CASE ENTRY

Someone I know finished a long stretch of training. On the day it ended, a relative gave them everything they'd need to start on their own: space, tools, the means to begin. I was there. I was glad for them, or thought I was. I made jokes about coming to work for them one day. It felt light in the moment.

Then I went home and something else arrived. Not sadness exactly. A heaviness with an edge to it. I sat with it and tried to name it honestly. Envy came up first and I pushed it away because I don't want to be someone who resents good things happening to people I like. I turned the feeling over and over, checking it for what it really was, as if naming it correctly would make it stop.

It didn't stop. It just got tiring. I ran out of the energy required to keep interrogating myself and went to sleep instead, telling myself I'd worked through it, though nothing had actually resolved. The feeling was still there when I woke, just quieter, waiting for the next reason to be loud again.

DEPARTMENT OBSERVATION

The pattern here is effort spent on self-diagnosis in place of effort spent on nothing at all, which was the more accurate response to a feeling that had not finished arriving. This resembles insight that made things worse: the search for the correct name for the feeling produced moral scrutiny of the self rather than clarity, and the scrutiny is what exhausted her, not the original feeling. What she felt is not within her control. Whether she interrogates it on the same night it appears, is.

A QUESTION FOR THE RECORD

What were you hoping the feeling would turn into, once you'd named it correctly?