Not wisdom. I want to be careful about that word.
The word wisdom implies a completion that I do not feel. It implies that the knowing has arrived in full, that there is a view from here that is clear and steady and cannot be shaken. I do not have that view. I have a partial view from a particular place at a particular time in my life, a view that is cleaner than the one I had at thirty-five but still obscured by things I cannot see yet, things I will probably only be able to name later, looking back from somewhere I am not yet.
But there are things I know now that I did not know.
I know that the work was real and the cost of it was real and both of those things can be true simultaneously without one cancelling the other. I spent years trying to resolve that tension, trying to decide whether my work had been worth the cost or whether the cost proved it had not been worth it, and the answer is that the question is wrong. Worth is not the right frame. It happened. It shaped me. Some of it was good. Some of it was harm I am still metabolizing. All of it is mine.
I know that the body kept the record and the body can release the record. Not all at once, not on command, but slowly, with the right conditions, the body can put down what it has been carrying. I have felt this. I want to say that I have actually felt it, in Loreto at the edge of the sea, in the slow morning walks I take now, in the particular quality of an afternoon when there is nowhere to be and the afternoon is fully mine. The body softens. It is not metaphor. The body actually softens.
I know that I was harder on myself than any institution ever was.
And I know that the people I loved did not need as much of me as I gave them. Or rather: they needed me, but they needed the present version more than the perfectly prepared version, and the perfectly prepared version was always partially absent because she was preparing for the next thing. I gave a great deal of a very good performance when sometimes what was needed was just me, just there, not prepared, not performing, just in the room.
I am practising being in the room.
It turns out I am better at it than I thought. It turns out the room is fine with just me in it, underprepared and present and alive.
