Vox Meditantis

When you think of the word “successful,” who’s the first person that comes to mind and why?

Thursday, 16th October 2025

The question arrived this morning like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples across the surface of memory.

Success. When I think of that word, who comes to mind first?

I’ve been sitting with it all day – between the woman who wept quietly about her daughter’s wedding she won’t attend, between the teenager whose silence speaks louder than any words he might manage, between the ordinary moments when I stand at my office window watching Tom shuffle past with his harbour wisdom and his weather reports. The question follows me like a melody half-remembered, insistent in its simplicity, troubling in what it asks me to reveal.

Yesterday I wrote about being woven into this neighbourhood, about the quiet discipline of showing up, about Father’s steadiness and Mother’s warmth and how together they taught me what it means to be present to a place and its people. But success – that’s a different sort of question entirely, isn’t it? It asks not about belonging but about excellence, not about participation but about achievement. It wants me to name someone I admire, to point toward a life lived so well that it deserves singling out.

And the truth is, the first person who comes to mind surprises even me.

The woman in the consulting room

Professor Helen Garrison turned seventy-seven this past July, though I only know because her last letter mentioned it in passing, the way she mentions everything significant – lightly, without ceremony, as if reaching such an age whilst retaining such fierce intellectual clarity were merely another data point rather than an accomplishment worthy of celebration.

She supervised my honours thesis at the University of Delaware in 1988 and 1989, guiding my fumbling attempts to understand trauma and memory with a patience I didn’t fully appreciate at twenty-one. I thought then, with the certainty of youth, that I was studying something academic, something theoretical. Research methodology. Cognitive psychology. The mechanics of how humans process and store difficult experiences.

What Helen was actually teaching me – what I’ve spent thirty years learning to see – was how to bear witness. How to sit with another person’s pain without flinching, without rushing to comfort or fix, without turning away when the truth becomes uncomfortable. How to hold space for what cannot be easily categorised or resolved.

She’s emerita now, retired from formal teaching since 2013, but her influence extends through every session I conduct, every silence I allow to breathe, every moment when I resist the impulse to fill emptiness with my own anxiety. That’s a particular kind of success, I think – the sort that echoes through decades, that shapes not just what someone knows but how they move through the world.

What success looks like from the margins

The thing about Helen is that she was never the sort of success story that makes headlines. She didn’t pioneer revolutionary treatments or publish bestselling books. She didn’t build a lucrative private practice or consult for prestigious institutions. She simply spent forty years at a mid-sized state university, teaching undergraduates with the same meticulous attention she brought to graduate seminars, treating every student as if their questions mattered equally.

In academic circles, that’s often read as a kind of failure – or at least, a failure of ambition. The brilliant scholars are supposed to pursue elite appointments, to chase research grants and speaking engagements, to build empires of influence. Helen chose something different. She chose to be profoundly, consistently present to the work immediately before her. To read every draft her students submitted with genuine attention. To remember not just their academic interests but their personal struggles, their family histories, the specific obstacles standing between them and their potential.

When I was writing my thesis, struggling to balance my mother’s recent health scare with my coursework, Helen simply appeared one afternoon with an extension on my deadline and a thermos of tea. She didn’t ask questions, didn’t pry. She just said, quietly, that sometimes the most important research is the work we do on our own capacity to hold multiple truths simultaneously – that we can be both scholars and daughters, that grief and learning needn’t be sequential, that allowing ourselves grace isn’t the same as lowering standards.

I’ve thought about that conversation a thousand times since. How she managed to acknowledge my struggle without making me feel fragile, how she offered support without assuming I needed rescuing, how she trusted me to find my way whilst ensuring I knew I wasn’t alone in the finding. That’s clinical wisdom before I had any formal clinical training – that’s the kind of success I’ve been chasing ever since.

The long game

There’s something about Helen’s career trajectory that speaks to what I’ve been circling around these past few days – this tension between adventure and steadiness, between the dramatic gesture and the quiet accumulation of daily choices. She succeeded not through spectacular leaps but through relentless, unglamorous consistency.

Every semester for four decades, she showed up. Read the papers. Led the discussions. Wrote the letters of recommendation. Attended the departmental meetings. Mentored the students who knocked on her office door uncertain whether their ideas were worth pursuing. She built no monuments to herself, but she shaped hundreds of lives – including mine – in ways that continue to ripple outward.

That’s rather at odds with how we typically talk about success, isn’t it? We celebrate the entrepreneurs who disrupt industries, the artists who achieve fame, the leaders who transform organisations. We measure success in followers and revenue and awards, in tangible markers that can be photographed and quantified. Helen’s success is none of those things. It’s quieter. Harder to see. It lives in the consulting rooms and classrooms and quiet conversations of people she taught twenty or thirty years ago, people who absorbed her way of being alongside her syllabus content.

I think about this often in my own practice. The temptation to measure success by the dramatic cases, the transformations everyone can see, the grateful testimonials. But the real work – the success that actually matters – is so much subtler. It’s the patient who learns, slowly, to speak their needs aloud. The teenager who stops cutting not because I performed some therapeutic miracle, but because over months and months of showing up, I created a relationship steady enough to hold their pain until they could hold it themselves. The woman who finally leaves an abusive marriage not with fanfare but with careful planning and a network of support built one phone call, one conversation, one small act of courage at a time.

Helen taught me to value that kind of success. To understand that influence needn’t announce itself to be real, that the most important victories often happen invisibly, that sometimes the greatest gift we can offer is simply our sustained, attentive presence over time.

The cost of consistency

I don’t want to romanticise Helen’s choices, though. There were costs to the path she took, costs she acknowledged with characteristic frankness in one of our later conversations.

She never married, never had children – not because she couldn’t have, but because the life she chose didn’t easily accommodate those other commitments. Academic salaries at state universities aren’t generous; she lived modestly, saved carefully, took few holidays. Whilst her more ambitious colleagues accumulated prestigious appointments and substantial retirement accounts, Helen accumulated something harder to quantify: a reputation for genuine care, for intellectual integrity, for being someone students sought out when they needed not just expertise but wisdom.

That matters, but it doesn’t pay the bills. It doesn’t fund elder care or cushion against illness or provide the material comforts we’re told success should deliver. Helen chose a kind of richness that exists alongside financial modesty, and I don’t think we should pretend that choice was costless. She made it with open eyes, but she made it in a world that rarely rewards the work she valued most highly.

I see echoes of that in my own life. The practice I’ve built here in New Corinth is successful by most measures – I have more referrals than I can accommodate, a waiting list that troubles me, a reputation that extends beyond the immediate community. But I’ve also remained unmarried, maintained boundaries that sometimes feel isolating, chosen professional consistency over romantic possibility in ways that have shaped my life as surely as Helen’s choices shaped hers.

Am I successful? By Helen’s standards, perhaps. I show up. I listen. I hold space for suffering and transformation with as much skill and compassion as I can muster. I’ve shaped lives – I know this because former patients tell me, because colleagues consult me, because the work continues to feel meaningful even after thirty years.

But I also live alone in rooms above my consulting room, walk the harbour most evenings by myself, maintain careful distance from the intimacy I encourage others to risk. The steadiness that serves my patients so well sometimes feels like armour I’m not quite sure how to remove. Helen modelled a life of profound professional success built atop personal solitude. I’ve followed that model more closely than I perhaps intended.

What success requires

Watching Helen across decades – through occasional visits, the quarterly letters that sustain our connection – I’ve come to understand that success of her variety requires several things we don’t often discuss.

First, it requires knowing what you value and choosing it repeatedly, even when the world insists you should want something else. Helen valued deep teaching over prestigious appointments, genuine relationships with students over networking for career advancement, intellectual integrity over expedient publication. Every time her colleagues took positions at Ivy League institutions or published in high-impact journals, she had to recommit to her own different definition of a life well-lived. That takes extraordinary clarity and courage.

Second, it requires comfort with invisibility. Most of what Helen accomplished will never be credited to her publicly. The students she mentored go on to cite other, more famous scholars. The lives she touched don’t come with monuments or retrospectives. Her legacy is diffuse, impossible to quantify, living in a thousand small ways across hundreds of people she’ll never know she influenced. That’s profoundly at odds with our cultural obsession with recognition, with being seen and acknowledged and remembered.

Third – and this is what stands out to me most – it requires the capacity to find satisfaction in the work itself rather than in its rewards. Helen didn’t need applause or advancement to feel that her days mattered. The teaching was enough. The students were enough. The slow, patient work of helping young people develop intellectual confidence and emotional resilience was its own reward. That inward orientation – the ability to find meaning in the doing rather than in the recognition – feels increasingly rare.

The inheritance

I’m fifty-eight now, the same age Helen was when she supervised my thesis. That realisation startled me this morning – that I’m now the age my mentor was when she shaped my understanding of what it means to do this work well. Time performs such peculiar alchemy, turning the young woman fumbling through research methodology into the established professional, turning the mentor into the emerita, collapsing decades into the space of a thought.

What have I inherited from Helen’s example? Not just clinical technique – though her influence runs through every session I conduct – but a framework for understanding success itself. A model that prioritises depth over breadth, consistency over spectacle, quiet competence over dramatic gesture. A conviction that the unglamorous work of showing up, listening carefully, holding space for complexity matters more than any single intervention, no matter how brilliant.

I think about this when I’m tempted to expand my practice, to take on more administrative roles, to pursue teaching appointments or consulting positions that would raise my profile but diminish the time I have for the actual work I value. Helen’s example reminds me that success needn’t look like growth, that sometimes the most successful thing we can do is maintain our capacity to be fully present to what’s already before us.

The question returns

So when someone asks who I think of first when I hear the word “successful,” I think of Helen – not because she’s famous or wealthy or publicly celebrated, but because she built a life of profound integrity, because she knew what mattered to her and chose it consistently across forty years, because she shaped my understanding of what it means to do good work in the world without needing the world to applaud in return.

That’s success of a particular variety, and I’m aware it’s not the only valid definition. My niece Rachel, with her marketing director title and her ambitious climb up corporate ladders, represents a different kind of success – one I admire even if I don’t aspire to it myself. My brother Michael, who spent decades building bridges and buildings, who retired this year with the satisfaction of work visible across the landscape, embodies yet another version. There’s no single right answer, no objective measure that settles the question.

But Helen’s the one I think of first. Helen, who taught me that the most important successes often happen quietly, that influence needn’t announce itself to be real, that showing up with genuine attention year after year after year creates something more lasting than any spectacular achievement. Helen, who modelled how to choose meaning over recognition, depth over breadth, sustained presence over dramatic gesture.

I’ve been writing about trying new things, about choosing adventure, about saying yes to watercolour classes and chamber music concerts and possibilities beyond my familiar routines. And I stand by all of that – I do want to risk more, leap more readily, allow myself the grace to be a beginner at something that doesn’t come naturally.

But I also want to honour what I’ve learned from Helen: that there’s profound success in the patient, unglamorous work of showing up consistently to what matters most. That steadiness itself can be a form of courage. That the greatest adventures sometimes look like returning to the same consulting room, the same patients, the same careful listening day after day, year after year, trusting that this accumulation of attention creates something worthy even if it never makes headlines.

The harbour light is fading now, that October gold hour when everything seems briefly suspended between day and night. Soon I’ll walk down to the waterfront, past Marcus closing the coffee shop, past familiar faces and familiar streets. Tomorrow I’ll return to this office, to the work waiting for me, to the ongoing privilege of bearing witness to other people’s becoming.

And perhaps that’s the most important thing Helen taught me: that success isn’t something we achieve once and then possess, but something we choose repeatedly, daily, in the small decisions about how we spend our attention and where we direct our care. It’s not a destination but a practice, not a trophy but a discipline.

When I think of the word successful, I think of Helen – still writing her letters at seventy-seven, still curious, still engaged, still believing that the work of understanding and supporting human flourishing matters more than any reward it might bring.

That seems to me an extraordinary life. That seems to me the kind of success worth emulating, even if I stumble in the attempt.

Catherine

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