The Stranger

(by John Gabriel)

Episode 3

My counsellor says I catastrophise. Even the spell check doesn’t find that word. Catastrophise? Actually I’ve tended to come round to his way of thinking now and I think he’s right.

I don’t tend to look at things like you do. You cross the road and get to the other side, I cross the road and imagine what horrors await me there and on the journey over. If I manage to avoid the hurtling, out of control juggernaut, or the falling fuselage of a passing jet liner then I’ll probably find out that the grass is greener but that’s because it’s GM grass or radioactive grass that will leap up at any minute and strangle me, or worse still I might be jumped any minute by some ruthless urban terrorists and forced to eat the grass before they bundle me into a shabby Cortina and drive me off in a screech of tyres to be held to ransom. Only no-one will bother answering their ransom notes and I’ll sit festering in a disused factory with a leaky roof whilst various generations of kidnappers come and go. I’ll spend my retirement showing apprentice terrorists how to make rudimentary plastic explosives, with only their misplaced pity to tide me over.

Best not to cross roads in that frame of mind. However, that brief burst of a Patty Hearst fate gave me a glimmer of hope in my protracted worry scenario. I could live with that.

When I was around 6 or 7, I remember playing happily in the garden when a passer by stopped to chat to me. At first I assumed he was probably a friend of the family who had stopped to say hello, but his questions seemed to get more and more intense. When he grabbed me by the arm and then the leg and tried to hoist me over the garden wall I must admit that I became somewhat perturbed. So much so that I reckon I uttered my first scream since birth. The sight of various siblings running out of our front door probably gave the old pervert a fright he’d never forget.

"Is that what you wanted to happen to you, or is that what you want me to believe happened?" "It might have happened" "But it didn’t did it? You like the fact that you were saved at the last minute by your nearest and dearest, but in actual fact your subconscious says that that was never likely to happen" "You’re the expert, you tell me." "Actually, you’re the expert. You tell me what’s going on up there."

My counsellor points to his head at this moment and I suppress the urge to say that I have no idea what’s going on in his head and sit forward in my chair to think a little deeper, which is what I think you should do.

"I do exaggerate. I catastrophise, and I worry intensely. I can’t seem to stop doing it and being here with you gives me even more worries. For instance, if I’m here of my own free will then I’m obviously self indulgent and therefore a fraud, but if I’ve been coaxed here then I really must have problems that I am not aware of and therefore, I’m probably worse than I originally thought, which must be bad, because my worse is really, really bad, and…"
"Stop, breathe and take stock. Let’s just look at what you’ve said there. You need to be aware of when you catastrophise and rein it in. you’re hurtling headlong along a path that you do not want to travel down. Now take some breaths again and consider what it is that’s brought you here. In the cold light of day, most of the things we feel are affecting us are mere trifles and it’s often an accumulation of little things that appear to weigh us down. By eliminating the little things, we find the true cause of our anxiety. Look back briefly and consider what one thing or event has brought you here. Where do we need to focus our thoughts?"

Where indeed?