Proof of Life
Can you go about living while kind of erasing yourself as you go?
I didn’t know I was trying to do that.
Sitting by myself in a waiting room, I extracted a magazine from the arc of layered options on the coffee table. I flipped through it for a few minutes before my therapist came to get me. I don’t like saying my therapist, but I don’t know a better and still-easy way to say it. Anyway, as I stood from the chair, I tucked the magazine back in its original spot.
“That’s considerate,” he said.
The comment surprised me at the time. I was considerate? I almost didn’t know who he was talking to. Didn't everyone put magazines back where they found them? A few days later I found myself thinking about the considerate comment and the possibility that it was considerate of me, the whole magazine thing. What I discovered though, just under the surface of thought, was that by returning the magazine and leaving the waiting room just as I left it, what I actually was doing was erasing the fact that I had been there at all. Leave no trace, that sort of thing. And it wasn’t because I didn’t want anyone to know I was seeing a therapist. I didn’t care about that. It was that in a weird way, I didn’t want to leave evidence of my existence.
Shocking. But if you feel disconnected from life (as in: you don't feel real or alive yet have no words for it), I suppose it might be natural to erase the very tracks of you. I know, super sad, isn’t it?
A year or so after finishing therapy (yes, life got better), I was walking through the woods with our dog on a quiet trail where nobody goes—ideal for our dog who is anxious about pretty much everything. I slipped my hair tie from my graying brown hair, and I thought I put it on my wrist but somehow I didn’t because, by the time I got back to the car, the hair tie was gone. I considered going back to find it. I, like you I assume, do not litter, but mostly I needed the hair tie for wherever I was going next. Finding it seemed 100% unlikely and I left. So apparently I do litter.
The next week I was walking the same trail with our same dog. Walking along I happened to look down into the river of fallen leaves, and incredibly—there lay my hair tie.
I was here.
It was a shocking automatic thought. First, there were the words themselves. “No way, I can’t believe it!” or some other variation would likely be more common. Mine was “I was here”? More importantly though was the feeling attached to that automatic thought: delight. Just enough delight. Before I might have explained finding the hair tie as alignment with the universe (or some other explanation that required external forces to justify my existence). Or in more dire periods, it might have looked like the magazine section of a waiting room with me picking up the hair tie to unknowingly erase proof of life with no thought or emotion at all. Instead, it was the feeling of delightful surprise at proof of me.
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