I am aflame with metaphors these days, trying to get each one just right. There is so much that keeps me from writing, I say to myself, but I know the truth is that if I start to write how will I stop myself from telling the truth?
Tell all the truth, Emily Dickinson echoes again in my mind. Just tell it slant.
In high school there was a corner of the lunchroom by an old (antique, probably) stove where that year’s “cool” seniors would gather for lunch. It was a source of loud laughter and inside jokes. As I went through the years, I used to wonder at my chances of having lunch at that table. I saw it through the eager eyes of a new student, then a soon-to-be-high-schooler: from that corner of loud laughter came the approval you wanted and needed. The confidence, the ability to walk across the Quad effortlessly and pull off the messenger bag over your shoulder.
But I also saw myself echoed back through the eyes of the people I thought they were (and so, what I thought they saw): awkward, uncertain, my body unwieldy in all of its new shapes and spaces, my mind racing, my palms sweaty.
This is how it began, I think, though threads begin in invisible places, and some don’t even have a beginning.
My healthy self, as the therapist has named her, is a fledging, a sapling, the tiniest of flames burning in a dark room. She comes out in the sunshine and greets me like a nervous rabbit. I don’t know if she trusts me not to run back to habits that call out to me like old friends. Will I stay with her? Will I run?
And the other self - the other Hilary (or the Hilary that I also am, I suppose) - she is the perpetual girl in the corner of the lunchroom sitting by that stove. She is leaning against the wall studying me, studying the world, studying me again. She speaks in asides. “You see?” she says a lot when I feel anxious, when something goes wrong, when I feel out of control and I start to spin my wheels. “I told you,” she says, and goes back to looking at me with what feels like the superior knowledge of a high school senior looking at my seventh grade self.
This past week I ran. I started out thinking, oh how lovely, you are free of anxiety and then promptly spun out like a top, winding myself up to the very edge. As I type this a few days later I can feel it rise in my chest again, the familiar assurance of a faster heartbeat, of coursing adrenaline that blocks out sound.
“You see?” She says. “This is just how we are. Trust me - I am keeping you safe.”
What can I say back to her, this familiar, cooler girl who lives inside my mind? She’s kept me safe for years in the wilderness of the world, if by that I mean in control if by that I mean mastering my hungers like an AP exam, my questions like a set of calculus problems. And suddenly, or not so suddenly, I have this longing to know if she is in fact keeping me safe. Is it working? Am I safer, for all this control, all the time? Am I wiser, for never letting my mind cease its frenetic pace?
She’s been the cool girl in my mind for what feels like forever. I have aspired to her image and to her promises of a well-managed life (which she tells me is what precedes a happy one).
But the question, now that I have asked, won’t stop haunting me - is it working?
Does a well-managed anxious life precede the happy one?
Every time I have resisted her I have found that she was wrong. Happiness was not lost simply because I was not anxiously anticipating its arrival or fretting over its potential departure. Every time I have said I don’t have to plan each meal according to what I am “supposed” to eat. Every time I have said yes to another three Oreos. Every time I have said yes to an unplanned spontaneous drink with a friend. Every time I have played one more song at music time with my kids.
She has always been wrong, even though I keep thinking she won’t be, she is trustworthy, she is what I hope to be.
This other Hilary who is me and who is not me, this high school cool girl living in my mind, I think she is afraid to be unnecessary, which maybe is a part of me being afraid that I will be unnecessary without all the worry and planning and restricting and controlling. What if that was what I had to give, and when I stop, I am just walking the Quad of my New England high school with sweaty palms and a too-big backpack full of books?
I don’t know if I can quite give her up yet. I want to write to you from the other side as if this story is finished. It’s not. The story is not a typical narrative plot structure with this other Hilary as the nemesis and myself the hero. It is the winding unusual experimental fiction where we don’t know where we are going or what story is being told, until the end, which might just be the beginning again.
These other selves, these “cooler” ones - they do not always tell us the truth about what a good life is and can be. They want to keep us safe, I think. But their safety is not a replacement for the joy that I can feel awaiting me, if I can put my roots down a little firmer. If I can grow a little more.
A sapling, I said. And Lord, may I grow.