Tasting Oranges: On Survival, Absence and Coming Back to Life

There are ways of disappearing that attract concern. There are also the other ways.

You stop turning up. You fall apart publicly. You become visibly unwell. People notice. They worry. They ask questions.

Then there are the other ways. You carry on. You answer the messages. You look after people. You function so convincingly that even those closest to you may never realise how little of you is actually present in the life you are running.

Tasting Oranges is a book about that kind of disappearance — the high-functioning absence that hides in plain sight. Drawing on more than thirty years of clinical work and his own lived territory, consultant psychotherapist Jimi Katsis traces the architecture of competence and the quiet cost of living inside it.

• The ghost at the kitchen sink, doing the dishes from somewhere else entirely
• The breath you have been holding since childhood without noticing
• The day the running stops and the room finally goes quiet
• The observer hovering above your own grief, narrating instead of living it
• The self assembled in defence — and what is underneath, still waiting
• The performance of kindness, and what real compassion looks like when there is no hierarchy in it
• The person in front of you, and the most important thing nobody applauds

This is not a manual. It is not a programme. It is not seven habits or ten steps or another identity to perform. It is a slow, careful return to the experience of being in your own life — the ordinary moments most of us have learned to dismiss as backdrop.

This book is for you if: you have looked fine for too long while living at a distance from your own experience; you have outsourced presence to performance; you suspect there is a life on the other side of the construction work, and you are ready to come back, inch by inch, to the life that is already here.