Vox Meditantis

What’s the hardest decision you’ve ever had to make? Why?

Friday, 28th November 2025

The madness started before dawn – not in my flat, blessedly, but three streets over where the retail district was already staging its annual theatre of scarcity. By the time I walked to Marcus’s for morning coffee, there were queues snaking past Elena’s shuttered grocers, people clutching printed coupons like battle plans, faces carrying that peculiar mix of determination and sheepishness that suggests they know they’re participating in something faintly ridiculous but can’t quite bring themselves to stop.

Black Friday. The day we’re invited to celebrate gratitude’s opposite – acquisition at any cost, urgency manufactured from thin air, the tyranny of too-good-to-be-true.

I’ve made my share of Black Friday mistakes, of course. The espresso machine that promised café-quality results and delivered expensive regret. The cashmere throw that looked like an investment in domestic elegance and turned out to be an investment in moths. Each time, the same seductive logic: at this price, how can you not? As if scarcity of opportunity somehow created necessity of purchase.

This morning’s writing prompt asked about the hardest decision I’ve ever made, and my first thought – before the coffee had properly done its work – was to reach for something suitably dramatic. A clinical fork in the road. A moment of diagnostic brilliance or catastrophic error. The sort of answer that would sound impressive at dinner parties I don’t attend.

But standing in Marcus’s doorway watching New Corinth queue for discounts it probably doesn’t need, what surfaced instead was this: the hardest decision wasn’t a single past fork. It was a recent yes, still unfolding, that keeps asking to be renewed daily.

The Museum Commitment

Six weeks ago, Maggie arrived at my door with funding documents and a cream envelope that smelled faintly of the Historical Society’s particular combination of paper and patience. The museum pilot had been approved – stillness spaces, Thursday quiet hours, sanctuary cards that would give visitors permission to leave difficult exhibits and return when steadier. Three hours every Thursday afternoon, beginning almost immediately, running through December and beyond if it proved useful.

I’d been enthusiastic about the project in principle, the way one is enthusiastic about worthy causes that ask nothing concrete of oneself. Designing the spaces, consulting on language, helping train docents in the art of not abandoning people mid-overwhelm – all of it aligned perfectly with thirty years of clinical practice. Care as public furniture rather than private appointment.

But Thursdays. All of Thursday. That particular commitment would require rearranging a schedule I’ve protected with near-sacred vigilance since I opened my practice. An entire day carved from the clinical week – not an afternoon squeezed between appointments, but dawn to dusk dedicated to museum work. Every Thursday patient would need moving. Rajesh, bless him, agreed to absorb what he could – redistributing hours across the rest of the week, finding spaces in his own carefully calibrated schedule. Small adjustments that sound entirely manageable until you remember that therapeutic relationships depend on constancy, on the patient knowledge that next week will bring the same time, same chair, same steady attention.

What made it hard wasn’t the logistics. Calendars can be persuaded. What made it hard was admitting that I wanted this enough to disrupt rhythms I’d spent decades establishing. That being Dr. Bennett in the consulting room – reliable, boundaried, professionally present – might not be sufficient for whatever it is I’m attempting to become at fifty-eight.

Saying yes meant risking being seen as Catherine – the woman fumbling with museum pedagogy, learning to design welcome rather than merely provide competence, admitting that she cares about how strangers encounter difficult history because she’s still learning how to encounter her own.

The Oral History Risk

The second part of the commitment arrived more quietly but with equal weight. Maggie needed participants for the oral history project – voices that would help document thirty years of New Corinth’s professional and civic life. For weeks I’d nodded enthusiastically, certain she meant other clinicians, the sort comfortable with their faces in archives and their stories made public.

Then one October morning, before caution could mount its usual elegant defence, I wrote: If you’re still looking for participants, I’d be willing to be interviewed.

Willing. What a careful word for what felt, in the writing, like standing at a precipice.

Because therapeutic work has always offered me cover – I ask the questions, I hold the frame, I’m the reliable witness to other people’s courage whilst my own remains safely theoretical. Being interviewed meant surrendering that position. Becoming the subject rather than the curator. Letting someone else ask about the moments I usually edit from the narrative, the fears I’ve packaged as professional caution, the ways I’ve built a deeply admirable life that has also been, if I’m honest, a sophisticated form of hiding.

The interview happened three weeks ago. Maggie was gentle, but her questions had teeth. Not malicious – just honest about what an archive requires. She asked about my morning walks, about why I’d stayed in New Corinth when larger cities might have offered more prestigious opportunities, about what it costs to hold other people’s stories whilst rationing your own.

I answered more truthfully than I’d intended. The recording will sit in the Historical Society’s collection, available to researchers and curious neighbours alike. I’ve been considering whether to share it here as well – to let the interview speak for itself in some future entry, a document of the year I finally stopped performing competence long enough to attempt ordinary presence. Whether I’ll have the courage to press publish on that particular piece of exposure remains to be seen.

The Ongoing Choice

Here’s what makes these decisions harder than any single dramatic crossroads: they aren’t finished.

Every Thursday I have to choose again – to show up at the museum rather than protect my clinic schedule’s familiar architecture. Every time someone asks about my participation in the oral history project, I have to choose again – to own the risk rather than minimise it as a minor civic contribution.

And the hardest part isn’t the initial yes. It’s the maintenance. The patient, unglamorous work of not retreating when the exposure starts to feel uncomfortable, when I catch myself reaching for the old defences – the professional persona, the tasteful distance, the elegant ways I’ve perfected of being adjacent to my own life rather than actually in it.

Yesterday’s Thanksgiving dinner crystallised this. David stayed late, washing dishes with his characteristic care, and at the door there was a moment – small but unmistakable – when the evening could have extended into something more defined, more committed, more intimate in ways that would require vocabulary I’m still learning.

I let the moment pass. Not from cowardice, exactly. More from a recognition that presence doesn’t always mean progression. That sometimes the braver choice is allowing something to matter without immediately needing to secure its next chapter, to risk wanting without weaponising efficiency against vulnerability.

But here’s the rub: that restraint only works if I keep showing up. If I don’t use patience as another form of avoidance. If Thursday museum hours and Tuesday watercolours and Friday morning walks with someone whose company I’m learning to need – if all of these become the ordinary architecture of a life less defended, rather than impressive additions to a CV I can cite when someone asks whether I’ve attempted intimacy lately.

The Patients Who Bear the Cost

This morning I saw two of the patients whose hours had to move to accommodate the museum commitment. One – the frail gentleman now in Rajesh’s competent care – seemed genuinely pleased by the change, reporting that Rajesh’s office has better parking and his knees appreciated the consideration. We laughed about bodies that issue their own amendments to best-laid plans.

The second took the rescheduling harder. Not dramatically – this is New Corinth, where distress presents itself with Yankee understatement – but I could see the small wound of displacement, the fear that comes when constancy shifts even slightly. If she can move my hour, what else might she change? If the room isn’t as reliable as I thought, can I still trust what happens inside it?

I didn’t minimise. Didn’t offer the reassuring lie that nothing of consequence had altered. Instead I said what was true: “You’re right that something has changed. I’ve committed to work that will take me out of this building on Thursday afternoons. What hasn’t changed is my commitment to this room, to you, and to the belief that healing happens when someone shows up consistently – which I’m still doing, just at a different hour.”

Then, more quietly: “I think what I’m learning is that being reliably present in one room requires being more present everywhere. The museum work is teaching me something about sanctuary that I want to bring back here. So you’re not losing time with me – you’re getting a version of me who’s attempting to practice what I’ve been prescribing for thirty years.”

She studied me for a long moment, then nodded. “That’s either very honest or very good spin, Dr. Bennett.”

“Probably both,” I admitted.

Black Friday’s True Discount

So yes, the hardest decision is this: to risk being known.

Not as the reliably competent psychiatrist who has built New Corinth’s emotional infrastructure one fifty-minute hour at a time. Not as the woman who walks the harbour at dawn with impressive discipline or produces elegant risotto on cue. Not even as the dutiful daughter sorting her mother’s Nevada letters with appropriate reverence.

But as Catherine – insufficient, fumbling, attempting at fifty-eight the ordinary intimacies that terrify her precisely because they can’t be timetabled or supervised. The woman who moved clinic hours to design museum benches. Who agreed to be interviewed rather than interview. Who let someone wash her dishes and didn’t immediately convert the gesture into material for clinical reflection. Who is learning, millimetre by millimetre, that the hardest choices aren’t the dramatic crossroads but the daily renewals – the patient, unsexy work of staying visible when every instinct says retreat to competence would be so much safer.

This afternoon, after the morning’s Black Friday theatre had mostly cleared, David and I walked the harbour’s full circuit. He’d texted midmorning asking if I needed rescue from retail madness. I’d replied honestly: rescue from my own thoughts, perhaps – walk?

We didn’t talk about yesterday’s doorway moment. Didn’t need to. Just walked the familiar boards whilst the November wind made its case for winter, and I felt the quiet rightness of being with someone who doesn’t require me to have it all sorted, who understands that courage often looks like repetition – showing up again and again to the same imperfect attempt at presence until it stops feeling like performance and starts feeling like life.

At one point he said, almost casually, “The museum thing – Maggie mentioned you’ve rearranged your whole Thursday for it. That’s not small, Catherine.”

“No,” I agreed. “It isn’t.”

“Are you glad?”

I thought about the two patients this morning. The frail gentleman’s ease, the second woman’s harder landing. The way commitment always costs something, asks something, reveals that values aren’t truly values until they’ve touched a calendar and demonstrated what you’re willing to rearrange.

“I’m terrified,” I said. “Also yes. Glad and terrified seem to travel together lately.”

He smiled. “Sounds about right.”

The Cost and the Rightness

Tonight the flat is quiet in that particular Friday evening way – harbour sounds filtering through old windows, the week’s weight finally setting down its bags. In a week’s time Michael and Linda will arrive for the first weekend of December, a visit I’ve been planning with equal parts anticipation and low-grade panic. The guest room is… functional. The menu is ambitious but achievable. And I’ve decided, with something approaching defiance, that this is my actual life and I will not be offering the edited version.

The hardest decision, then: not a single past fork but an ongoing commitment. To show up at the museum every Thursday even when my clinic schedule whispers that I’m abandoning my real work. To honour the oral history interview even when I want to claim it was a temporary lapse in judgment. To let David keep arriving at my kitchen table even when intimacy without guarantees feels like standing on boards made slippery by November weather.

To remember, when Black Friday’s false urgency tries to convince me that scarcity demands immediate action, that the real work is slower. Less dramatic. Built from exactly these repeated small choices – moved appointments and museum benches and doorway moments that don’t rush toward resolution but trust that presence itself, accumulated across weeks and months, might be enough.

The harbour is dark. The discount shoppers have gone home with their bargains and their buyer’s remorse. And I’m here, in the corridor I’ve finally learned to furnish, making the hardest choice again: to be findable. To be seen. To risk being Catherine as well as Dr. Bennett, and to trust that the cost – in rearranged schedules and exposed vulnerabilities and Thursdays given to benches instead of billings – is also the rightness I’ve been avoiding all along.

Black Friday’s true discount, it turns out, isn’t on espresso machines or cashmere throws. It’s the recognition that the life I’ve been rationing so carefully might actually be less expensive – and infinitely more valuable – when I finally agree to spend it.

Catherine

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