Someone brought me flowers and I cried.
Not because of the flowers. Because of the being thought of. Because a person had stood in front of the flowers and thought: she would like these, and had carried that thought all the way to my door, and the distance between the thinking and the arriving is the whole of what undid me, the evidence of having been held in someone’s mind as a person who deserves flowers, which I apparently needed more than I knew.
I have not been good at receiving.
This is the honest accounting of it. I have been very good at giving, at anticipating what is needed and providing it before anyone has to ask, at the particular silent satisfaction of a woman who manages care so thoroughly that the care becomes invisible, which is its own trap, which means the care is never seen and therefore never returned because no one knows it was given. I built a life around giving of a quality and consistency that made it easy for people to take without noticing they were taking, and then I wondered why I was depleted.
The receiving required unlearning.
The specific unlearning of the deflection, the automatic redirection of any care offered my way, the habit of saying: oh no I’m fine, I don’t need anything, let me get that for you, the routing of the attention away from myself and back toward the other person so efficiently that no one ever quite managed to give me anything before I had redirected it. I did this for decades and called it low-maintenance and it was not low-maintenance, it was a refusal, it was a holding-at-arm’s-length of the very thing I most needed and did not know how to take.
I am practising saying thank you and stopping there.
Not thank you but. Not thank you however. Not thank you followed immediately by a gift returned in kind to rebalance the ledger and remove the debt of having been given something. Just thank you. Just the receiving. Just the standing in the fact of being cared for and letting it land, letting it actually touch the place it is aimed at rather than batting it aside before it arrives.
The flowers are on my table. They are yellow.
Every time I look at them I practise saying: I deserved these. Someone thought of me. That is enough. That is the whole of it. I deserved the flowers and I let them come.
