Flo’s Yellow Chair

It wasn’t too long before we had started to talk about the yellow chair. I’d seen it in every session. It looked comfortable enough, bright but heavy, the color of midday yellow and taking up most of the screen.

This chair was the centrepiece in an apartment stacked to the brim with personality and quirk.

Gold framed black and white photographs stoically haunted each wall.

A plastic frog holding a magnifying glass stood on the shelf and made a silly face.

 
The light by the chair could only be switched on by pulling a gold cord attached to a beetle. It cast a maroon glow over the room. Behind the houseplants were shadows.

 
The woman in front of me, I won’t say her name (we can call her Flo) had just returned from the hospital.

‘Flo is diagnosed bipolar’ her mother in Texas had said earlier that week. ‘She hates Denmark and she hates me because I put her back in the hospital. But she was in a manic state. I didn’t know what else to do.’

 *********

 ‘I’ve written you a contract, Flo. You’re obligated to sign and follow the rules here. If you break it, we stop. Are you able to commit to that?’

Flo’s Fantastic Counselling Contract:

I, Flo, hereby agree to these terms and conditions.

1. Continue medication and regular monitoring by nurse.

2. Swim at least twice a week and 30 minutes walking per day.

3. I will not lie.

4. I will try things twice.

Flo was languishing in her yellow chair disconnected from the professionalism of the contract. This was her very first time in therapy. In the early sessions she was averaging fifteen hours of sleep, interrupted by an incessant sleep apnea brought on primarily from obesity. She’d wake up tired and spend the remainder of the day swimming in an existential void.

‘I don’t want to die. I won’t kill myself.’

‘You’re hungover Flo. Imagine doing speed non stop for six months then going cold turkey. Mania is fun but it has consequences.’

‘The mania is fun,’ a wry smile crossed her face. ‘There are things I want to do. I just won’t let myself do them. Like going to the grocery store to buy food.I like cooking but…I just end up sitting here in the yellow chair.’

‘What’s the scariest thing?

‘Loneliness.’

Flo had said the word lonely so many times that it had grown into the very structure of her life and become the wallpaper. The wallpaper was a floral mix of green, a kind of deep jungle wilderness. The only rest from it was sleep or retreating to that comfortable and suffocating island standing in the middle of the lagoon, the yellow chair. The chair was a safe haven, a place to sit back safely and become part of the furniture.

In 2008 a documentary following Flo and her struggles with bipolar was filmed by a collective of Danish art students. The documentary was screened in a theatre and presented on Danish television to the entire country. Flo felt humiliated.

‘They set up this story like they know what they are talking about and just kind of film me swiping through tinder being dismissive, and then it ends with this fake Hollywood thing of how everything is going to get better. It’s just stupid.’

‘Have you seen Castaway with Tom Hanks?’

‘Umm…yeah?´

‘Do you remember the part when he comes back from the island and everything has changed? He picks up a lighter and lights it easily, on the island he had to build his own fire! All of his friends greet him and love him but because they have no inkling of what it takes to survive on an island they seem distant and alien to him. Their homecoming meal is a large table full of raw fresh shellfish for god’s sake. As if he hadn’t eaten enough of that on the island. The man probably just wanted a steak.’

Flo had become used to my moods and wild ideas. At times utterly practical and aloof then next minute I’d be dreaming about the psychological significance of the movie Castaway. Luckily, we both agreed that everybody loves Tom Hanks.

“But at the end of the movie his biggest superpower are the trails that changed his perspective. He stands at the crossroads of life and chooses his own way. He’s been scarred, yes, but who’s to say the next chapter isn’t full of life, love and happiness?’

Flo was hesitant.

‘How can I do that when I’m like this?’

*********

I’m sitting at a bar with a gay man who looks exactly like George Michael. He is wearing large Dolce and Gabana sunglasses and his teeth are so white that they surprise you. I’ve just asked him what he does for a living.

‘Botox, what about you?´

‘Psychologist’

‘Reeeeaaallly,’ he says and leans back. ‘Can I ask you a question then? I hope you don’t mind.’

I feel like I can anticipate the question. It’s either one of two things.

1. Is therapy actually useful or is it a bunch of B******t.

2. Does that mean that you are crazy?

He continues, ‘does that mean you’re a little bit mental?’

The answer is yes. Panic attacks, surviving trauma, raising four kids, being a failed artist, changing country and career, turning it all around and still in the thick of it? You bet.

‘The answer is yes.’

We both laugh and it reminds me of a therapy session. Part of what makes therapy the only job I have ever liked is that I get to hear people’s stories and they remind me so much of my own.

George Michael who works in Botox goes on to tell me that ( of course) he has struggled too. He got through it by raising pigeons.

At one point he owned 57 of them. The pigeon he was most fond of died around the same time his father. He showed me a picture on his phone.

‘Somehow’ he says,’ that helped get over a lot of the things I was dealing with.’

In other words, I’m Tom Hanks and I got off the island.

*********

‘When were you the most lonely?’

Flo is happier today, she has a job working for a ballet company and a ballet dancer tattooed on her arm.

‘When I was in the hospital’

‘What makes the hospital so scary, so lonely?’

‘It’s full of crazy people’ she says and laughs.

I appreciate the joke but I don’t say anything.

‘I’m not living. I’m just bipolar. I don’t exist. I become part of the furniture.’

Not every therapy session offers up a metaphor so starkly. In this case the yellow chair has become a fairytale character that belongs in the works of Hans Christian Andersen.

‘I’m sorry. But I have to say this, Flo. Isn’t that exactly what you are doing in the yellow chair?’

‘What?’

'Aren’t we just replicating the hospital environment in a controlled way at home? Isn’t it our way of making sure that it doesn’t happen again so we don’t have to feel lonely like we did there? In a way, unless you can accept the scars that you carry with your bipolar, moderate them but still live….well, you’re still living in the hospital. No?’

She’s silent.

‘One thing is having bipolar. But you are treating it. Did you know that bipolar is the third most diagnosed mental health issue?’

‘Really?’

‘The first one is anxiety which everyone has. The next one is depression which we all go through at some point. The third is bipolar disorder. But that’s not the point. Bipolar is one thing, but when it comes to mental health a lot of what you’re dealing with is is just regular life stuff. Off course you don’t want to go back to the hospital. And the chances that you don’t are severely decreased now that you are monitoring it, on medication, seeing a psychologist. Are we going to spend the rest of our time avoiding the hospital? Or are we gonna be like Tom Hanks and accept it and look at the crossroads?’

*********

Flo is redecorating and I am the Danish art student who is creating a Hollywood ending to this documentary.

‘I’ve gotten the sleep apnea machine. Which is great cause I’m sleeping better. And less’, she smiles.

‘When are we going to talk about your weight?’

‘I know.’ She pauses.

‘Ok, what about the yellow chair?’

‘Ah!’ She laughs. ‘The yellow chair. I haven’t thought of her in a while!’

I know she hasn’t but I have.