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Life Chart

Today at CBT I was asked to plot my life chart. I knew some basic ones - potentially my highest and my lowest, but was interesting to try and plot 35 years into a piece of paper. I labelled the years under my age. 
I was sure on the lowest: 2015. The year where everything was fine and nothing felt right. That was easy. I even knew the date - 18 July 2015, the day of my 34th birthday.  I did have the relative question on where to plot the lowest. Is my lowest zero or just average. Will my lowest a blip when i try and do this chart at age 60?
I quickly moved on to what i rationalized as my second low, at age 15. Interesting enough, despite the havock of my father leaving at age 15, it did not feel nearly as bad as last year. Is it distance from the event? Can't tell. I can't pinpoint what I felt that made it low, how I dealt, was hard to connect with it. Generally, my feeling was the point would have been much lower had I known how the secondary effects would last through to today. Wow I might have really needed therapy then. But when it happened it was an isolated bad event rather that just became business as usual. If I remember feeling bad? Yes. But I did not feel abandoned and alone, I guess my life was still evolving to being able to digest such emotions. 
I then fiddled with the pen to come up with a childhood line. I remember it to be happy, but again memory fails me in how I should describe it. So onto grown up life. 
The climb as I moved to London was an ascending one, with only some blips in isolated segments of life. My job becoming a career, a break becoming an MBA in Harvard, a little gesture dream becoming a proper charity, meeting B and chosing to grow old together. 2011 and 2012 have to be the peak of this ascension. I must admit, I started by putting 2013 when C was born as the peak but most likely that was just because I should. Having a child is happy no doubt, one of the most special moments in life for sure, but the year around it may be nothing short of overwhelming. So i decided on 2011 as the peak year, with 2012 a close second. 
She asked why? I had trouble saying it, I am not even sure myself. The reason I learnt not to rationalise and explain why I feel sad sometimes (to avoid the risk of feeling worse), would probably lead me to also not explain why I feel happy. It was a day where I cared only about myself and B and was overwhelmed with joy to be able to sustain any other worries for longer than 5 minutes. Despite all that happened along the way. And we lead our life like that for a while. Worrying less, focusing on what we wanted to do more. We don't do that much. That is what I can't point. 
I don't think she was too happy that I had trouble connecting. I was not avoiding it, but I found that happiness is even harder to explain than unhappiness, even though it would most likely help me understand what drives happiness in me!

Comments

C/N/N said…
I forget who said this, but sadness behaves like velcro, while happiness behaves like teflon ...
06 December, 2016 14:40
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