If you’re a Person of a Certain Age (and American), you probably remember a time when missing children were pictured on milk cartons. The belief was that by placing the photos on a surface that people see every day, people would eventually come to pay attention to the faces, thereby increasing the chances that the missing child would be found.
Since April, 2009, I’ve felt like one of those missing children. But I think I’ve finally been found.
I had a bit of a breakthrough last week in therapy. I haven’t talked about my therapy experiences here, largely because they’ve been frustrating for me. Lack of money for private services meant that I had to rely on free, provincial services. To make a long story short, it’s a good thing I wasn’t in any worse shape because the waiting list alone might have contributed to my demise. But I digress.
Last week when I met with my doctor, he said he noticed a change in me. I was still depressed, although my mood seems to have shifted. He says I seemed more focused, more determined, and more dynamic. During the session, he opined that the source of my unease seems to be a fear of standing still. I’m a person who needs to keep moving, he said, and if I don’t move, I become surly, I lose all self-esteem, and I fall into an abyss so deep that the only way I can seem to find my way out of it is through explosive actions. Those explosive actions leave some collateral damage; the challenge for me is to learn how to break through and break free, to keep on moving, without laying things to waste when I find myself in a position of having to stay still.
When my doctor mentioned the word “dynamic” it was as if a light had gone off in my head; no, it was more like a fireworks display had gone off in my head. You might not know it to look at me, but I love moving. I love being in motion. I might not like the getting there, and anyone who has traveled with me knows this all too well, but the act of being in between spaces, of living in the potential of a moment is the source of my greatest power.
This need for movement is what makes me love learning and sharing knowledge with others. This need for movement explains why something as simple as taking a bike ride through a neighbourhood I’ve never seen before thrills me so. It also probably explains why little five-year-old me told my mother “I’m never getting married and I’m never having children.”
My doctor says I see life as a series of choices, as experiences to be lived, as vignettes. He thinks that my path is to be someone who gathers wisdom by movement, by inhabiting spaces for awhile and then moving on. When I asked him if I’d ever settle or grow up, he suggested that it wasn’t that I couldn’t grow up, but more that wisdom was more important to me than status.
Well, damn.
Have you ever been seen? Truly, truly seen by someone? Completely laid bare by another person’s insight? I can honestly say that until that moment, I never had been.
What does this mean for me going forward? Decisions. Conversations. Planning, charting, setting goals and seeing them through.
It means moving forward. Ever forward.
And maybe, hopefully, it means seeing this face, this beaming, happy face, more often.