Sitting Across from What I Have Survived
I can sit across from what I have survived without losing myself in the room.
Have you felt your shoulders tighten before their footsteps reached the door? There is a particular kind of meeting that asks you to occupy the same space as the person who shaped your hardest years — across a table, inside a quiet room, with other people present whose job is to facilitate a conversation. Your body knows what this kind of meeting costs.
You are allowed to feel the cost — the tightening shoulders, the breath gone shallow at the sound of that voice, the eyes that need to find something to land on that is not the face across the table. These are not weaknesses. They are honest reports from a body that has paid attention.
Inside that room, you do not have to perform composure. You only have to keep returning to yourself — your feet on the floor, your breath slow and ordinary, the small private knowing that you are not the person you were when this began.
The two rooms are separate. You decide what crosses from one to the other. The person across the table is not in charge of the room of your inner life. They cannot reach in there. They cannot rearrange what you know about yourself. They can be in the outer room with you and still be — quietly, entirely — outside the inner room of who you have become.
You will leave the meeting eventually. You will walk back out into the daylight. You will drive home. You will pour the glass of water. You will sit in the chair that is yours. The meeting is finite. The life you have built around it is not.