, it helps you sleep. I don’t know anything like that glowing, aching tiredness you feel after a keen game of squash or eighteen holes of golf or five sets of tennis, the luxury of stretching out your limbs between the sheets when you go to bed, knowing you’re just about to slide effortlessly into a long, deep sleep. Sex is nowhere near as effective. It will send you off for a couple of hours, but that’s about all. Sally and I made love last night (at her suggestion, it usually is these days) and I fell asleep immediately afterwards, as if I’d been sandbagged, with her naked in my arms. But I woke at 2.30 feeling chilly and wide awake, with Sally breathing quietly beside me in one of the oversized T-shirts she uses for nighties, and although I went for a pee and put on my pyjamas, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I just lay there with my mind spinning — spiralling, I should say, down and down into the dark. Bad thoughts. Gloomy thoughts. My knee was throbbing — I suppose the sex had set it off-and I began to wonder whether it wasn’t the first sign of bone cancer and how I’d cope with having my leg amputated if this was how I coped with a mere Internal Derangement of the Knee.
    That’s the sort of thought that comes to you in the middle of the night. I hate these involuntary vigils, lying awake in the dark with Sally calmly asleep beside me, wondering whether I should turn on the bedside lamp and read for a while, or go downstairs and make a hot drink, or take a sleeping pill, buying a few hours’ oblivion at the cost of feeling next day as if my bone marrow has been siphoned off in the night and replaced with lead. Alexandra says I should read till I’m sleepy again, but I don’t like to turn on my bedside lamp in case it disturbs Sally and in any case Alexandra says you should get up and read in another room, but I can’t face going downstairs into the silent, empty living space of the house, like an intruder in my own home. So usually I just lie there, as I did last night, hoping to drop off, twisting and turning in the effort to find a comfortable position. I snuggled up to Sally for a while, but she got too hot and pushed me away in her sleep. So then I tried hugging myself, with my arms crossed tightly over my chest, each hand grasping the opposite shoulder, like a man in a strait-jacket. That’s what I ought to wear instead of pyjamas, if you ask me.
     
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    Wednesday 17th Feb. 2.05 a. m. Tonight we didn’t have sex and I woke even earlier: 1.40.1 stared appalled at the red figures on the LCD of my alarm clock, which cast a hellish glow on the polished surface of the bedside cabinet. I decided to try getting up this time, and swung my feet to the floor and felt for my slippers before I had a chance to change my mind. Downstairs I pulled a jogging-suit over my pyjamas and made a pot of tea which I carried into my study. And here I am, sitting in front of the