Extract: I Only Know Happy People, by Sarah Beck

Extracted from I Only Know Happy People: a psychologist's memoir by Sarah Beck. RRP $33.00. Published by Copy Press. Released May 2024.  “Why are you going home to New Zealand?” my Melbourne friends asked. After all I had been a Melbourne fixture for more than 40 years, spending much of my time in Jimmy Watson’s wine bar and the Albion hotel in Lygon Street, Carlton, and most of that time living in the inner city suburb of Brunswick. I wanted to tell them that my mother was dead, my fathers were dead and my abuser was dead. I had unfinished business. 

     I found I had been away from New Zealand too long. Of course this was a different country from the one I had left in 1965 and I had returned to a different family. I began to realise I was a foreigner in my own country. 

     It was exceedingly lonely in Auckland. I was, after all, a Wellington girl and the Auckland I remembered was from summer holidays spent on Takapuna Beach in the ‘50s and 60’s.

    I would long for the phone to ring but it rarely did. I would catch buses and ferries to places with interesting names like Half Moon Bay, Smales Farm and Cockle Bay in the hope of finding someone to talk to. I would park outside my mother’s house in Devonport, where she had lived her last years, waiting for her to come out. She had promised she would live to 92 but she did not and I gently reprimand her for being dead.

    I knew that being alone, feeling lonely and having a weak social network can be a death sentence, that loneliness can be a killer and emotional pain worse than physical pain. I have heard depression described as, “a howling tempest” in the brain.  I knew I was suffering from a disease called unhappiness, an illness they call depression, a lurgy that would not go away. I knew that I did not belong.

     Everything became too difficult. Graham Greene in The Quiet American wrote that one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel, and I knew what he meant.

     I began to see a therapist who was welcoming, affordable and insightful. She gave me a sense of hope. I saw her for months until I no longer had the energy to walk, to catch a bus and then a ferry. I lost 25 kilos.  I did what many people do when they know they are going to die. I began to give away my belongings. I threw my knickers in the bin so that my husband would not have to wash them. I took my pink wedding dress that had hung in the wardrobe for more than 30 years to an Op Shop.

    I tried to keep going. I told myself what I often tell my clients, that everything would be different in six months time, but six months was like a frightening distant land.

                                        ………………

     Ward 12 at North Shore Hospital is a psychiatric ward for older people.  The door to the ward is kept locked all the time. My fellow mental misfits included the schizophrenic, the demented, those with Parkinson’s disease and socially isolated older women struggling to make the transition from family home to retirement village.

     In my room there were four women. One did not talk but her silence was filled by another who never stopped talking all day or snoring all night.   I thought of escape as Janet Frame once did when she was wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent much of her life in psychiatric hospitals. Escape for me would have been when the doors were flung open for the heavy food trolleys to enter and there would have been just enough room to squeeze past them to the outside world. But I suspect that by then I had become too frightened by the outside world”.