Share five things you’re good at.
Thursday, 4th December 2025
The museum closes on Thursdays at three – not to the public, but to the noise. Quiet hours, stillness spaces, the pilot we’ve been building since October rendered actual. I arrived at nine this morning with the particular nervousness that comes from turning theory into furniture, and left at dusk with my voice slightly hoarse from the oral history recording and my conviction slightly firmer that rooms, when designed with mercy, can carry load-bearing kindness.
Between those hours, I did no clinic work. Saw no patients. Held no fifty-minute containers for other people’s difficulty. For the first time in thirty years of Thursdays, I spent an entire day being useful in ways that can’t be invoiced.
It feels both radical and faintly ridiculous – which is how I know it matters.
Tonight’s prompt arrived via email whilst I was making tea, the sort of question that sounds like a school exercise until you realise it’s asking for an audit: Share five things you’re good at.
The phrasing has that faint whiff of self-help optimism I usually find allergic. But it’s also – I recognise this with the particular discomfort of being caught by one’s own teaching – precisely the sort of assignment I give to patients who’ve spent decades cataloguing inadequacies whilst treating competencies as unremarkable weather. So here, then, is the exercise I almost never do myself: five things I’m demonstrably good at, offered without the usual apologies or footnotes about how they could be better.
Staying
Thirty years in the same Victorian rooms. Same harbour view, same blue chair angled toward the window, same streets walked at dawn before the town requires me to be anyone in particular. I have built a practice – both clinical and personal – on the stubborn, unglamorous art of not leaving.
This is not inertia dressed as virtue. Staying, the genuine kind, requires daily re-commitment. Choosing, again and each morning, that this building, this harbour, these people warrant my continued attention. That fidelity might matter more than novelty. That depth is excavated through repetition, not by perpetually seeking fresh ground.
In the consulting room, staying means holding difficult stories across months and years, witnessing transformations so gradual they’re invisible week to week, trusting that presence itself – repeated, reliable, undramatic – does work that insight alone cannot. It means resisting the urge to refer onwards when a case grows complex, to tidy the mess by handing it to someone else, to protect myself by maintaining professional distance when what’s needed is precisely the opposite.
Outside the room, staying has meant learning New Corinth’s rhythms until I can read the town’s mood in the quality of silence at Marcus’s counter, the angle of Tom’s greeting on the harbour boards, the way Elena wraps fennel when she’s worried about someone’s health. It has meant becoming part of the infrastructure – not always comfortable, occasionally claustrophobic, but woven into the fabric in ways that make leaving unthinkable even when it’s tempting.
This weekend, when Michael and Linda arrive and old sibling patterns threaten to resurface – the capable youngest who needs nothing, the sister who reports rather than reveals – I’ll lean on this. Staying doesn’t only mean remaining in one place. It means not fleeing mid-conversation when vulnerability makes the room feel smaller. Not retreating into competent opacity when honesty would serve better. Showing up, again, to the same difficult intimacy until it stops feeling like exposure and starts feeling like home.
Listening Between the Lines
During the oral history recording this afternoon, I sat across from Arthur Bishop, retired shipyard foreman, whose hands still bear the topography of forty years’ labour – calluses, scars, that particular thickness that comes from repeated impact. Maggie had matched us carefully: the psychiatrist who’s spent three decades listening, the man who’s spent four building things, both of us trying to archive what matters before time erases it.
He spoke about the shipyard closures in ’89, the way unemployment moved through families like weather, the morning he had to tell seventeen men their jobs were finished. But what he didn’t say – what lived in the pauses, in the way his gaze kept drifting to the window where the old cranes still stencil themselves against the harbour – was louder than the words. Shame, not at being made redundant, but at surviving when so many didn’t. Grief for a version of New Corinth that no longer exists. Pride in work that no longer has witnesses.
I’ve made a career of hearing the feeling before the formulation. Of noting the sentence that doesn’t quite finish, the subject that gets changed too smoothly, the moment when someone’s shoulders shift and I know we’ve wandered near territory they haven’t yet mapped for themselves. It’s pattern-recognition, yes – decades of practice – but it’s also something older. A quality of attention my father practised on bus passengers, checking in the mirror that everyone was still upright. A kindness my mother extended to casino strangers, sensing when someone needed teasing or tenderness before they knew to ask.
I do this with patients, obviously. But also with friends who arrive at my kitchen table carrying difficulty they haven’t yet named. With Father Walsh on dawn walks, hearing the question about Wilmington underneath his careful commentary about river tides. With David, sensing when his careful courtesy is care and when it’s caution, when proximity would comfort and when it might overwhelm.
This skill will matter on Saturday, when Michael’s here and the conversation inevitably turns to Mother’s belongings, to Father’s legacy, to the question of what we’ve each made of the inheritance. I’ll need to listen for what he’s not saying – the worry, perhaps, that his younger sister has built a life too solitary, too defended, to be entirely believed. The hope that I’m managing despite the evidence he doesn’t quite have. The ordinary sibling concern that distance makes harder to voice.
And I’ll need to let him listen to me. To say enough of the truth that he can hear what I’m almost admitting – that I’m attempting, belatedly and badly, to be less competent and more visible. That the museum work and the watercolours and the careful-handed man in my kitchen are not crises to be managed but experiments to be witnessed.
Cooking for Safety
The shepherds pie I’ll make tomorrow evening is not about culinary ambition. It’s architecture. Lamb browned properly, vegetables softened without surrender, stock that tastes of bones and time, potatoes mashed until they crown the whole with modest authority. My father’s grammar, translated into something I can offer Michael and Linda when they arrive – a meal that says: You are welcome here. Tomorrow will come. We will still be here to meet it.
I learned this from both parents, though they practised it differently. Mother’s cooking was theatrical warmth, lemon-bright risotto that tasted like audacity and forgiveness, dishes that announced: Life is permitted to be delicious, even when it’s difficult. Father’s was quiet steadiness, Sunday roasts that appeared without fanfare, food that didn’t make grand claims but kept its promises.
What I’ve become good at – what took me decades to recognise as skill rather than mere competence – is using food as a form of care that doesn’t announce itself. Risotto made for David that first evening, stirred with patience until it tasted of both brightness and time. Soup carried to the parish hall on Thanksgiving, white beans and rosemary speaking my parents’ combined inheritance. Ginger biscuits from Mother’s butter-spotted card, baked because some recipes deserve enacting as well as preserving.
This is not performance cooking, the kind designed to impress. It’s the opposite: food that creates safety, that steadies nervous systems, that says without words, You are fed, you are tended, you can rest here. In a profession that trades in language and insight, I’ve learned that sometimes the most therapeutic thing I can offer is a bowl of something warm, made with attention, served without commentary.
Saturday, when the flat fills with family and perhaps-more-than-friendship, I’ll use this. The table will be ordinary – no spectacular centrepieces, no intimidating technique – but it will be generous. Michael and Linda will eat food that tastes like our parents’ best impulses. David, if he stays, will eat with people who know I fumble and have decided that’s acceptable grounds for continued acquaintance. And I will practise, through the basic choreography of feeding people, the intimacy I’m still learning: that being known includes being known as someone who cares enough to brown the mince properly, who believes in the quiet mercy of a well-made meal.
Making Rooms Kinder
This afternoon, after the recording finished and Arthur had left with the particular relief of someone who’s told a story he didn’t know was weighing on him, I walked the upstairs galleries with Maggie and Claire, one of our trained docents. We were checking the stillness spaces – the benches we’d placed, the signage we’d agonised over, the small sanctuary cards that give explicit permission: You may sit as long as you need. You may leave and return. Nothing here requires you to be other than you are.
Claire paused by the Civil War exhibit, the one with the daguerreotype of the unnamed woman arriving by river, and said, quietly, “I watched someone use the bench this morning. Older gentleman, maybe seventy. Stood in front of the photograph for two minutes, then sat, just… sat. Twenty minutes. When he left he took one of the cards. Nodded at me like I’d given him something he needed.”
That, in miniature, is what I’ve learned to do. Not to heal – that’s too grand, too proprietary – but to create the conditions where healing might occur at its own pace. To design rooms, literal and metaphorical, that don’t demand anything except presence. That allow people to arrive carrying difficulty and to stay with it long enough to discover it’s bearable.
My consulting room has been doing this work for thirty years. The blue chair positioned to catch harbour light without exposing whoever’s sitting there. The shell bowl, for anxious hands. The books arranged not to intimidate but to suggest that others have walked similar territory and survived. The particular quality of silence I’ve learned to hold – not empty, but full of attention – so that people feel witnessed without being scrutinised.
Now the museum is attempting its own version. Public architecture usually rushes people through – see it, understand it, move along – but we’re building pauses into the experience. Permission to be overwhelmed. Space to step away and return. The radical notion that engaging with difficult history should happen at the pace bodies can metabolise, not the pace institutions demand.
And slowly, belatedly, my own flat is joining the conversation. The parlour is no longer just a corridor to elsewhere; it’s becoming a room where people sit, where soup gets eaten, where David washes dishes whilst I dry and we navigate the companionable choreography of domestic care. The guest room, once a storage facility for postponed grief, is being cleared – not perfectly, not completely, but honestly – so that Michael and Linda can occupy it as guests, not auditors.
I’m good at this: taking spaces and making them kinder. Noticing where the light falls, where the silence needs holding, where a bench or a chair or a cleared table might invite someone to rest. It’s not dramatic work. But it’s mine.
Beginning Again in Public
Tuesday evenings, seven o’clock, Harbour Street Community Centre. I stand at a cheap easel with wrong brushes and attempt skies that list sideways, boats that look confused about buoyancy, horizons that would make any competent sailor weep. The instructor – sleeves rolled, endlessly patient – moves through the room offering gentle corrections that amount to: Keep going. It’s meant to be difficult. That’s why it matters.
At fifty-eight, I have become a dedicated, public novice.
This is new. For most of my adult life, I’ve practised competence as if it were a moral requirement. Psychiatric training, three decades of clinical work, committee positions, lectures, consultations – all of it building a visible architecture of expertise that says: Dr Bennett knows what she’s doing. You can trust her with your difficulty because she has solved her own.
Which has been, if not a lie, then certainly a carefully curated truth.
What I’m learning now – through watercolours that won’t behave, through Bach partitas that resist my fumbling at the piano, through museum work that requires designing mercy rather than demonstrating knowledge – is that being good at beginning again might be the most honest skill I’ve acquired. That willingness to be seen attempting something badly, to tolerate the wobble without retreating to safer ground, to let incompetence be visible because the alternative is never trying anything I haven’t already mastered.
David understands this in ways I’m only beginning to name. After the Bartók concert, standing in the Methodist church doorway, he said: You know you don’t have to arrive fully assembled. At the time it felt like kind observation. Now it reads more like invitation – to let him see the Catherine who’s still under construction, who doesn’t have everything sorted, who’s attempting late-life intimacy with all the grace of someone learning a language decades after childhood would have made it easy.
This weekend, when family arrives and I’m tempted to perform sorted competence, I’ll remember the watercolour class. The way Tuesday evenings have taught me that fumbling in company is survivable, that being witnessed mid-mistake doesn’t destroy credibility, that sometimes the bravest thing is just showing up with inadequate materials and trying anyway.
Beginning again is how I’ll meet Michael without retreating into the capable-youngest script. How I’ll let David see the flat’s honest chaos rather than its curated version. How I’ll continue this entire late-life experiment of becoming someone who can be known by people, not just excellent at understanding them.
The Pattern That Keeps Repeating
Reading back through this list – this assignment I’ve finally completed – I notice something that should probably embarrass me more than it does. Every single strength is relational. Staying means staying with this harbour, these people. Listening requires someone to hear. Cooking implies others to feed. Making rooms kinder assumes bodies that need sanctuary. Beginning again in public means being witnessed mid-fumble.
I have, it seems, built a life entirely organised around being good with people. At holding, at tending, at creating conditions where others can soften or speak or simply be. I can design safety into furniture, read distress in the quality of someone’s silence, feed family and strangers until everyone leaves steadied.
What’s taken me fifty-eight years to ask is this: when, exactly, did I decide that being good with people exempted me from needing to be known by them?
When did I turn relational skill into a moat that keeps everyone at exactly the distance where I can serve them beautifully but never have to admit my own hunger, confusion, or mess?
The museum work is teaching me something I didn’t quite anticipate. This afternoon, after Arthur left and I sat in the stillness space we’d designed, I realised: I’ve been building these rooms for decades. Creating architecture that says, You’re allowed to be overwhelmed. You can leave and return. Nothing here requires you to perform.
I’ve been brilliant at making that permission available to others whilst carefully excluding myself from the invitation.
So the real test this weekend won’t be the shepherds pie or the cleaned guest room or even the emotional honesty I’m practising with Michael. It will be whether I can let the people I’m feeding, hosting, sitting beside also feed me back. Not with grand gestures, but with the ordinary intimacy of being seen, witnessed, known – and discovering that competence was never the entry requirement.
Tomorrow, Michael and Linda arrive. The flat is ready enough. The meals are planned. David may or may not join us Saturday; I’ve learned to issue invitations without requiring immediate answers, to trust that presence, when it comes, will be honest.
And somewhere between the table and the washing-up, between the museum’s quiet hours and my own, I’m learning that the five things I’m good at might finally, belatedly, include this: being willing to receive the very care I’ve spent a lifetime perfecting how to give.
The harbour has gone the colour of slate and amber, December announcing itself with characteristic bluntness. Tomorrow the practice begins – not the clinical kind, but the harder sort, where I attempt to live as though being good at connection doesn’t mean I have to be the one who never needs it.
Maggie emailed an hour ago: the transcript from my oral history interview is ready. She’s asking if I’d like her to publish it to the Historical Society’s archive, make it available for whoever’s curious about three decades of psychiatric practice in a small harbour town.
I’ve written back: yes. With the same breath-held courage as saying yes to brushes, yes to David at my table, yes to family seeing the guest room mid-excavation.
Let the record show I was here, attempting this, fumbling it badly and trying anyway.
That seems, tonight, like enough.
Catherine
Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
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