How do you camouflage despair? If I tell the truth, I suspect that I’ll set myself on the yellow brick road back to the clinic. But if I don’t tell the truth to her, someone who is paid to listen, then what hope do I have of finding a way through the selva oscura? Why do you think you find it so hard to speak plainly, the therapist often asks. She tells me not to make allusions, to try to talk directly about myself, without filtering what I say through references to books or films or art. She says she doesn’t care about my references. I say I don’t know how to speak any other way, it is how I understand myself. These references are my work, what I do. She says it’s deflection, a form of resistance. I can run down the clock by talking about Kleist or Chinese scholar’s rocks, but I won’t get any better. I am trying, she says, to present myself as the expert, instead of the patient. It is a thing a lot of her male clients do. I say I don’t think of myself as an expert in anything. I never set out to be any kind of authority. I just wanted to be left alone. At some point during every appointment she will remind me that getting well means accepting certain things about what has happened. It means understanding that my picture of the world is distorted. I find this hard to hear, and not just because I’m bored of listening to her say it. It is shameful to be a broken mechanism, to have to sit obediently while someone else goes about putting you right.