Goal: To imagine that I am talking to my therapist.

Side Effect: Squeezing in one more session for free.

Cost: Fifty minutes, electricity, coffee, light, rent etc.

The central concern: Exploring the gulf between individuals.

Approach: Talking around the problem.

An obstacle, an unmovable, gargantuan, formless, un-word-ly obstacle lies in front of me. I cannot capture its aspects in words, precisely because the obstacle is where language stops working. It is that obstacle which presents itself when I attempt to reply to a message, or try to describe the symptoms of an affliction that prevents me from “communicating” the very symptoms of the affliction. It is sort of a chicken-and-egg situation.

Let us consider a particular situation: I receive a text message with a link to a song. The song is about twenty minutes long. I try listening to it, but my current activity (writing an academic text) prevents me from giving myself to the song, so I keep the song aside. For the next two or three days, I keep thinking about how I am unable to provide the amount of care and focus to the song, and how that prevents me from replying to the text message. After these two or three days, I receive another text message that tells me it is not quite annoying when I do not reply to text messages. What do I do at that point? Do I tell them that their last text message has been sitting in my brain like a hair splinter because I have not been able to give myself to the message? How can I, at this moment, tell them that the message has been present in my wakeful life—without coming across as a pompous liar?

Let us consider another situation. A friend approaches me and says hi. I am pleased to see them. Maybe even a little too much. Maybe I am slightly even in love with them. What do I tell them? Apart from the usual ‘hi’, ‘hello’, and ‘how are you’s? How can I tell them what seeing them means to me without spending at least a day in front of my text editor? How can I tell them the things that I want to tell them? That I have been thinking about them for a long time? That I wondered whether they were, for a long time? Later that evening, I receive a message from them, where he asks me why I get uncomfortable when he talks to me. How do I tell him that…

Oh. And fuck ravikant kisana for unsettling me. Not what I wanted now.