Vox Meditantis

You have three magic genie wishes, what are you asking for?

Tuesday, 28th October 2025

The question arrived this morning in that particular tone some prompts have – half-party game, half excavation tool. If you had three magic genie wishes, what would you ask for?

I’ve sat with it all day, the words circling like gulls over the harbour, never quite landing. Between sessions I found myself watching October light play across the consulting room floor, thinking about Michael’s phone call yesterday evening, about his question that hung suspended between Baltimore and New Corinth: Do you ever feel as though you’ve been so good at one thing that you’ve forgotten how to be anything else?

Perhaps that’s why the genie prompt feels less frivolous than it should. Because underneath the whimsy lies a sharper question entirely: what do you actually want, Catherine, when you strip away all the careful professionalism, all the competent adjacency you’ve spent fifty-eight years perfecting?

The Wish I’d Never Voice Aloud

My first patient this morning brought her own version of magical thinking – if she could only find the right therapist, the right medication, the right words, surely the grief would lift cleanly, completely, leaving her restored to who she was before. I sat in my usual chair, offering what I always offer: the truth that healing doesn’t work by erasure, that some losses reshape us permanently, that the work isn’t about returning but about learning to inhabit what remains.

But later, alone with my cooling tea, I caught myself wishing for exactly what I’d gently discouraged in her. If I could wish for anything, the first thing would be this: that everyone who’s ever sat in that worn leather chair across from me would know, absolutely and without doubt, that they were seen. Not assessed, not diagnosed, not managed – but witnessed in their full complexity, held without judgment whilst they found words for what they’d been carrying wordlessly.

It’s a clinician’s wish, I suppose. The fantasy that presence could be perfected, that attentiveness alone might be enough. But it’s also deeply personal, this longing to know whether the work I’ve done for thirty years has mattered in ways I’ll never quite see. Whether the Monday mornings and the late sessions and the careful holding of boundaries whilst simultaneously offering warmth – whether any of it actually reached the people who needed reaching.

Father Walsh would call this a prayer dressed as psychology. He’s probably right. But if a genie appeared in the harbour mist tomorrow, that’s what I’d ask for first: certainty that the witnessing mattered, that the seeing was felt.

The Wish That Terrifies

Michael’s question keeps returning. Not the words themselves, but what they revealed – my eldest brother, the engineer, the load-bearing structure of our family, asking whether he’s become so competent at solving that he’s forgotten how to simply be.

I recognised it immediately because I’ve been circling the same territory for weeks now. All these entries about hiding, about extraordinary adjacency, about being so very good at professional presence that I’ve avoided the messier, more essential work of ordinary intimacy.

So the second wish, if I’m being honest, would be for courage. Not the dramatic kind – I’m not asking to scale mountains or make grand gestures. But the small, daily bravery Mother demonstrated so naturally: the willingness to show up without credentials, to be insufficient and fumbling and still somehow present.

I’d wish for the courage to walk the harbour tomorrow morning and actually stop when I encounter someone, rather than offering pleasantries whilst perpetually in transit. To attend tonight’s watercolour class – the first session, the one I’ve already half-convinced myself to postpone – and accept being genuinely terrible at something in full view of strangers. To let David, the man with careful hands who washed my dishes with such unreasonable attention last Thursday, see me not as Dr Bennett but as Catherine, who doubts and fumbles and doesn’t always have answers.

This wish frightens me more than the first. Because it requires sustained risk rather than a single magical intervention. It asks me to live differently, to value presence over competence, to trust that ordinary intimacy – the kind my siblings embraced so naturally – isn’t something I’m fundamentally unsuited for but simply something I’ve spent decades avoiding.

The Wish I’d Take Back

Here’s what troubles me about genie logic: the assumption that omnipotence serves us, that unlimited power to reshape reality would make us better rather than simply more dangerous.

In my consulting room, I see the damage caused by the fantasy of control – parents who believe they can engineer their children’s happiness, partners who think love means eliminating all discomfort, individuals convinced that with enough willpower they can outrun their histories. The therapeutic work often involves helping people release that grip, accept what cannot be managed, learn to sit with uncertainty rather than rushing to false resolution.

So if I’m granted a third wish, I’d wish for the wisdom to refuse the first two. Or rather, to transform them – not “make everyone feel witnessed” but “help me show up more fully to the work of witnessing,” not “give me courage” but “teach me that courage grows through practice, not magic”.

This feels like the psychiatrist’s occupational hazard, this constant reframing of desires into processes. But it’s also what I believe most deeply: that we’re served not by erasure of difficulty but by accompaniment through it, not by shortcuts but by the slow accumulation of small, repeated choices toward something more whole.

Mother would have rolled her eyes at this. She’d have wished for adventure, for spontaneity, for the pure pleasure of possibility without all this therapeutic hedging. And perhaps that’s exactly what I need – to occasionally want something without immediately analysing why, to reach for joy without first ensuring it’s sustainable, to leap before cataloguing all the ways I might land poorly.

What the Harbour Teaches

The light is fading now, that blue-grey dusk that makes everything feel provisional. In an hour I’ll walk down Harbour Street to the community centre, where the Tuesday watercolour class meets, where I’ve registered myself as a beginner for the first time in three decades. The wrong brushes sit in a paper bag by the door, Dan having kindly assembled a kit yesterday with the sort of gentle competence that makes risk feel manageable.

I don’t need a genie. I need what I have already: this harbour town with its accumulated kindnesses, its careful-handed men and its patient librarians, its priests considering transfers and its engineers learning how to be unproductive. I need Michael’s courage to ask uncomfortable questions, Jenny’s willingness to call me on my deflections, Tim Walsh’s honesty about using our walks as sophisticated avoidance.

And I need what Mother left behind – not her Nevada postcards or silk scarves, but her example of saying yes before all the variables are known, of choosing presence over protection, of being gloriously, messily alive in ways that competence never quite captures.

If a genie appeared tonight in the October mist, I suspect the truest wish would be this: Help me want what’s actually possible. Not transcendence, not perfection, not the magical elimination of all risk and discomfort. But the ordinary miracles that arrive when you stop hiding – friendship that costs vulnerability, intimacy that requires fumbling, community that forms when you’re finally willing to be seen without the protective frame of expertise.

The watercolour class awaits. No wishes required, only attendance. That seems, somehow, both less and more than magic.

Catherine

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