What have you been working on?
Sunday, 19th October 2025
The question arrives like a gentle prod from a colleague at a conference – polite, professional, inevitable. What have you been working on? It’s the sort of enquiry that invites a tidy answer, a summary of projects and progress, the measurable outputs of one’s days.
After yesterday’s admission – that raw confession about fear and avoidance – I’m tempted to deflect. To offer my curriculum vitae’s greatest hits: thirty years of clinical practice, consultation work with the school district, the occasional workshop on trauma-informed care. All perfectly true. All rather beside the point.
Because what I’ve actually been working on, though I’ve only just realised it, is learning to sit still with the question I raised yesterday morning: What if I’ve spent three decades being extraordinary at adjacency rather than risking the ordinary work of presence?
The morning’s ordinary courage
Father Walsh and I walked the harbour at dawn, as I’d mentioned I would. October light off the water, that particular slant that makes everything look both sharper and more forgiving at once.
He asked how I was – not the social pleasantry but the actual question. And instead of my usual deflection into observations about the weather or reflections on the community, I found myself saying: “I think I’ve been hiding.”
The words hung there between us like breath in cold air. Visible. Unavoidable.
Tim didn’t rush to reassure or reframe. He simply walked beside me, his silence holding space for mine. After perhaps a quarter-mile, he said: “That’s brave work, Catherine. Naming what we’ve been avoiding.”
It struck me then – this is what I do in sessions, this steady companionship whilst someone finds language for what they’ve been unable to say. But experiencing it from the other side felt unutterably different. Vulnerable in ways my professional training never prepared me for.
What the river teaches
By mid-morning I was at Kevin’s clean-up – gloves, bin bags, the familiar choreography of community service along the Delaware’s muddy banks.
Kevin coordinates these monthly gatherings with the quiet efficiency of someone who understands that environmental care and social connection aren’t separate endeavours. He knows everyone’s names, asks after their families, creates the sort of casual intimacy that invites people back.
I’ve been participating for over a decade now. Reliable. Present. Contributing. But watching Kevin move through the group this morning – genuinely curious about Priya’s latest restoration project, listening to Tom’s stories about the harbour’s shipbuilding days, making space for newcomers like James Zhang who’s still finding his footing in town – I recognised something I’ve been doing without quite seeing it.
I show up. I participate. I’m pleasant and engaged. But there’s always that slight professional distance, that therapist’s observational stance that keeps me just outside the full messy reality of connection.
Kevin doesn’t do that. He’s in it – fully, unreservedly, with all the awkwardness and warmth and fumbling that genuine presence requires. He models exactly the ordinary courage I’ve been avoiding: being insufficient, making mistakes, needing others as much as they need him.
What the archive holds
The Historical Society meeting this afternoon – Maggie’s domain, where New Corinth’s layered past gets carefully preserved and interpreted.
We’re working on an oral history project documenting the harbour district’s transformation: the industrial heyday, the decline, the current gentrification. Maggie wants perspectives from longtime residents like Tom and Dot Williams, newer arrivals like Priya, and what she calls “continuity figures” – people who’ve witnessed decades of change.
She’s asked me to interview several participants, given my professional skill at drawing out narrative. I agreed, naturally. It’s work I can do well, work that serves the community, work that keeps me comfortably in the role of facilitator rather than participant.
But sitting in that meeting room this afternoon, surrounded by photographs from the 1940s through today – the shipyard workers, the casino-era downtown, the Victorian buildings being restored – I found myself thinking about my mother’s trajectory. Elizabeth, the Nevada casino girl who became a New Corinth volunteer, who channelled her vivacity into connection rather than spectacle.
She made that shift, that willingness to be ordinary in service of something real. And I’ve been studying her example for fifty-eight years without actually following it.
The work I’m actually doing
So what have I been working on? Not what my professional identity would suggest.
I’ve been working on recognising that the question isn’t whether my vocation is genuine – it is, deeply so. The question is whether I’ve allowed my vocation to excuse me from the other kinds of work that make a life: reciprocal friendship, romantic risk, the sustained undefended presence that family and intimacy require.
I’ve been working on noticing how I deploy competence as protection. How I analyse social situations even whilst participating in them. How I maintain that slight observational distance that my patients experience as therapeutic presence but that my friends might experience as… what? Reserve? Unavailability? A sense that I’m perpetually on duty rather than simply present?
I’ve been working on understanding that my fear of ordinariness isn’t about status or achievement. It’s about vulnerability. Because ordinary life – the kind my siblings embraced, the kind my parents modelled – demands showing up without credentials. Being needed not for expertise but simply for presence. Risking insufficiency without the protective frame of clinical boundaries.
The supervision I need
In our profession, we’re taught to seek consultation when cases become complex, when countertransference threatens, when we need perspective we can’t achieve alone.
But who supervises the life we’re living outside the consulting room? Who asks the uncomfortable questions about whether we’re bringing the same courage to our personal lives that we expect of our patients?
Jonathan, my residency colleague, does this for me occasionally. So does Amelia Hamilton, in her gentle sideways fashion. They know me well enough to see when I’m deflecting, when professional talk is obscuring personal truth.
But mostly, I’ve avoided that supervision. I’ve cultivated a life that looks full – work, community involvement, family connection – whilst remaining curiously empty of the risks that genuine intimacy demands.
That’s what I’ve been working on: seeing this pattern clearly enough to name it, sitting with the discomfort long enough to understand what it’s costing me.
The evening harbour is quieter now, the Sunday sailors heading in, the October light fading to that blue-grey twilight that makes everything feel provisional, as if the day hasn’t quite decided whether to hold on or let go.
Tomorrow I’ll return to the work I’m trained for: the consulting room, the steady rhythm of therapeutic hours, the privilege of accompanying others through their struggles towards something more whole.
But underneath that familiar structure, something’s shifted. A recognition that perhaps the most important work isn’t the kind that goes on my curriculum vitae. It’s the private labour of facing what I’ve avoided, risking the ordinariness I’ve feared, learning to show up not as Dr Bennett but simply as Catherine – insufficient, fumbling, human.
Yesterday I asked what my life might look like if I stopped being extraordinary at adjacency. Today I’m beginning to suspect the answer involves working at something far more difficult: being genuinely, vulnerably, imperfectly present.
That’s what I’ve been working on. That’s what, perhaps for the first time in decades, I’m actually willing to attempt.
Catherine
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