Vox Meditantis

Name your top three pet peeves.

Tuesday, 25th November 2025

There is a question that has been working on me all day – less a prompt than a splinter – about the small tyrannies that make me unreasonably cross. Not the grand injustices that merit manifestos, but the petty irritations that double as confessions: the things that annoy me most reliably are usually the things I recognise, with discomfort, in the mirror.

The harbour this morning was the colour of brushed tin, November performing its usual alchemy of making beauty out of restraint. Tom lifted two fingers from his usual bench – the dog beside him practising that enviable art of simply being exactly where he was – and I thought again about yesterday’s list, those five people I named as favourite, and the invitations I promised to make before the week ends. Progress on that front: none yet, though the intention sits in my chest like an appointment I’ve written in pencil and keep checking to see if it’s still there.

Between morning clinic and the lunchtime supervision that ran long because grief doesn’t respect timetables, I found myself cataloguing irritations. Not patients’ behaviours – they’re allowed their full catalogue of human difficulty – but the environmental assaults, the cultural habits, the narrative shortcuts that make my jaw tighten before I’ve noticed I’m clenching.

Three annoyances arrived with uncomfortable clarity, each one pointing back to the keeper rather than the kept.

Weaponised busyness

First: the person – and I include myself in this indictment – who wields their schedule like a shield. “I’d love to, but I’m absolutely swamped.” “Can we do next month? This one’s impossible.” “I barely have time to breathe.” Delivered with a particular performative exhaustion that says Look how needed I am, look how little margin I permit myself, look how I’ve turned availability into a competitive sport.

I recognise this most in colleagues who treat rest as something that must be earned through sufficient depletion, who make a moral virtue of the overbooked diary, who cancel on themselves first and everyone else second. But I also recognise it, with deepening discomfort, in my own reflexes.

How often have I used “Thursdays are impossible” as a way to avoid genuine exposure? How many times have I let clinical hours expand to fill every available space, not because the town desperately needs another hour of Dr Bennett, but because a full diary feels safer than a full life? Yesterday I named people I cherish and promised to invite them properly into my home – Thanksgiving supper for David, a December weekend for Michael and Linda – and immediately my mind began drafting excuses about timing, about the guest room not being quite ready, about how perhaps February would be more sensible.

Busyness, when weaponised, is just fear with a better alibi.

The value underneath this irritation is slowness – not as laziness, but as a radical commitment to humane pacing. In the consulting room, I tell people constantly that healing cannot be rushed, that the nervous system needs time to metabolise, that presence requires the one commodity late capitalism most resents: unmonetised hours in which nothing measurable happens. Then I walk upstairs to my own flat and discover I’ve scheduled my evening with the same grim efficiency I’d use to plan a military campaign. Kettle, dinner, notes, tidying, bed. No margin for the bread to rise, for the thought to finish itself, for the friend to ring at an inconvenient hour and be answered anyway.

What I’m really objecting to, when I bristle at someone else’s performed exhaustion, is the mirror they’re holding up. I too have made busyness a fortress. The difference is I’ve had thirty years to make mine look like professional dedication rather than emotional avoidance.

Environments that assault the senses

Second irritation, arriving with more force than I’d anticipated: spaces that seem designed to punish the bodies inside them. The waiting room with lighting so harsh it could perform minor surgery. The museum gallery with no benches, as if standing were a moral requirement for appreciating art. The café where the music is three decibels louder than conversation, so patrons must either shout or mime. The hospital corridor with no windows, no softness, nothing to suggest that the people walking it might be carrying more than they can easily bear.

I notice these most acutely in medical settings, perhaps because I’ve spent decades watching patients arrive already braced for pain, only to be greeted by environments that seem to confirm their worst fears: that care will be administered without tenderness, that their distress is a logistical problem rather than a human one, that speed and sterility have been mistaken for competence.

But it’s broader than that. It’s the assumption, embedded in so much public architecture, that accommodation is the same as coddling. That if we make spaces too comfortable, people will linger too long, want too much, begin to believe they’re entitled to gentleness as well as service.

This is where Maggie’s museum project lands with unexpected weight. The sanctuary benches we’re placing, the cards with permissions printed in generous fonts – You may sit as long as you need. You may leave and return. Nothing here requires you to be other than you are – these are not radical interventions. They’re simply refusals to let institutional architecture punish vulnerability. They’re gentle design made civic policy, and the fact that this still feels like innovation rather than baseline decency is precisely what irritates me.

Yesterday I moved the blue chair two inches toward the window so the afternoon light would fall kinder on whoever sits there next. It’s a small geometry, but it’s also an ethics. Rooms declare their values before anyone speaks. If we care about trauma-informed practice, about dignity, about not requiring people to perform health in order to access care, then our spaces must learn to be hospitable before our sentences do.

The pilot quiet hours at the Historical Society begin this Thursday – three to six, when the upstairs galleries will soften their noise and lighting, when docents will be trained to pause rather than lecture, when visitors will be permitted to sit on the floor if that’s what steadies them. Maggie sent the final volunteer schedule this afternoon. My name is there, neat and accountable, in a column that says I’ve agreed to help tend a space that doesn’t assault people as the price of entry.

I can object to hostile environments all I like. But the real question is whether I’ll keep making small, specific moves toward gentler ones – in consulting rooms, yes, but also in the overlooked inches of civic life where design either honours bodies or ignores them.

Tidy stories that skip the messy middle

Third, and perhaps most professionally personal: narratives that rush from wound to healing without lingering in the long, unglamorous middle where most of the actual work happens. The memoir that gives trauma three chapters and recovery a triumphant fourth. The case study that makes transformation sound like a decision rather than a weather system. The well-meaning friend who says “You seem so much better!” as if recovery were a destination one simply arrives at and stays in, like a train reaching its terminus.

This irritates me because it’s both false and dangerous. False because anyone who has lived through sustained difficulty knows that progress is not linear – it’s two steps forward, one and a half back, a long plateau where nothing visible shifts, then a sudden lurch sideways into something new. Dangerous because tidy stories make people feel like failures when they relapse, when the old fear resurfaces, when Wednesday undoes everything Tuesday seemed to promise.

In the consulting room, I am fierce about this. I tell people that doubt is not evidence of backsliding, that setbacks are information rather than verdicts, that the work of becoming less afraid is measured in decades, not quarters. I draw diagrams on paper – not the neat upward line of progress, but something more honest, with loops and detours and patches where the pen hesitates because we genuinely don’t know yet what comes next.

And yet.

Yesterday I wrote about my favourite people, and the entry had a certain narrative momentum: here is where I was (adjacent, defended), here is where I’m moving (present, braver), here are the invitations I’ll make to prove it. All true. But also tidier than the lived experience, which includes the mornings when I wake and think What if I just don’t? What if I keep the flat to myself, the schedule intact, the risk at bay?

The messy middle – the part I keep trying to skip in both my own life and in the stories I tell about it – is the part where courage hasn’t yet become character. Where I’m still negotiating, daily, with the woman who would rather be competent than seen, who prefers adjacency to intimacy because adjacency is revocable. The part where David asks, kindly, after a concert, “Tea?” and my whole nervous system looks for the exit before my mouth can say yes.

I object to tidy narratives because I’ve spent thirty years helping people live honestly in the untidy ones. But I’m also, apparently, susceptible to tidying my own. This blog, for all its reflective intention, still wants to present a Catherine who is progressing neatly from self-awareness to self-revision to self-improvement. The truth is more effortful: most days I forget the insight by lunchtime, most weeks I resist the very change I claim to want, and the invitations I solemnly promised to make yesterday still sit, unmade, in the margin of my good intentions.

What I’m asking for – in myself, in my patients, in the stories we tell each other – is not tidiness but truthfulness. The kind that includes the relapse, the doubt, the morning when you simply can’t. The narrative that doesn’t skip from insight to transformation but lingers, with patience and without judgment, in the long middle where most of us actually live.

Hiding behind standards

Here is the uncomfortable realisation that arrived by mid-afternoon: I hold these standards – slowness, gentle design, honest narratives – like credentials. Like proof that I am paying attention, that I am not complicit in the cultural errors I diagnose so fluently. But standards, when held too tightly, become walls. They let me object to performative busyness without risking my own calendar. They let me design better waiting rooms without sitting in my own discomfort. They let me critique tidy stories without admitting how often I reach for the tidy ending when the mess gets too close.

With David, I hide behind these very values. After concerts, when he asks whether I’d like to extend the evening, I can retreat into “I need slowness” or “I don’t want to rush this” – both true, both also convenient ways to avoid the question of whether I’m willing to let this matter enough to risk it falling apart. With family, I hold the line about authentic presence and humane pacing, which gives me excellent reasons to delay the actual invitation, to wait for the perfect weekend, to ensure the guest room is a sanctuary rather than merely a room with a bed in it.

The standards aren’t wrong. But I’ve been using them, at least partially, as permission to remain defended. To stay in control. To avoid the profoundly uncomfortable truth that real intimacy – with David, with family, with the possibility of a life less adjacent and more inhabited – will be imperfect, awkward, mistimed, and unmasterable.

This is what pet peeves do, when you let them: they show you where you’re standing. And I’m standing, it seems, just behind the door I keep saying I’m about to open.

A Thanksgiving experiment

Thanksgiving arrives on Thursday, three days from now, and the timing feels less like coincidence than assignment. Here is a holiday that asks, with American earnestness, that we gather, give thanks, and feed each other – tasks I can do competently in professional contexts and am still learning to do without armour in personal ones.

So an experiment, small and specific enough that I can’t defer it into theoretical bravery:

This Thanksgiving, I will let at least one thing be imperfect without intervening. Not as a test of tolerance, but as practice in letting the people I care about meet me where I am, not where I’ve curated myself to be.

If I cook for David – and I will ask him, tomorrow, before my nerve deserts me – I will not apologise for the flat’s domestic chaos, the guest room boxes still visible through the doorway, the fact that the risotto may be my mother’s recipe but my execution is merely competent rather than luminous. I will not rush to correct the room, the menu, or the silence if the conversation lulls. I will let the evening be what it is: two people attempting presence, with all the fumbling that entails.

If Michael and Linda confirm for that first weekend in December – and I will email them, also tomorrow, before I invent new reasons to wait – I will not transform the flat into a stage set. The guest room will be clean and welcoming, but it will not be perfect. The radiators will clank. The street noise will intrude. The meals will be the ones I actually know how to make, not the ones I imagine a more accomplished host would serve. I will let them see the life I have, not the life I’ve been curating in the margins of my mind.

And at the table – whether it’s Thursday or the weekend after – I will not rescue every pause, smooth every awkwardness, or rush to provide the tidy narrative arc that makes everyone feel we’ve arrived somewhere. I will let the mess show. The uncertainty about what this friendship with David is becoming. The grief that still surfaces when I think of my parents and holidays they won’t be here for. The quiet envy I sometimes feel when Michael describes his loud, ordinary household. The fact that I am fifty-eight and still learning how to let people in without immediately offering them a treatment plan.

This is not a grand gesture. It’s just permission to let one thing – the flat, the timetable, the table talk, the story I tell about how I’m doing – remain unoptimised. To trust that the people I love might prefer me slightly undefended to me thoroughly competent.

The invitations will be made tomorrow. The flat will be imperfect on Thursday. The experiment will be awkward and provisional and unmasterable, which is to say, it will be real.

The harbour has gone dark while I’ve been writing, the November evening settling with its usual competence. Tomorrow I will ask David about Thanksgiving. I will email Michael and Linda about December. I will do it badly, probably – too formal or too tentative or with some clumsy phrasing that reveals how little practice I’ve had at this. But I will do it. And whatever comes of it will be honestly, imperfectly mine.

Consider that a vow. The sort that requires showing the work, not just the polished result. The sort that lets the mess be visible, because that’s where the actual living happens.

Catherine

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