Growing up, a single question dominated my thoughts. What was the use? What was the use of getting out of bed, of combing your hair, of breathing, all that breathing? What was the use of anything when all of life inevitably came grinding to an end? By 17, I was waking up in the middle of the night, seized by the meaninglessness of it all. By 18, I started to lose sleep. At 19, I dropped out of college. In my 20s, I knew I had to do something.
So I began seeing a therapist.
Initially, the idea felt romantic like a scene out of Game of Thrones or Gone Girl, the movie. At our first appointment, I might have even won a knockoff JBL Bluetooth speaker. My new therapist extended her hand and introduced herself as Dr. Graceline and for the next six years, that was the only name by which she was known to me.
Dr. Graceline never referred to me by my first name either. Instead, she called me Mr. Stephen, which, because she spoke with a heavy Acholi accent she pronounced ‘StepHen’. The first and only time I tried correcting her, she simply said, IT IS STEP-HEN!
Dr. Graceline was beyond thin, appeared to be in her late 60s, and always dyed her hair black and occasionally shaved off her eyebrows. She preferred kitenge dresses and Birkenstock sandals and sat behind an imposing desk empty except for a telephone and neat stack of small notepapers
At the end of the first appointment, she asked me to write up a one-page family history. Instead, I took a deep dive into my childhood. I wanted her to have all the source materials she would need to get to the bottom of my restlessness. And so the following week, I proudly presented her with a book-length memoir.
Dr. Graceline skimmed through it and then silently stacked my life history in a drawer. And never brought it back up.
Several sessions later, I couldn’t take it anymore so I asked her whether she was able to have a second or even third look at my memoir.
“I’m not very interested in the past,” she said. “I’m more interested in the future. What are you going to do now?” she asked
What I was going to do now, I hoped was talk about my past but Dr. Graceline couldn’t care less.
A therapist uninterested in the past ran contrary to everything I thought I knew about therapy. It was like a carpenter who refused to work with wood. More than that it was like a carpenter who hated wood and if you brought them wood, they would throw it in a concrete drawer and never mention it again. Wasn’t excavating the past pretty much a therapist’s job? Where else could one find answers?
Dr. Graceline’s unwillingness to even acknowledge my past was strange but so were a lot of things about her. Sometimes she would show up wearing two pairs of glasses, all looking like an alien off a UFO. Other times she’d spend several minutes buffing out an invisible stain mark from a waiting room chair. Then there were the long anecdotes about car trouble, a trip she was planning, and a neighbor she was on bad terms with. Stories that went nowhere and were illustrative of nothing I could fathom. And all the while all precious expensive minutes elapsed in which I could neither whine nor complain my way to mental health. It felt positively wasteful.
Dr. Graceline’s office was in a large building in the nearly abandoned part of town. Our appointments happened around dusk. And in my memory, it was always the dusk of the dry season. Hot and dry dusk of Small Town. From behind her desk lit by a kerosene lamp, she spoke of giving birth to one’s authentic self. A self that wasn’t all tangled up in regrets about the past or consumed by anxiety over the future. That is a self that didn’t sound very ‘Step-Heny’
In every session, Dr. Graceline repeated the same refrain “You must give birth to yourself”. “What could she possibly mean?” I asked my girlfriend at the time. Angella was working on her bachelor’s in Clinical Psychology. And in my darker moments, I felt certain her relationship with me was a part of her fieldwork.
Week after week, Dr. Graceline and I sat in a dark room as I tried in vain to birth myself. On a bad day, she would reprimand me for not doing as she instructed. On a good day, she would say that I was very, very close, my authentic self was crowning. Was this just a line? I wondered something Dr. Graceline told all her patients?
I grew increasingly frustrated. I was still lost, still waking up at noon. Still spending my days watching old movies and listening to sad songs in my parent’s house. Still showing up for appointments with Dr. Graceline for conversations that felt as pointless as life itself.
Finally, after being told for the nth time that the miracle of birth was nigh, I grew upset.
”It’s hard to hear this year after year,” I said I told her that we must be doing something wrong.
“It is not working,” she said, “because of you”.
She spoke her words quietly but firmly. I was taken aback. It had to be something more than just me. If only slightly maybe a tiny bit because of her. I mean she was sitting in the room as much as I was. Even in my insecure state, her conclusion felt off.
“It is because of you,” she repeated
Was a therapist even allowed to say that? How could she refuse to share in this failure?
“I think this should be our last session,” I said
Ending things was something I had been thinking of doing for a while
“But you are yet to find the philosophy,” she said “words to live by that will ease self-birth”
“Not everyone needs a philosophy,” I responded.
“That is true,” she said “but you do”
At the end of the hour, Dr. Graceline rose from behind her desk and opened her door for me. She smiled warmly, sincerely no edge at all. The blame she cast in combination with the simplicity of her goodbyes was chilling. She shook my hand, ending one of the most intense personal relationships I have had up until that point in my life. And then just like that, I was back in the streets, silently wondering what the hell had just happened. It’s a question I still don’t have an answer for.
When you are young, because the world is small and new, so many experiences confuse you. But as you grow older, the odd things fall into place and you look back with something approaching clarity. But after 30 years, my experience with Dr. Graceline somehow feels more mysterious, and more difficult to comprehend than I did when I was 20. We go for therapy to form a more coherent narrative out of your life yet paradoxically, the chapter of my life with Dr. Graceline remains one that I have never really been able to make sense of. And so, I still find myself asking who this was person. And was she a bad therapist? Or was I a bad patient? Although Dr Graceline died in 2023, I recently realized there might still be a way to find out.
In recent months, I have found myself moving away from traditional psychotherapy and towards a more improvisational mental health regimen. That is I stay up late drinking beer and watching old movies.
It was while watching at close range a Luo film, Wek Abonyo Kwani from the early 2000s that I realized I’d already seen it in at our class. With this recollection, I remember the teacher who taught the class, and the one time I had seen him outside of his classroom it was in Dr. Graceline`s compound. The moment was long ago and so fleeting but if true. This memory had the power to tear open a potential wormhole connecting me to my past
As a kid in therapy for the first time, I had no perspective on Dr. Graceline but there was a fully pledged adult patient of hers, a teacher no less who had the experience and insight to cast a decisive vote in the “Was it me or was it Graceline referendum?” Was she just weirdly hanging up on this notion of self-birth or was I just too young to get it?
With the movie paused in the background, I paced the floor of my room. A plan began to take shape. All I had to do was break all the rules of therapy, of polite society, and track down a teacher who taught at a school I was expelled from to inquire if it had been him I’d seen exiting my therapist’s office 30 years ago.
“Yes,” I agreed nodding my head to no one in particular.
The only problem was after thinking as hard as I could, I could not remember the teacher’s name.
A visit to the school’s website tells me nothing about my old teacher but I do discover that a former classmate is now one of the teachers at the school. Joan and I haven’t spoken in close to 20 years
Joan tells me how much she enjoys teaching English and I tell her that I have recently been guiltily reading ‘Weep Not Child’, a book on the required reading list back when we were in school. That I never actually read. Eventually, I explained the reason for my call and I told her I was in search of a teacher from our former school whose name I couldn’t remember but who may or may not have favored sharp-pointed shoes, big buckled belt, and cowhide briefcase. I proceed to describe the professor, the best I can. I offer Joan all the details I can. She seems to enjoy chewing gum, I could tell. After a while, I just give up. But as I was about to get off the phone with Joan, one tiny detail popped up in my mind.
“His name could have been Mr. Pule” I said
And indeed my old teacher’s name was Mr. Andrew Pule. Joan later dug in and within a few hours, she texted me the phone number.
The following day, I reached out to Mr. Andrew but to no avail. So I left him a text and as soon as he got my message asking if we could speak, he phoned right back. Every so often he’s interrupted by the neighbor’s daughter, Jane, and her toddler sister Oliva.
Andrew, a retired teacher now tells me has been working on a documentary about the underlying causes of drug abuse among teenagers in the fishing communities of Lake Kwania. While I do find the subject of Andrew`s documentary interesting, the questions I have in mind are not in service to that somehow interest but rather just starving off the moment I have to announce the invasive nature of my phone call.
The whole point of therapy is to have a sacred space separated from the rest of the world, free from the judgment of others. And here I was phoning up a stranger to ask, Mind if I poke around in your sacred space a bit? Any hot takes on the therapist, did she sound crazy to you?
Andrew would have every right to bang down the phone on my face. And so I keep deferring. We go back and forth for almost half an hour. All the while, Andrew never asked why I was phoning
Having exhausted every possible way to put asking my question, every digression, every subject change, every attempt to keep Andrew’s two-year-old neighbor on the phone I am left with no recourse but to finally get to the point of my weird- out of nowhere social call. So I just dive in
“I have a pretty strange question and I am just going to say that right out of the gate. Basically, the reason I am calling you is there was a moment where our lives crossed and totally in a very coincidental way, and I was reminded of it”
Just as I am finally getting to it, Jane interrupts again
“I used to see this therapist and I have this memory and I might be misremembering even. I have been in the waiting room and I remember seeing you leave her office”
“Was it, was it Dr. Graceline?”
Without any ado, he just jumps right in, telling me he began seeing Dr. Graceline during the most traumatic years of his life and he continued to see her for four years.
“I found her very interesting and I found her also very weird in some way”, Andrew said
“I can`t remember exactly what age she was but she kind of was on the older side. And there was a thing about the cows which I can`t remember”
Andrew and I swap old memories. It’s validated, that Dr Graceline was old
Andrew remembers how angry she would get when he was even a few minutes late. How harsh she can be in her method.
I told Andrew about the note Dr. Graceline and I parted on. How she`d been crossed about my failure to ‘birth’ myself. When I asked whether self-birth was something they`d also talk about, he said no
Sure he wasn’t handed a certificate with the word cured stamped on it, but getting to where he wanted to go was a more dignified end to therapy than I had managed. Maybe it wasn’t with honors but at least Andrew had graduated rather than dropped out.
Just as one of the strangest telephone calls of my life came to an end, Andrew casually mentioned that he just so happened to be in touch with another of Dr. Graceline’s former patients. And one who, unlike the both of us wasn’t confused by Dr. Graceline at all. Andrew encourages me to give him a call. His name was Dickolas
“I have seen a couple of therapists over the years and she wasn’t my favorite”, Dickolas said
After a breakup left them devastated, Dickolas went to Dr. Graceline for help.
“She wasn’t crazy about listening much. I mean in fact she did a lot of the talking and it got into a kind of who is now talking competition. She started reprimanding me, which I thought was kind of strange”
Dickolas`s memory sparks one of my own. One day during a fit of coughing, I asked Dr. Graceline for water. There was a sink in the corner of her room but no cups. She told me to use my hands. Hunching over the sink and cupping my hands together to catch the flow of water from Dr. Graceline’s spout, I felt like someone from the Stone Age.
But when I bring up the business of giving birth to myself. As in how naughty was all that. I am surprised by his response
Dickolas put me in touch with yet another patient of Dr. Graceline’s, the person who recommended he see her in the first place. Esther, wasDickolas’s colleague at the time.
And so I reached out to her.
Esther loved Dr. Graceline so much and in our conversation, she always referred to her as The Fantastic Dr. Graceline.
Esther is a painter who began seeing Dr. Graceline in the early 2000s because Esther`s lack of confidence was threatening to derail her work and career in general.
Esther says Dr. Graceline`s approach went beyond talk, beyond even the confines of the office.
“She went to the galley to see my work and the galley dealer greeted her and showed her my work”
Sure Esther is taught in therapy about her self-doubt as an artist but she never would have anticipated Dr. Graceline actually going to see her work. But the point is, Esther says that Dr. Graceline loved what she saw that day. Hearing that, at that particular moment in her life from someone who is as no-nonsense as Dr. Graceline gave Esther the confidence she was looking for.
Esther experienced a different side of Dr. Graceline, one that I never could have imagined, and the more we talked the more I realized how different our experiences have been. While my Dr. Graceline has been weird in every sense, Esther’s Dr. Graceline loved The Fray.
Esther got to know that Dr. Graceline wanted to be a musician, who took vacations alone, could scuba dive, and described swimming alongside a baby hippo as one of the most meaningful encounters of her life. Esther’s Dr. Graceline was the type of person who blushed after saying a joke, who got a look of satisfaction when she hit on something deep. And this is why on the wall of Esther’s art studio besides pictures of her friends, her family, and her dog hangs a photograph of The Fantastic Dr. Graceline.
Dr. Graceline devised a treatment plan uniquely tailored to Esther. Esther needed confidence and reassurance and Dr. Graceline went out and gave it to her. If she`d done that for Esther, perhaps she`d also done the same for her other patients. With that in mind, I asked Esther if during her therapy Dr. Graceline had ever mentioned giving birth to herself. But Esther has no idea what I am talking about.
After 30 years of obsessing, it dawned on me that Dr. Graceline might have tailored this notion of self-birth specifically to me. So I reached out to one last former student of Dr. Graceline. Martin
Martin and Oliva were newly-wed. For the most part, things in the young family were going great. His career was taking off and he finally felt settled. But when he came to dealing with his mother, Martin says he had no control. She would phone at all hours, sometimes even threatening suicide. That’s when Esther encouraged them to start seeing Dr. Graceline.
One night she phoned saying she was about to jump off a balcony. So then that very night, Martin got in the car and drove to her house. When he arrived at her home, he expected to see her body on the ground outside but she was inside her living room eating a full bucket of popcorn. She just wanted to see him. What finally pushed him to the breaking point was the time he called her from his hotel while away on a business trip in Kampala accusing him of abandoning her and only taking care of wife`s relatives. The lengths his mother was willing to go to assert control puzzled Martin. He was a full-grown man with no idea how to deal with his mother, he played Dr. Graceline the threatening voice messages his mother had left
And on the phone, Martin dictated to me the note Dr. Graceline wrote to him as a way of dealing with his mother.
“Dear Mother, what you’ve done has done damage to my life. From here on you can sustain a relationship with me if you behave in a positive constructive way but at the moment we shouldn’t talk”
Martin acknowledges that it wasn’t much. Maybe just a couple of lines but for him, it was enough. It was the first time that he`d ever dared talk to his mother this way. After he read it, Martin says he and his mother didn’t speak for 10 years
And so a decade passed and then one day his mother called and she was totally cooled out. She just says I am really sorry. And from that day forward they had a relationship, a loving one.
Toward the end of Martin’s therapy, Dr. Graceline was diagnosed with cancer. It made her weak. And in the last year, she would disappear during the sessions for long stretches in the bathroom.
About a year after Martin stopped seeing her, at the age of 77 Dr. Graceline died of cancer
As was I, Dr. Graceline wasn’t very interested in learning about Martin’s past. But unlike me time to time Martin did learn something about her, particularly towards the end. As the bigger issues and the therapy received, a sort of friendship emerged. They would just talk sometimes about a family back in Lamwo.
Dr. Graceline’s obituary mentions a son, Bruno. He’s a retired computer systems consultant. He agreed to talk and when I asked about her mother’s life during the war. He tells me all he has are snippets. The past, Bruno tells me, didn’t come up much at dinner conversations.
Given his mother’s feelings about the past, it makes sense. What he does know is this, she was born Graceline Akullu and she was an athlete. She played tennis competitively and was a strong enough swimmer and her grandfather was a doctor
While I have taken my inability to give birth to myself as a failing of either myself or Dr. Graceline’s, it wasn’t really. Maybe Dr. Graceline telling me over and over that birth was imminent was her way of saying there was no endpoint. It`s just living. And that’s the point.
You are not your past, you are not your father, or your family or at least you do not have to be. You are the things that you make, which is a lesson Dr. Graceline must have had to learn for herself before she could pass it on to others. Before she could pass it on to me. Even though I still don’t have what Dr. Graceline might call a philosophy, I eventually came to see that what`s the use was never the right question. The most important things in life have no use. And maybe this is the closest I have come to words to live by.