I thought therapy would bring me happiness - why does it feel more elusive than ever? | Megan Nolan

In the past few years I've been forced to confront my competing desires: the thrill of chaos or the comfort of security

I started therapy last spring, and was briefly worried that my therapist and I were too demographically similar and might run into each other at a bar - a concern based entirely on his beard and shoe choices. I got around this by aggressively refusing to absorb even the most irrelevant personal information about him. Once, I rhetorically said: I don't know what it's like where you're from ..." and he pleasantly replied: London!" and I went blank and stared out the window as I tried to forget this personifying detail.

Once I had managed to flatten him in my mind into a benevolent inhuman listening machine I took to the process, but if anything, therapy has made the concept of happiness feel even more distant than it did in the past. Before, I could at least tell myself I was too lazy and stupid to build the life that would give me happiness. But in this past year, I have begun to understand how nebulous and elusive a notion it really is.

Megan Nolan is an Irish writer based in London. Her novel Ordinary Human Failings is published on 13 July 2023

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