Vox Meditantis

What are you most proud of in your life?

Monday, 20th October 2025

The week begins again – Monday’s familiar architecture of therapeutic hours, the return to routine after Sunday’s river clean-up and Historical Society meeting, after Father Walsh’s companionable silence during our dawn walk. The consulting room awaits, high windows framing October harbour light, the worn leather chair that’s held three decades of other people’s sorrows.

And this question, waiting on my screen like an examination I haven’t revised for.

Pride. An odd word for someone trained to dissolve the self, to become a clear pane through which others might finally see themselves. We’re taught early – those of us who choose this work – that the moment we start feeling proud is precisely the moment we’ve stopped listening properly. Pride suggests ownership, accomplishment, the sort of self-regard that occludes the very attentiveness our patients require.

Yet here’s the prompt, asking me to claim something. To point toward my life and say: this, here, this matters.

The Reluctant Inheritance

I’ve spent the past few days writing about hiding, about the sophisticated adjacency I’ve mistaken for presence, about learning – or trying to learn – what it means to show up without the protective frame of professional competence. Not exactly a catalogue of achievements. More an admission that I’ve spent fifty-eight years perfecting a particular kind of accomplished absence.

So what am I proud of?

Not the credentials, certainly. The University of Delaware psychology degree, the psychiatric residency in Philadelphia, the thirty years of practice – these feel less like accomplishments than like scaffolding I’ve climbed, structures that held me whilst I learned how to hold others. They matter, but they’re not what I’d point to if someone asked what I’ve actually done with this life.

Not the professional reputation, the waiting list that troubles my conscience, the referrals from colleagues who trust me with their most fragile cases. That feels more like fortunate positioning than genuine pride – being in the right place, with the right training, at the right moment when this harbour town needed someone willing to listen.

What Remains When We Stop Performing

Perhaps – and I’m only discovering this as I write it – what I’m proudest of is something smaller and larger at once. Something Helen demonstrated but I’m only now beginning to understand.

I’ve kept going.

Not spectacularly. Not with the dramatic transformations we’re meant to celebrate. But steadily, across decades, through the accumulated weight of other people’s pain and my own considerable capacity for self-protection, I’ve continued showing up to the work. Monday mornings, year after year, regardless of how the previous week left me, regardless of doubt or fatigue or the persistent question of whether I’m actually helping or merely providing expensive companionship.

That feels like something. Not pride exactly – more like satisfaction at having not quit when quitting would have been so much easier.

I think of the young woman I saw this morning, the one learning slowly that her worth isn’t determined by her output. She’s been coming for eighteen months now. Eighteen months of fifty-minute sessions where sometimes we sit in silence, where progress measures itself in millimetres, where the only visible change is that she can now hold my gaze for longer than a few seconds before shame sends her eyes to the floor.

That’s three years away from being a case study anyone would write up. But it’s the work – the actual work – and I’ve stayed with it. With her, and with the dozens of others whose healing doesn’t announce itself in tidy epiphanies, whose suffering requires not brilliance but sustained, patient attention.

The Ordinary Architecture of Care

I’m proud – if that’s the word – of having built something here in New Corinth that endures. Not a monument, but a practice. A consulting room where people know they can return, where the high windows and the harbour view and the seashells on the bookshelf (grounding tokens, I call them, though really they’re just things I’ve collected on morning walks) create the sort of reliable continuity that makes risk possible.

Jenny, my primary school friend, said something years ago that’s stayed with me. We were having coffee at Marcus’s place, and she mentioned that people in town talk about my office not as a medical practice but as a place – somewhere that exists independently of me, that’s woven into the neighbourhood’s texture the way the harbour itself is, or Elena’s grocers, or the Historical Society building where Maggie preserves our layered past.

That’s architectural, in its way. Not buildings, but relational infrastructure. Thirty years of showing up in the same Victorian rooms, of being findable, of creating the sort of therapeutic consistency that allows people to risk falling apart because they know someone will still be there Tuesday morning when they need to attempt reassembly.

I didn’t plan it. But I’m proud of it – proud that this place exists, that it serves, that it continues.

What My Parents Gave Me

The industriousness I inherited from Father and Mother – that relentless showing up I’ve written about all week – turns out to be the thing I’m most grateful for. Not the restless productivity that makes rest feel like failure, but the deeper conviction beneath it: that consistency itself is a form of care.

Father drove his bus routes for forty years. Not because each day brought novelty or excitement, but because people relied on him to be there, to navigate the same streets with the same steady competence, day after day. That’s what I do now, in this consulting room – drive the same careful routes through other people’s pain, offering not spectacular rescue but reliable presence.

Mother, who channelled her casino-girl exuberance into community connection, taught me something equally valuable: that warmth needn’t be bounded by blood relation, that the work of noticing and tending extends as wide as we’re willing to let it. Every person who sits across from me – the exhausted solicitor, the retiring engineer (Michael, actually, whose struggle with unstructured time mirrors my own), the teenager whose silence speaks volumes – receives something of that inheritance.

I’m proud of having honoured what they gave me, even as I’ve shaped it toward purposes they never quite understood.

The Courage I’m Still Learning

Here’s what I’m not yet proud of, but hope to be: the willingness to risk what I’ve been writing about these past days. To stop being extraordinary at adjacency. To attempt the ordinary intimacy that terrifies me.

Yesterday, at the Historical Society meeting, I agreed to be interviewed for the oral history project – not as the interviewer, using my clinical skills to draw out others’ narratives, but as a participant. As someone whose thirty years here constitute part of the story worth preserving. Maggie looked surprised when I volunteered. I think I surprised myself.

That’s not pride yet. It’s barely even courage. But it’s a step toward something I might someday feel proud of: learning to be seen, not just as Dr Bennett but as Catherine – insufficient, fumbling, ordinarily human.

The harbour is darkening now, the Monday afternoon light giving way to October’s early dusk. Tomorrow will bring its sessions, its small revelations and setbacks, its ongoing work of bearing witness. The consulting room will hold what it’s always held: other people’s courage, and my own attempt to honour it with attention.

What am I proud of? This – all of this. The showing up. The not quitting. The Victorian rooms that have become a kind of harbour themselves, offering shelter when the weather turns. The inheritance transformed. The work continuing, imperfectly but persistently, toward something I still believe matters.

And perhaps, if I’m very lucky, the pride I’ll feel someday at having finally risked being ordinary – at having stopped hiding behind competence and allowed myself the grace of genuine presence. Not yet. But I’m working toward it.

Catherine

---

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.