Vox Meditantis

What’s something most people don’t know about you?

Saturday, 18th October 2025

The prompt sits on my screen this morning like an old therapist’s trick – deceptively simple, quietly demanding. What’s something most people don’t know about you?

I spent yesterday writing about rest and productivity, about the difficulty of simply being without constant justification. About lazy days and guilt and the slow work of unlearning my parents’ relentless industriousness. The harbour was dark by the time I finished, and I’d convinced myself I was practising the art of doing nothing, of being insufficient and incomplete and perfectly, humanly enough.

Then this morning arrives with its pointed question, and suddenly all that hard-won equilibrium feels rather theoretical.

Because here’s what most people don’t know: I’m terrified of being ordinary.

The inheritance no one mentions

There’s a particular kind of pressure that comes from being the child of extraordinary ordinariness – if such a phrase makes sense.

Father drove buses for four decades, then supervised municipal transport until retirement. Steady work, reliable income, nothing glamorous. Mother channelled her casino-girl vivacity into volunteering and community organising after they married, her restless energy finding outlet in connection rather than neon-lit ambition. Between them, they modelled a life of contribution without fanfare, usefulness without recognition, dignity found in daily showing up rather than spectacular achievement.

My siblings absorbed this perfectly. Michael became a civil engineer – pragmatic, dependable, recently retired after a career of building things that work. Susan teaches English at the same high school we attended, nurturing generations of teenagers with the same steady care she brought to raising her own children. Both found partners who share their values, raised families, participate in their communities. They are, by any reasonable measure, successful in exactly the way our parents hoped we’d be.

And then there’s me.

The youngest, the introspective one, the daughter who went further in formal education than anyone in the family’s history. The one who chose psychiatry – a profession our father never quite understood and our mother found simultaneously fascinating and slightly unsettling. The one who remained unmarried, built a career rather than a family, became the person people consult during crises rather than the person hosting Sunday dinners.

I tell myself this is simply who I am, that vocational calling matters more than conventional markers of adulthood. But underneath, a question pulses with uncomfortable regularity: What if I’m not actually called to this work? What if I’m just afraid of the ordinary life my siblings embraced so naturally?

The paradox of visibility

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: I’ve spent thirty years helping people feel seen, whilst simultaneously constructing a life that keeps me carefully obscured.

My patients know me as Dr Bennett – calm, present, reliably empathetic. They trust me with their most vulnerable truths because I create space for those truths without imposing my own. This is my professional strength: the capacity to hold others’ experiences without making them about myself.

But there’s a cost to this kind of presence. After decades of listening, of metabolising others’ suffering, of being the steady witness to so much pain, I’ve become rather expert at deflection. Ask me about my work and I’ll speak passionately about the privilege of the profession. Ask about New Corinth and I’ll describe the harbour’s October light, the community’s resilience, the layers of history visible in the district’s architecture. Ask about my family and I’ll offer charming anecdotes about my parents’ unlikely romance or my siblings’ children.

But ask about me – not Dr Bennett, not the psychiatrist, not the daughter or sister or community member, but me – and I become remarkably evasive.

Father Walsh noticed this years ago. We were walking the harbour one autumn morning – much like this one, actually – and he asked what had drawn me to psychiatry. I gave him my standard answer: the intersection of medicine and meaning, the privilege of accompanying people through their darkest moments, the intellectual challenge of understanding the human psyche.

He listened with his characteristic patience, then said gently: “That’s a very good answer for a lecture hall, Catherine. But what I’m asking is what drew you – not some abstract psychiatrist, but you specifically – to this particular form of listening.”

I didn’t have an answer then. I’m not sure I have one now.

The fear beneath the competence

Most people see professional confidence. What they don’t see is the constant, low-grade anxiety that I’m somehow performing a role rather than inhabiting a genuine vocation.

Every morning before my first patient, there’s a moment of near-panic: What if today’s the day I’m revealed as insufficient? What if this person’s suffering exceeds my capacity? What if all these years of training and practice haven’t actually prepared me for the depth of need sitting across from me?

The anxiety passes quickly – professionalism kicks in, clinical training takes over, the familiar rhythms of therapeutic work assert themselves. But it’s always there, waiting in the wings like an understudy who knows the lead’s lines better than the lead does.

I think about Helen Garrison, my undergraduate mentor, and how she seemed to carry her expertise so lightly. She never appeared to doubt herself, never seemed to question whether she belonged in the role she’d chosen. I wrote about her steady presence just days ago, about success measured in sustained attention across decades. But what I didn’t mention is how much I’ve spent thirty years trying to replicate that settledness, that quality of being entirely at home in her own skin.

I haven’t managed it yet.

The ordinary I’m avoiding

Here’s what really frightens me: the possibility that my entire career is an elaborate avoidance strategy.

Because if I’m completely honest – and this blog seems to demand nothing less – I’m not sure I chose psychiatry because I was called to it. I think I chose it because it offered an acceptable way to remain perpetually adjacent to intimacy without having to risk it myself.

My patients share their lives, their fears, their failures. They trust me with secrets they’ve never spoken aloud. We develop relationships of profound depth – but within carefully bounded limits. There’s a frame: fifty minutes, professional ethics, clear roles. When the work becomes too heavy, when countertransference threatens, when their needs exceed what I can offer, there are consultation groups and supervision and the entire architecture of professional boundaries to protect us both.

But ordinary intimacy doesn’t come with those protections. Friendship requires reciprocal vulnerability. Romance demands letting someone see not just the thoughtful, competent professional but the person who doubts, who fumbles, who doesn’t have answers. Family life – the kind my siblings embraced – requires showing up not at your best but at your realest, day after day, in ways that don’t allow for careful self-curation.

And I’ve avoided all of it.

Oh, I have friends – Jenny from primary school, Andrea from university, Jonathan from residency. I have community connections – Marcus at the coffee shop, Tom on his morning rounds, Father Walsh with his theological musings. I have family who love me. But none of these relationships require the kind of sustained, undefended presence that terrifies me.

What they don’t see

Most people who know me would be surprised by this admission. They see someone warm, engaged, apparently content with her choices. They see the restored Victorian office with its high windows and harbour views, the steady stream of patients, the community involvement, the professional respect. They assume I’ve built exactly the life I wanted.

What they don’t see is the woman who goes home each evening to an empty flat and wonders whether this is actually living or merely a very sophisticated form of hiding.

They don’t see the moments when I catch myself envying my sister Susan’s chaotic household – the noise, the mess, the demands, the sheer thereness of family life that I’ve carefully avoided.

They don’t see how I analyse social situations even as I’m participating in them, maintaining that slight professional distance that keeps me safe but separate.

They don’t see that the person who helps others navigate intimacy has rather carefully arranged her own life to require very little of it.

The question that haunts

Yesterday I wrote about lazy days and guilt, about the difficulty of allowing myself unproductive time. But underneath that struggle with rest lies a deeper question: What am I so afraid of stopping for? What might I have to face if I weren’t perpetually busy being useful?

I suspect it’s this: the realisation that I’ve built an admirable life that’s missing something essential. That I’ve become very good at witnessing others’ journeys without actually risking my own. That ordinariness – the kind my parents embodied so beautifully, the kind my siblings inhabit so naturally – requires a courage I’m not sure I possess.

Because here’s what ordinary life demands: showing up without credentials, loving without professional boundaries, being needed not for expertise but simply for presence. It requires the vulnerability of letting people see you fail, the humility of needing help, the risk of being insufficient without the protective frame of clinical competence.

And I’ve spent fifty-eight years avoiding exactly that.

What I’m learning – slowly

The harbour light this morning has that particular October quality – sharp, clear, unforgiving. It illuminates rather than flatters, shows things as they are rather than as we’d prefer them to be.

I don’t have resolution to offer here. No tidy therapeutic reframe, no clinical wisdom that makes this easier. Just the uncomfortable recognition that the person I’ve become – competent, reliable, admired – might also be the person I’ve hidden behind.

Helen used to say that the most important therapeutic work happens in the spaces between sessions, in the metabolising time when we’re not actively trying to solve anything. Perhaps that’s what I’m doing now – allowing space for a question I’ve avoided for decades to finally surface.

What would my life look like if I stopped being extraordinary at being adjacent to intimacy and risked being ordinary at actually experiencing it?

I don’t know the answer yet. But perhaps asking the question is itself a start – a small act of the courage my parents modelled so quietly, the courage to show up as you are rather than as you’ve carefully constructed yourself to be.

The morning walk with Father Walsh awaits. Later, the river clean-up that Kevin coordinates, the Historical Society meeting Maggie mentioned. Sunday will be full, as Sundays are, with the comfortable rhythms of community participation.

But underneath those familiar routines, something’s shifting. A question that won’t be silenced anymore. A recognition that perhaps the most frightening thing isn’t being ordinary after all – it’s discovering that I’ve been so afraid of it that I’ve never actually tried.

Most people don’t know this about me. Until this morning, I’m not sure I fully knew it myself.

Catherine

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