I was on the phone with my sister and she said: you sound exhausted and I said: I’m fine.
I said it reflexively, in the voice of a woman who has been saying I’m fine for so long that the phrase no longer requires input from the part of me that knows whether or not it is true. I’m fine is what comes out. I’m fine is the default. I’m fine means: I am managing and I intend to keep managing and I am not going to add my not-fine to your already full plate because that is not what I do, that is not who I am, I am the one who carries things not the one who asks other people to carry things for me.
She said: I know you’re not fine. What do you need.
The question landed differently than I’m fine could deflect. What do you need is a different kind of question than are you okay. Are you okay can be answered with fine. What do you need requires an inventory, requires you to look honestly at the shelves and name what is missing, which is a more exposed position and one I was not ready for and did it anyway because she asked and she knew I was not fine and I was too tired to maintain the performance and the permission to stop was right there in the question.
I said: I need someone to come on Tuesday when I take her to the appointment.
The simplest thing. The specific thing. Not the full weight of everything I was carrying, just the Tuesday, just the one Tuesday when I needed someone else in the chair beside me, someone to divide the waiting with, someone to look at when the doctor came through the door.
She said: I’ll be there at ten.
She was there at ten. We sat in the chairs together. She brought coffee. We divided the waiting. When the doctor came through the door I looked at her and she looked at me and the looking was its own kind of medicine, the knowing that you are not alone in the thing you are in, which is not the same as the thing being easy but is profoundly different from the thing being hard by yourself.
I am practising asking.
It is still hard. The I’m fine is still the first response. But underneath it now I know there is an inventory, and I am learning to look at it, and I am learning to name one thing from it when someone who loves me asks what I need. Just one thing. Just the Tuesday. That is enough to begin.
