There is a version of me that only exists when no one needs anything.
I met her in Loreto. I have been meeting her in small increments since, in the garden in the early morning and at the edge of the water and in the chair with the book and the tea that I let go cold because I was in the book and the book was where I needed to be. She does not come when someone needs something. She requires a particular kind of quiet, the quiet of an unscheduled hour, the quiet of a morning with nothing pending, and she is cautious about showing up because for most of her life the unscheduled hour was a rumour.
I like her.
I like her in a way that is different from the effortful self-acceptance I have practised for years, the deliberate choosing to be on my own side, the daily practice of treating myself with the care I would extend to anyone I loved. That is important work and I am still doing it. But this is different. This is actual liking. The way you like a person whose company you seek, whose presence is its own reward, who makes the room feel better rather than more complicated. I am in the room with her and the room is better.
She is curious about things.
She notices the bird on the fence and wants to know what it is. She reads things that are not relevant to anything, that are just interesting, that are interesting for the pure reason that the world is interesting and she has time to be interested in it now. She makes things slowly and without purpose. She takes the long route. She says yes to things that have no productive outcome and no entry on any ledger and no value except the value of having done them, which turns out to be a significant value, which turns out to be the value she was missing for most of her adult life without knowing she was missing it.
I have been trying to introduce her to the other versions.
The one who manages and the one who produces and the one who shows up and delivers. I am trying to let them all be in the room at the same time, let the version nobody needed sit alongside the version everyone depended on, let them look at each other and find they are not in competition, that the room is large enough for all of them, that none of them has to leave for the others to exist.
The version nobody needed has been waiting a long time for the room.
She is in it now. I intend to keep the door open for her.
