Little Miss Late lives by her own clock. She celebrates Christmas in January. She is chastised by Little Miss Neat for not mowing her lawn until autumn. She is sacked from several anodyne jobs because she can’t make things happen when they should. In a way, her story is about freedom. Little Miss Late isn’t interested in meeting other people’s expectations. In the end, she goes to work for Mr Lazy, who has a similarly anarchic schedule. Rather than improve herself, she finds a place that fits. For about a year, I was always late for therapy. My therapist encouraged me to talk about this, which was the last thing I wanted to do, since talking about lateness always felt like a waste of time. I thought the task of therapy was to locate the fatal flaw in my personality. Once it had been identified, I could flick the switch and feel better, at which point I assumed I wouldn’t be late anymore. But lateness was seductive. It allowed me to avoid something I feared and gave me a feeling of freedom I desired – all useful material for therapy, if you can turn up for it. Once, to compensate for how late I was, I ordered a taxi. As I watched the image of the car moving along the picture of my street, I considered how much of the session I would miss. Ten minutes. Half an hour. Was there any point in going at all? There was a thrill in this wager with time. I wanted to be unreliable. I liked being trapped in the present. This was what lateness allowed – invisibility, being nowhere. The car arrived. Still counting the minutes, I ran out the door. But when the driver asked if I was in a rush, I said no. ‘Where are you going?’ he said. ‘To work,’ I lied. ‘What do you do?’ he asked. ‘I’m a therapist,’ I lied again, for no reason. ‘Like a physio?’ he said. ‘A psychotherapist,’ I clarified, nonsensically. He asked other questions. which I answered as if I’d misheard him. ‘How does that work?’ ‘Talking to people.’ ‘But why?’ ‘About their feelings.’ When we were almost there, he said: ‘I think my mum needs therapy.’ He told me she had spent her whole life raising her children and now they were grown up she was lonely and had nothing to do. He repeated this last part several times. I began to suspect that his mum was fine. He kept describing what, as he saw it, was her empty and meaningless life, until I pointed out that he had stopped at a green light. In therapy, we mostly talked about the lie. I said I hadn’t wanted to admit I was a writer. My therapist pointed out I might have said I was a teacher, which is also true. ‘He didn’t know me,’ I said. ‘Why should I tell him about myself?’ ‘Why shouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘It would make more sense than telling him about me.’ Weeks later, it occurred me that, in the moments before therapy, I often fantasised about taking the other role. I wanted to inhabit the anonymity of the analyst. To be a therapist also seemed to me to be a kind of nowhere. This desired freedom – to be above myself – was a glorification of a baser fear: that my words meant nothing, that nothing I did was of much use. My resistance to therapy conflated a fantasy of transcending myself and a fear of not having a ‘true self’ at all, at least not like the one D.W. Winnicott describes. I thought that therapy would force me to reveal this: that I would talk and talk and unveil a big nothing beneath all the words. Alice Miller, in The Drama of the Gifted Child, acknowledges that not everyone has a true self that they can simply dig out of the false one. It’s ‘not a homecoming’, she writes, ‘since this home has never before existed. It is the creation of a home.’ For Miller, a self is something you can build in therapy. At some point, lateness lost its shine. It happened when I stopped finding myself quite so predictable, when the things I said to my therapist came as a surprise. Then, therapy became investigative. Sometimes it felt mythic. At stake, there was the co-creation of a world, not unlike the early stages of building of a novel. Though I’m not late anymore, I still have some respect for the specific pleasure of being unreliable to yourself. It’s a way to test whether life feels real, to reclaim it from the structures of respectability, from the kinds of rules that tell a person when they ought to mow their lawn. Image© (https://unsplash.com/license)The New York Public Library • This essay is part of_Resistance_ (https://granta.com/resistance/), a series on Granta.com where writers tell us about a time they have pushed back against change or advice.