Who Are You When You're Not Useful

Well, here we are again. The place where I write about my usefulness, work, and what the hell I'm doing as a therapist.

My husband said something to me last night that stopped me completely. He said, "I remember you every time I process how I'm feeling and ground myself again. Because you helped pave a path for me to process my own emotions and create my own inner peace."

I didn't say anything. I just laid there next to him and noticed my forehead loosening, like a knot that had been there so long I'd stopped noticing it. I had been waiting for something like this. Not the praise exactly, but the proof that I had actually mattered to someone by just being present. By being there.

For most of my life — and especially in my work as a therapist — I organized myself around usefulness. I was always scanning for how I could adjust, improve, show up better, give more. I thought that was what it meant to be good. What it meant to be safe. My nervous system had learned to disappear to be useful. And I was doing this everywhere — in my friendships, my marriage, my clinical relationships — but I was most legible to myself as a therapist, because there it had a name. It was called service.

I didn’t initially see that this way of relating was hurting everyone, including me. When I finally faced that, I had to let go of a lot. Relationships that couldn't survive me taking up space. A version of myself I'd been tending for decades.

That was about a year ago.

Since then I've been slowly rebuilding — my caseload, my sense of self, my tolerance for ordinary days. I've been sitting in the not-yet-knowing of who I am when I'm not useful. It's not a comfortable place. I've felt anger in it, and fear, and real grief. I've felt apathy too, which surprised me most because I had spent so long being urgently, anxiously on that the absence of that feeling didn't feel like rest. It felt like a devastating loss.

So I stopped trying to become someone new and just started doing the basics. Not the beautiful self-care you post about. The boring kind. Exercising in the morning before I'm awake enough to negotiate with myself. Drinking water. Stretching on my bedroom floor while Copper wanders in and steps on me. Texting a friend back. Sitting in my new office and hanging something on the wall just because I wanted to look at it.

None of it is impressive. That's the point.

Because what I'm finding — slowly, imperfectly — is that I don't have to be impressive. I don't have to be useful or transformed or arriving anywhere in particular. I just have to be here. A regular woman living an ordinary life. Letting herself become whoever.

That's the whole project now.