Vox Meditantis

What is one thing you would change about yourself?

Wednesday, 3rd December 2025

The guest room door stood half-open this morning – a small accusation in oak and hinges. Inside, fresh sheets waited to be tucked, a box of Mother’s things still occupied the chair by the window, and the winter light fell across it all with the sort of clarity that makes avoidance visible.

I’d been standing there perhaps a minute, pillowcase in hand, when the question arrived not from today’s prompt but from the room itself: who, exactly, am I preparing this space for?

The obvious answer: Michael and his wife Linda. They arrive Friday evening, will occupy this room for two nights. My brother will receive the version of his youngest sister I’ve spent fifty-eight years perfecting – the competent, self-contained doctor who has built a good life in this harbour town and requires neither concern nor complicated questions about the bits that don’t fit the narrative.

The honest answer, the one that made my hands still on the Egyptian cotton I’d bought specifically to signal I have this handled: I’m preparing it for the performance. The careful set dressing that allows me to remain opaque. The sister who provides the annual précis – practice fine, work steady, flat well-maintained – whilst editing out anything that might require them to see me as something other than successfully sorted.

The Script I’ve Perfected

For decades now, whenever Michael rings or visits, I’ve offered the same broad-stroke portrait. The practice: yes, full waiting list, gratifying work, patients doing remarkably well given the circumstances. The community involvement: museum consultancy, river committee, the occasional lecture – enough to demonstrate useful citizenship without suggesting I’m overextended. The personal life: untroubled solitude in pleasant rooms, sufficiently social via the Historical Society and Marcus’s café, no loneliness worth mentioning, certainly no mess.

What doesn’t make the précis: the Thursday afternoons I’ve quietly committed to the museum project, designing sanctuary spaces where strangers are given permission to metabolise difficulty at their own pace – work that matters to me in ways I can’t quite defend in economic terms. The oral history interview I signed up for, volunteering myself as subject rather than safe observer. The short December trip I’ve booked to Québec, solo, no professional justification, just three days of choosing to be unremarkable in a city that asks nothing of me.

And David. The man who washes dishes with such unreasonable care that it looks like a form of prayer. Who has, without announcement, become a presence in my kitchen, my harbour walks, my emerging sense that companionship might be bearable after all. I haven’t mentioned him to Michael – not as evasion, precisely, but as… what? Protection? Superstition? The fear that naming it to family will require me to name it to myself, and I’m not entirely certain what the name would be?

The Inheritance of Opacity

This morning’s session – a woman in her mid-thirties negotiating the family Christmas she’s already dreading – offered an uncomfortable mirror. She described, with careful precision, how she becomes a different person around her parents. More guarded. Less textured. Able to report accomplishments but unable to admit uncertainty, to celebrate competence but never confess need.

“It’s like I file off all the complicated bits,” she said, fingers worrying the shell from the bowl. “I show up as the highlight reel. Everyone’s relieved, I’m exhausted, and nothing real actually happens.”

I sat in my chair – the one positioned to catch harbour light but not be caught by it – and heard my own decades in her syntax. The way I’ve turned opacity into a family virtue, competence into a moat that keeps everyone at a comfortable distance. The youngest Bennett sibling, successfully independent, admirably self-sufficient, requiring nothing that might disrupt the myth.

I asked her, gently, what it cost to maintain that curation. She looked at me with the particular weariness of someone who’s just heard themselves named, and said, “I think I’ve forgotten how to let them love the person I actually am. I only know how to let them admire the version I can manage.”

After she’d left, I sat with the silence and the shell she’d returned to the bowl and the question I couldn’t quite evade: when Michael arrives on Friday, which sister will open the door?

What Needs Changing

The prompt asks what I’d change about myself, and the guest room this morning answered with unnerving specificity: the reflex to edit myself into competent opacity around family.

Not my tendency toward caution – that has its uses. Not my professional boundaries – those serve genuine ethical purposes. But this particular habit of offering Michael and Linda the sanitised version, the précis that fits comfortably into the thirty minutes between his arrival and Linda’s observation that I’ve done something lovely with the curtains – that pattern feels less like privacy and more like a failure of trust.

In New Corinth, I’ve slowly – terrestrially, with much fumbling – been learning a different grammar. With Father Walsh on dawn walks, admitting that I use busyness as elegant defence. With Jenny over library coffee, confessing that I’m still learning how to occupy leisure without converting it to productivity. With David in this very kitchen, allowing him to witness my fumbling with risotto and watercolours and the ordinary mess of being a person rather than a clinician.

But with Michael, I revert. I become the capable youngest who solved herself years ago and requires no further attention. Not because he’s asked me to – he hasn’t. Because somewhere in the architecture of being the doctor in the family, I’ve confused competence with not needing anything, professional success with not being allowed ordinary struggle.

The Micro Grammar of Change

This afternoon’s second session offered the teaching I needed, though neither of us named it as such. A man in his fifties, senior civil servant, working on what he calls “the tyranny of my own standards.” For months we’ve been unpacking his belief that change requires dramatic gesture – the transformative retreat, the complete overhaul, the cinematic moment when everything shifts.

Today he reported, with visible surprise, that he’d managed something small: telling his wife, without preamble or performance, that he was struggling with a work decision and didn’t know what to do. Not seeking her solution – just admitting the uncertainty aloud.

“I’d been practising it for weeks,” he said. “Imagining these elaborate scripts, building up to the perfect vulnerable moment. Then last Tuesday, over washing-up, it just came out. I don’t know what to do about this. Four seconds of honesty. She just nodded and kept drying. But something loosened.”

I wrote in my notes afterwards: Change is micro and repetitive, not cinematic. The exposure must be scaled to survivability.

Which is therapeutic wisdom I’ve been offering for years whilst carefully exempting myself from its application.

The Behavioural Contract

So here is the modest, specific, accountable thing: this weekend, when Michael and Linda occupy the guest room I’m still preparing, I will choose one truth I will not hide.

Not a confession delivered with theatrical weight. Not an emotional unburdening that makes them responsible for managing my vulnerability. Just one corridor I won’t edit out of the précis. One small fact about the life I’m actually living, rather than the life that fits comfortably into their understanding of “Catherine’s doing very well.”

I haven’t decided which one yet. Perhaps I’ll mention the Thursday museum work – the sanctuary spaces, the fact that I’ve rearranged clinic hours to design rooms where people are permitted to leave and return, that this matters to me in ways unrelated to my CV. Perhaps the Québec trip, the solo pilgrimage with no professional justification, just three days of choosing to be unremarkable and see what surfaces. Perhaps even David, existence-of, without requiring myself to define or defend what he is to me, only that he’s here, and it matters, and I’m learning what that means.

The exposure exercise runs Friday evening through Sunday afternoon. The work is not to become braver in some abstract, permanent way – that’s the cinematic fantasy that prevents actual movement. The work is to practise, once, the specific micro-skill of not hiding. To let Michael see one corridor of risk I’ve been carefully editing from the annual report. To discover whether family love can accommodate the textured sister as well as the competent one.

The Slip of Paper

Before bed tonight, I’ll write it down. Not the grand statement of intent, but the single truth I’ll offer. I’ll fold the paper once and tuck it into the bedside table drawer in the guest room, beneath the lamp that still needs a new bulb and the water glass I’ll set out on Friday.

A private contract, witnessed only by the room itself. A reminder that the space I’m preparing isn’t for the performance of sorted competence – it’s for people who deserve the real sister. The one who is still learning how to occupy her own life. Who sometimes doesn’t know what to do. Who has started, belatedly and with appropriate humility, to let a few people past the frame of expertise.

The one who is fifty-eight years old and only just discovering that the thing most worth changing isn’t a character flaw or a personal deficit, but a reflex so old and so practised it has felt, for decades, like identity itself.

Michael arrives in forty-eight hours. The guest room will be ready – sheets tucked with hospital corners, mother’s box acknowledged rather than hidden, the slip of paper waiting in the drawer like a dare I’ve finally decided to meet.

The harbour has gone the colour of pewter. Tomorrow I’ll walk it at dawn with Tim, then keep my first Thursday at the museum – sanctuary spaces, docent training, the quiet corridors I’ve committed to making gentler. After that, perhaps finally address the box on the guest room chair – not to complete the excavation, but to decide what stays visible when family comes. Evidence that I’m mid-process, not finished. That the youngest Bennett is still under construction, still learning, still occasionally uncertain what to do with museum work that serves no career and careful-handed men and rooms that ask to be inhabited rather than curated.

One truth. Micro and repetitive, not cinematic. The weekend as exposure exercise. The guest room as witness.

Consider it a promise – not to become someone else, but to risk being seen as the person I actually am.

The bedside drawer awaits its small folded contract.

Let the practice begin.

Catherine

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