Mental recovery laid bare in bold memoir

This is a brave book. I wish I wasn’t saying that, but here we are, a memoir about the 21 days Lesedi Molefi spent in a mental institution is still a brave thing to write and publish. While mental health is certainly given more attention than before, some stigma remains, unfortunately. In some companies telling your boss that you’re leaving early to go to a therapy session means you’re painted in a weak light, and it’s still more acceptable to say you’re attending to a painful tooth than a wounded mind.

But that’s what Molefi has done: he’s thrown the door wide open on his stay at Crescent Clinic, a stay that he initiated after suffering depression and anxiety. And, in doing so, he has also let us in on what a stay at mental clinic is like, and how healing it was for him. He sets the scene early on: “It’s November 2016, and this month has been generous with bad news: Donald Trump was elected president of the US of America, the company I work for is about to go under, my girlfriend is cheating on me, and I’m in a mental institution.”

At first Molefi is convinced he is only going to be there for a few days, and he will leave soon. He is not entirely convinced that he needs all of those 21 days. He even gets a pass-out early on. But as the days move on, and the layers of his life and memory peel back, onion-like, he comes to value the experience, and to stay the distance.

The memoir is arranged in 21 chapters, for the 21 days that Molefi spent at the Braamfontein branch of Crescent Clinic. The chapters are written in the present tense, as diary entries, which lends the memoir a fresh immediacy, and Molefi’s writing sparks throughout with wit and humour: “My plan is simple: clear the choking feeling in my chest with a dose of medication, turn a corner and live happily ever after. The writers of Soul City would be pleased with a black kid checking himself into a clinic; it reads like a memoir.”

At this point, Molefi is sharing an apartment with a friend, has a girlfriend, Zuri, who isn’t entirely committed, plays computer games, and goes out with his friends to a bar called the Great Dane, yet something is off. There’s a flatness in him: “Like a comedian whose joke hasn’t landed, somewhere along the way, I stopped having fun. I’ve felt this way for many years, but hid it successfully.”

The story weaves between the time spent at the clinic, a look at his life as a burnt-out copywriter, and the meat of the book: his peripatetic childhood that led him to the clinic’s door. He is also estranged from his father and describes an awkward encounter with him at a Rosebank restaurant.

But it is in the clinic that he will begin to heal. He describes sessions with a psychiatrist, who will put him only on mood stabilisers, a somewhat disappointing regime. He sees a fellow patient gulping down seven pills and wonders why the doctor is skimping on his fix. The answer, says the psychiatrist, is that Molefi needs psychotherapy, possibly for the rest of his life.

He gets that chance with a warm, motherly therapist, Vuyo. This is where he will talk through and over his problems, and the childhood experiences that led him here. He tells her he feels as if he doesn’t have a personality and can’t feel anything. And so the process starts: he says he grew up in many towns, though his grandmother’s home in Diepkloof was a sort of home base; has two sisters, with different fathers; and then there’s his mother. A complicated woman, taking care of three children without much help, the story will pivot on her actions, too, another clue to why Molefi is in Vuyo’s brown office attempting to unravel it all.

But also central to this story are his group therapy sessions, and the interactions he has with the other patients at the clinic. The descriptions of what occurs in these sessions are fascinating to read and enlightening. A session by facilitator Joan called “Who am I?” elicits all sorts of responses that ignite Molefi’s own questioning. Some patients muse that “who am I?” equates to what you do. Another, Farida, says people define themselves in terms of how they treat their family. Joey says who you are is what you want. Molefi shoots out: “Isn’t who you are your personality?”

He’s called away to see his therapist before he can continue this line of thought. Other group therapy sessions sprinkled throughout the book show not only how different we all are, and how differently we view the world, but that learning about those differences can open us up, too. This is also shown in the interactions he has outside group therapy, sharing cigarettes with other patients, introducing each other, sharing lives and lessons.

We’re introduced to “Ma”, bearing a KFC bag and “the bright red and yellow of a Shoprite plastic bag. I know what waits for me inside the bag: salt and vinegar chips, Granny Smith apples and mango- and orange-flavoured Liqui Fruit juice. She knows all the parts of me that I have forgotten; she knows what I like. She is my mother.”

Yet, seeing his mother, he says, triggers a dull pain. The relationship with her is coloured and tarnished by a childhood in which Molefi and his sisters moved around from town to town, punctuated by times at their grandmother in Diepkloof. Anything but a secure childhood, the more we learn about Molefi’s childhood, the less opaque becomes the mystery of why he is at Crescent Clinic in a bad year. In a way, this story unfolds like a detective novel, and the story of his past peels away until we understand what has happened, and how that has affected him.

This is a magnificent story, a riveting story of how someone attempts to heal from the past, and how that healing is woven through with the strands of friendship, therapy, journaling, self-awareness, constant questioning and bursts of “aha” moments. It’s a type of healing that slides back and forth: Molefi knows he should do something about his relationship with the cheating Zuri, but he’s pulled back to her repeatedly. Her WhatsApp messages punctuate the text, as do those of his best friend. The writing is full of dialogue and detailed descriptions that bring the clinic and the past to life.

Brave, yes, and how pleased I am for it. We need more stories like this — that demystify the therapy process, throw open that healing room, showing how it is possible to move on from the past instead of being caught in its sharp claws, forever scratching at our wounds.