The Vault

The door beeped, and the catch unlocked. She swung a left, headed down the hallway, not stopping until she saw a familiarly unusual sight. A vault door, painted a soft lilac, left hanging open.

“Tea?” Glen called out from behind, rattling around in the kitchen. His nest of forms and documents in the two-by-two cell was empty. A nosier person might have taken a peek, but Stephanie was here for her own shit.

“Sugar, no milk?”

“Milk no sugar.” Stephanie corrected. The closer to liquid caramel the better really, but she’d panicked in her first therapy session and now felt honour-bound to maintain her ‘preference’. There was definitely something to unpack there, but in its own way the bland drink had become a good marker that this was, despite rusting fittings and a rough and ready nature, a safe space for such introspection.

Glen bustled in behind her, setting her cup down on a little side table, and then his. He took his seat. He was dressed in one of his ever-present primary colour hoodies, though Stephanie was yet to see one that had evaded white paint stains. This one read ‘Believe’. His beard was a little neater than usual.

“So how have things been this week?” Glen began in his usual way, even as he seemed more focussed on his misbehaving pen lid. To the point.

“I’ve been okay ish. Things were a bit rough and tumble, but I’ve had a lot on, so that doesn't seem unfair.”

“Well that's good self-talk to start with - sometimes it is just a case of one foot in front of the other.” Glen was looking at her now, smiling.

“Well I suppose,” The image of a death march towards a dying sun was cast in her tea.

“If you could, what do you think the main challenge of this week was?” Glen was undaunted.

“Well it's hard to rank. There was a carpet beetle, some more stuff with Stephen, and I’m still feeling odd around Sophie which is terrible. I feel like I’m on autopilot, blundering through situations, while other times I feel like I’m thinking so so much I get genuinely stuck. I’m thinking too much.” She exasperated. It was a rough paraphrase of the week's diary, but the main point had been hit.

“Yeah, that does seem like a lot.” Glen said without requiring further explanation. Could you give empathy without needing context? Probably, if you replace context with justification.

“That last bit though, that seems to be the thing tying everything together?”

“Uh” Stephanie jolted back. “Yep”. Just a syllable to light the fuse.

“So when do you think you think too little?”

“Well, when stuff is happening, it's like I’m on autopilot, I can't remember any of the thoughts I have at the time - maybe I don’t even have any, until it's 2am, or I turn my music off, and then I’m turning them over and over and over”.

“Them?”

“Whatever it is. Who I’m dating, what I’m doing at my job. What I’m doing outside of my job - am I hanging out with my friends too much? I have these projects to finish but it seems I don't do them - or socialize. In fact are these ‘projects’” Stephanie raised air quotes with her fingers to narrowly avoid the dangerously up her own arse words: ‘magnum opus’. “Really worth it. What do they say? Do they help anyone? Do they even need to?”

Glen put a pause on the avalanche with a tilt of his pen. Stephanie took a breath.

“I just don't seem to think, or then I think so much I feel I have to put everything in my head down on paper, like my thoughts and ideas are so freaking precious, when in reality they have no value to me or anyone else.”

“It’s interesting you went towards the idea of value.”

Shit. She’d hit one of the tripmines.

“We’ve spoken before about how you didn't feel seen as a child, and so quite naturally your body developed thought patterns in the aim of being seen, valued - proving your worth. Do you think that's why these projects,” Glen’s finger quotation marks were not mocking, “are so important to you?””

“I suppose, but I never really thought about it as seeking external validation, but more as my ideas were an escape, something just for me?" Stephanie paused. It felt badly like an admission.

“Well exactly. It can be both. You could have wanted to escape into dreams of skyships and trolls,” Glen had pegged her as a fantasy nerd. Not incorrectly. “But also to not have to escape, just to be seen.

It was the kind of logic Stephanie could appreciate. Both were her brain’s approaches to a problem. He’d got her.

“But doesn't all art need to have value?” She hadn't wanted to use the word art for her ‘projects’ but one sentence just could not be the fix to everything in her head.

“Well we're heading a bit out of my remit…” Glen was on the backfoot now.

“Goblins and trolls aren't going to stop the rise of fascism in the west.” A teeny bit of an exaggeration, but it wasn't going to get her sectioned. Half embarrassed, half happy to have levelled the playing field, Stephanie sat back in her chair.

Glen’s face barely reacted. “No, probably not. But with all the time you spend justifying your goblins and trolls, or trying to find something that will fix everything - and spoilers, there isn't, you could have done something. And I'm not gonna say then you'd get a platform to do something about those other things, but you would have at least done something. You would have got stuff out of your head. It’s okay to do stuff just for you.”

Hmm, he’d appealed to her inner need for productivity, and unfortunately that was always going to be a winner. She was running out of steam.

“Remember explanations aren't excuses. We're just looking for why you might see things in certain ways, so we can disrupt some of the more negative thought patterns.”

He was capitalizing on his advantage with an old classic of his.

“But sometimes I think I just think too much. There's a girl I can't get out of my head. I know I shouldn't, so I think about how I shouldn’t be. I try to write it down to get it out, only to then tease myself it's not even worth writing, who cares. But then I say maybe I can use it as inspiration so it is worth it, to go through the pain, and to put it down on paper. And on and on, like a coliseum of voices, back and forth in my head.”

“Do you remember we talked about the dog chasing his tail?” The dog is a he, of course.

“I don't need to explain, to justify everything?”

Glen nodded gently. “No you don’t. You are allowed to just be. You have come very far. It is okay to stop trying. Analysing whether you're thinking too much or not enough, is just going to become another layer on a cake that is going to become harder and harder to swallow. I suppose thinking is a bit like eating - you eat when you're hungry, you don’t eat all the time, and that’s okay. Just don’t overface yourself when you go to eat."

God he made it sound so easy; and God the man loved an analogy. She had been warned by the friend who referred her. But Glen's analogies appealed to Stephanie, converting endless strings of thought into solid form. That and Glen’s repeated use of them made him predictable, and safe, and uttered often enough they could take root in her mind, to be conjured up when she was at her most stressed - Glen and the dog ever chasing its tail.

She was starting to see her words were just strings of thoughts. They went down on paper to be processed, to not bang around her head. They needed no witnesses and no value. They didn’t even exist on the same plain as such physical things - besides, skimming a layer of the gateau would mean she could eat more later. She enjoyed the cold indifference of a biological system. It was indeed a good analogy.

“Won't I lose something if I stop thinking?” One last death rattle from her brain, as she clasped her cup, peering into the near empty vessel. A ‘Full Empty’ was a piece of alien junk from Roadside Picnic, the book by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, who spent 8 years fighting the scalpels of soviet censorship.

“No one knows what's going on inside your head. You aren't valued because of a few tiny electrical impulses no one can see.” Glen mimed little explosions whizzing around his head, a barrage of firing neurons.

“You don't think inventing a therapist in my head is just a ‘little’ too much?”

Glen smiled. “Look - if it helps you speak to yourself more positively. If it lets you stop and assign a fixed length of time to process things, and the conversational nature lets you put breaks on thought patterns before they spiral out of control, then it sounds healthy enough for now.”

Ben smiled as he tucked the pen into its holder and snapped the notebook shut. The vault was closed for today. Outside the café the sun had moved across the sky, and there were a few more empty tables than when he’d first put his head down. With a wry smile he tucked the book into his bag, threw the bag over his shoulder, and swung around the table towards the door. Shit. He’d almost forgotten to pay.