Therapeutic Paintings

Therapy. It’s a word that makes people cringe when they hear it. Some feel sorry for you; others think there must be something inherently wrong with you. It’s associated with sickness, social anxieties, and old stigmas that should have been left behind in the 1940s. For me, however, it’s associated with two paintings of gold flowers.

I’m not sure if any of the stereotypes about therapy patients are true, but I chose to become one in early 2011 because I wanted to stop feeling terrible. I had been feeling terrible since middle school, with bouts of depression, self-harm, and an eating disorder that everyone around me liked to ignore. Things worsened in my first year of university. I was insecure, a little shy, and desperately lonely, and I continued my pattern of self-loathing; I ate a meal or two a day, had daydreams of stapling my fingers together when I was stressed, and wallowed in front of a mirror for longer than necessary each morning.

I, like many who suffer in silence, was able to keep most of the crazy to myself. Near the end of my first year, I started seeing someone new, and for the first time, my eating issues were called out. From there, my problems were exposed, raw and open for someone unqualified to dissect. I let him because he loved me, and I think I needed the attention. We’re still together, three years later, and we look back to that time with shared grimaces.

The Christmas holidays soon rolled around and I went home for the break. I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing my best friend, who had been hospitalized for all of 2010 with anorexia. I could look at her frail body and see what starving did to a person. However, I would also turn my attention back to me and see a bus staring back; I didn’t look anorexic, not like her. I was fine.

We went to a hotel for New Year’s Eve and danced the night away on the beach. She was obsessed with taking photos to document our good times. I reviewed those photos shortly after they were taken, smiling outwardly and dying inwardly as I stared at the size of my thighs. It was at that moment that I thought, “Wow. Nothing makes you look more like a cow than standing next to an anorexic girl.”

I was mortified. I couldn’t believe those words had even crossed my mind – what the Hell was wrong with me? It was a fleeting moment of clarity that disappeared when the overwhelming negativity of the eating disorder kicked back in. However, I still somehow managed to book my first therapy appointment at Western in January. After briefly explaining my issues to the receptionist, I filled out some paperwork, and saw a therapist within the week.

I don’t remember what I was wearing, nor can I recall anything about the waiting room on that first day. Both of my therapists have been blonde, and the first always wore her hair down and straight. I can’t recall what she was wearing either; I don’t even remember the configuration of her office. I remember three things from that day: the first question my therapist asked me (“So, why are you here?”), my nausea after I spilled all of my secrets to a stranger, and the pair of paintings on the wall directly across the room from me.

I couldn’t look at her, not at the perfectly poised social worker with the clipboard, so I stared at the paintings. They were definitely from IKEA, and the gold flower petals stuck out in odd directions, some sort of post-modern 3D piece that people used to jazz up a dull space. I know every detail of both paintings; the flowers were in bunches of threes, and there were only two bunches per square frame. At the time, I thought the yellow hue was fitting for the conditions of the people who came to the office: yellow for sickness, for disease.

Sometime along the journey to mental health recovery, my first therapist got a new job. I was given to someone else in the department, and I had to start the horrible process all over again with someone new. The paintings disappeared with the blonde who wore her hair straight, replaced by diplomas by the blonde who wore her hair in a bun. Life went on. Sometimes I went to therapy once a week, other times once a month, and then back to weekly when I wanted to staple things to my fingers again.

Those paintings made another appearance in my world at a sushi restaurant one afternoon. I stared at them, just as I had in my sessions, and realized that their gold did not stand for sickness. Gold was for victory; a first-place banner for all the patients who sat in that dimly lit office. Even if they all couldn’t get there, maybe some only settled for bronze, I decided those cheap paintings were my gold medals. The fact that I could get through an all-you-can-eat sushi meal without an ounce of panic, regret, self-loathing, or a need to starve for the rest of the week was proof enough. On my next trip to IKEA, I plan to find a pair of those paintings; I’d like to display my gold.

Megan Muldoon is a fourth year Anthropology student at Western, taking a minor in Psychology and a certificate in Writing.