Not a Happy Place

A few months ago I stopped having therapy because I felt I had stabilised myself enough to navigate life without it. For the time being, anyway.

I'm sure the counselling helped me but I couldn't tell you how and I've chosen not to look deeply into it. For someone who is usually pretty analytical this is perhaps an interesting decision but I knew that I didn't want to be second-guessing my counsellor, Sue, or mentally cross-referencing stuff that I'd researched while we were talking.

And talk was what we mostly did, with Sue suggesting hardly any specific tools for me to try. One that she did recommend was finding a happy place to visualise, somewhere that I could be out of the moment for a moment to calm disruptive thoughts. (Something like this.)

Surprisingly, I found that I couldn't conjure anywhere up inside my head. That's when I realised that I've always had difficulty seeing with my mind's eye but never called it out. If I try to imagine even my closest family, all I get is a kaleidoscope blur of features. I did look into this and found a condition called Aphantasia.

I wondered what I could do instead and came up with the idea that if I could locate a somewhere that was everywhere then I'd always be able to find it. After a bit of consideration I settled on trees. Most places I'm likely to be, even those which are heavily urbanised, will have some trees in the vicinity.

Now, early on a Saturday morning, I walk for an hour or two and along the way choose a tree to stand under. I look up at the branches and try to find paths through the canopy to the sky. I have post-rationalised this as a metaphor for moving from where I am to a future which is clearer, with fewer constraints and more opportunities.

I take a photo or two of that view, and sometimes also an arresting aspect of the immediate surroundings, Today, one year after I started, I have over 130 pictures on my phone in a folder called, simply, Trees.

The weekly cycle is helpful and balancing for me and, if I feel the need and I can't get to a real tree, I can take my phone out and lose myself there for a few minutes. I've also set my phone background to one of the early images and so I get a little top-up every time I open it.

--00--

This week there was a huge round of redundancies at my work. My job is safe but, as you can probably imagine, it's not a happy place to be right now. Fortunately I have somewhere else, my own curated arboreal not-a-happy-place, to escape to when I need it.

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TestyRedheadOctober 27, 2024 at 4:26 PM
Some of the best engineers and people I trust the most have Aphantasia and I find it facinating. Because they do not have a mental picture they tend to plan and test things out. I am the opposite. I can sit down with just a canvas and start painting from my imagination. It makes me an amazing improvisor, but people often say my style is "ready, fire, aim". Not true. My style is machine gun firing with constant adjustment, but because I already have a clear picture in my head, others have trouble seeing the plan or keeping up unless I make an effort to externalize it. The fact you HAVE to externalize it makes it an asset that can help you. People like me on the other end of the spectrum can do a huge amount with very little due to improvising, but we make more mistakes as a result. I just was hoping this might help. Layoffs are a no win situation. They harm and even kill people, and they do not even help companies with any of their goals long term (according to the studies that have been done). I am sorry that your company is going through that process and I really wish this trend would die or a law would pass that makes it so expensive to lay people off that it isn't seen as a temporary way to bump stock anymore.
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