[Read] Hot Desk Extract: Graham Panther - What To Do When You've Ruined Your Life

As part of The Wheeler Centre's Hot Desk Fellowship program, Graham Panther worked on What To Do When You've Ruined Your Life, a book about trying absolutely anything to be less anxious. Part personal development, part memoir, it asks: what do you do when you've been asking for help for years, but still feel blown apart? We follow Graham’s year-long experiment to prove to his girlfriend (and himself) he's a good bet for the future, mixed with insights about the long game of mental health, drawn from twenty years working in the field, and running global initiative The Big Feels Club.

Overexposure Therapy

By Graham Panther

You can’t relax! You can’t have fun! I feel like staying with you means being chained to your anxieties for the rest of my life!

This is my girlfriend, SJ, reading word for word from the list of Things I’m Most Afraid She Really Thinks tattooed on my heart. It’s the angriest I’ve ever seen her. I think it might be the angriest she’s ever seen herself. Thanks to a good country upbringing, she usually swallows her anger whole (a trait I never appreciated enough).

I am holding on for dear life while she speaks, not just at this strong conversational opener, but because the flatbed taxi-truck we’re riding in the back of is bouncing all over the dusty Balinese dirt road. I have pictured this scene a thousand times, but never on the back of a fast-moving death trap. Even life’s most hotly anticipated agonies have a way of surprising you.

All at once she’s not yelling anymore, but the half-swallowed sentence that follows is the worst one yet. I barely hear it above the noise of the road. I know the words before she says them.

I don’t know if I can keep doing this.

The truck lurches left to just about miss a scooter carrying a drunk mid-twenties couple wearing shorts and no shoes. A carefree skin reconstruction waiting to happen. I almost fall off the side for the eighteenth time. SJ is completely untouched by the truck’s movements, as if suspended in a cocoon of animus.

All things considered, I am strangely calm. Or at least I look like I’m calm, which I’ve found is a meaningless distinction, at least as far as anyone else can prove. I hear my voice respond in a weird, polite tone, like I’m repeating directions back to a helpful stranger, not contemplating the end of my six-year relationship.

You don’t know if you can keep doing this?

(Take the second left is it?)

By way of response, SJ’s anger collapses into silent sobbing. I should do something, I think, move toward her, but even if I weren’t white-knuckle gripping the seat to keep from falling off the truck, some crucial part of me has already sunk far below the surface of this whole scene. Any volitional thought would have to travel such a distance as to be rendered surely incomprehensible by the time it reached my limbs. How embarrassing that will be, I think, if any feeling ever returns, if this truck ever stops moving. SJ wipes a stream of snot and tears with a tissue she then folds and folds again into a perfect, sodden square.

Her words are the first we’ve exchanged since leaving our couple’s massage twenty minutes earlier, at the five-star resort up the road from our beach-side bungalow. It was meant to be the highlight of the trip so far. A moonlit, open-air, full blown (and full-priced) Romantic Experience. Or as I had already cutely dubbed it in anticipation of needing to defuse a fight, Torture Under The Stars.

Here’s the thing. I’m not a fan of massages. Where most people apparently find them relaxing, I focus more on the various potential injuries a skilled masseuse can inflict with those unnaturally strong fingers. SJ is a complete puddle after a good massage, the platonic ideal of relaxation. My main post-massage thought is, oh good, I’ve survived another massage.

After initially hiding this discrepancy from my younger, full-of-life girlfriend (because what kind of anxious joy-kill doesn’t like massages?) I have in recent years just stopped going with her. One of many slow, small compromises. But I said yes to this one. I’d thought booking a couple’s massage was exactly the kind of thing the new Cool Island Holiday Boyfriend I’d promised to transform into would do.

SJ even made a point of saying, multiple times today, that I should only actually come if I really thought I could enjoy it. This was, of course, a trap. My only possible option was to push through and do the thing, to prove how cool and un-anxious I now was.

As I’d hobbled out of the gorgeously arranged, flower-filled post-massage bath we’d just shared, convinced they’d done something irreversible to my now inflamed lower back, things went downhill quickly.

I told you not to come if you couldn’t relax! SJ continues, the anger now returning through the tears, the truck still bouncing in three directions at once.

From the sunken place within, I manage to swallow my first response (I did this for you AND I MIGHT BE PERMANENTLY INJURED) and instead hear my voice in that weird polite tone again, asking, Could you try using the Feedback Wheel? The Feedback Wheel is something we’ve been working on with our couple’s therapist. SJ does not try using the Feedback Wheel. To her credit, though, she does take a breath before her next sentence.

Her shoulders slump. After five seconds that feel like an hour, she says in an awfully tired voice, I just don’t know how to do this Graham.

The taxi-truck slams to a halt. I catch myself against the hard metal cab of the truck and scramble down the single step to the road where SJ is already waiting, sarong perfectly unruffled.

Shall we get a drink then? I offer, unsure of anything else I could possibly say. We head in silence to our island local, where god knows what awful ‘what happens next’ conversation awaits us. I think of our flights home, still ten days away, trying to calculate how bad the change-of-booking cost might be if one of us goes home early.

This spontaneous Bali getaway was meant to be about convincing my brilliant, lovely girlfriend of six years that we were ready to take the next step together. Marriage, sure, but I mean the really big step. Kids.

Step One of my plan was to show SJ I’m a good bet to take on major, stressful new life challenges with. That I am normal, relaxed, the kind of person who can have fun on a holiday. The only problem is that I am precisely none of those things, and I’m starting to get the strong impression she might be onto that.