Federer and Me by William Skidelsky

Author:William Skidelsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448190867
Publisher: Random House

5.

I had little idea what I wanted to do after I left university. I did not feel (despite my degree) that my prospects of finding a decent job were good. Inspired by my love of cooking, I first tried my hand at cheffing. For a few months, I worked twelve-hour shifts in crowded kitchens, being humiliated by men twice my age who seemed to take exception not merely to the way I chopped vegetables but to the very fact that a ‘college boy’ wanted to work among them. In spite of its gruelling nature, I rather enjoyed the experience. And I regret, now, that I didn’t stick at it longer. As was so often the case, I lacked the confidence of my convictions. I was worried that cheffing wasn’t a ‘good-enough’ job.

Next, I worked at a company that called itself a ‘writing consultancy’. However, the writing consisted mainly of replying to letters of complaint on behalf of a major supermarket, which was too disorganised – or too fundamentally unbothered – to perform the task itself. I wrote thousands of such letters, becoming a master of the empty phrases that are the stock-in-trade of corporate communication. (‘We have carefully investigated the matter and we assure you that we will take every step possible to remedy the problem to your satisfaction.’) That job, too, quickly lost its appeal.

What I actually needed, more than a job, was help; and eventually – and very luckily – I found it. My mother, though no particular fan of therapy herself, had been urging me to try it for some time. Through a friend, she obtained the number of a psychoanalyst. And so, one day, I found myself knocking on the side door of a large house in north London. The woman who greeted me was in her forties; she had oddly formal manners, a German-sounding name, and an accent I couldn’t place. I ignored the couch, and sat opposite her on a leather armchair. In that first session, she didn’t strike me as hugely sympathetic. She seemed more interested in discussing the practicalities of future meetings – which hadn’t even been arranged yet – than in finding out what my problems were. This struck me as presumptuous. What insight, I thought, could this woman – whose life was evidently so disconnected from my own – possibly have into my psyche? The session ended, and I didn’t return.

A few weeks later, I received a short typed letter from her, in which she asked why I hadn’t come back. She said she thought that psychoanalysis could help me. Something about the tone of her letter – or perhaps just the fact that she had bothered to write it – struck me as significant. Despite my misgivings, I returned, and this time kept going. Over time, her manner came to seem less strange. I started noticing that the things she said often made an unexpected sense. Following our sessions, I’d feel more engaged, more alive, than I had in ages.

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