Paulina Gjetnes: What Doesn’t Make Figure
The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali
They ask me what I feel.
They ask again.
They ask me what I feel.
They ask again.
They wait for an answer in straight lines.
But I do not move in straight lines.
I move like weather.
Sudden sun. Sideways rain.
I say: “It’s blue.”
They say: “Stay with the blue.”
I say: “It’s moving across my chest like clouds.”
They say: “Stay with the sensation.”
I say: “It’s already somewhere else.”
The field is loud today.
I hear a kettle boiling three rooms away.
The tremble of the window.
The memory of shame.
There is no clear ground.
I do not choose what becomes figure.
The figures arrive uninvited, like children, like birds,
like unravelled time.
They say figures emerge from the ground.
But mine emerge and dissolve, like foam in the sky.
They don’t ask for permission.
They come in flickers, fragments.
A buzzing ankle. A smell from 2003.
A sense that something is wrong,
but not knowing what.
What if nothing makes figure because everything does?
In one session I say:
“I feel afraid.”
But what I mean is:
There is electricity moving through my jaw.
A kaleidoscope in my ribs.
A thumping pulse that is not really fear,
but becomes fear when no one is listening.
They nod, as if I have named “the thing”.
I have become fog — the echo of my own voice.
I have only translated myself,
and lost something on the way.
I used to think this was wrong.
They called it fragmentation.
Disorder. Lack of integration.
They called it a deficit.
I called it my life.
There was a time I tried to become the right kind of person.
Fewer tangents. Measured voice.
I practiced pausing before I spoke,
but the pause was full of noise.
They said: “What happens in stillness?”
I thought stillness would save me,
but stillness made me disappear.
It didn’t calm me.
It brought me closer to the chaos.
They took a deep breath in.
And out.
A soft surrender.
And there, in the breath,
I met the part of myself that’s everywhere.
The part that doesn’t need to hold myself back.
Only met.
One day, I cried in front of them.
Not for any reason I could name.
A tear just fell.
Then another.
They didn’t ask for a story.
They just breathed with me.
Their body soft, their eyes without urgency.
And something in me
—the sky-blue foggy something—
settled, like a whisper in the air.
In that moment,
there was no noise.
No fear.
Only us.
Only breath.
Only this.
Name: Paulina Gjetnes, MA, MNCPS (Acc.), UKCP reg.
Connection with GT: I am a Chilean/Norwegian Gestalt trainee psychotherapist, having just completed my final (fifth) year of training at the Gestalt Centre, UK.
Location: Surrey/Hampshire
Contact Email: paulina@thegestaltclinic.co.uk
Description:
A poetic piece rooted in my thesis and client work, exploring neurodivergent contact and GT’s neurotypical bias through the lens of ADHD experience.
