It’s a relief that some people want to be dentists or doctors or mechanics or any of the vast number of things that I have never considered doing or shown any propensity for.
How would we manage without each other? Without our specific and personal passions?
I have many times thought I should be able to do it all. (Not long ago I talked my way through a sense of inexplicable overwhelm that I didn’t know how to fix my lawn mower… which wasn’t even broken). But I don’t live alone on the edge of the prairie. Not in reality or emotionally. I don’t need to try to do it all. I am not, in fact, alone.
It’s exhausting not to trust an expert, or even a layperson with a nerdy hobby. To doubt everything, always. And there’s so much beauty in plugging into the system– of going to the clinic and having a test and getting a prescription, of talking through the looping chords of thoughts and feelings with a coworker and listening to what she picks up on.
I had band practice tonight and that’s the same thing: I don’t want to do this life so fiercely alone. Whatever I was proving (and I know what it was), there’s no point to it and it’s not true:
We need each other. That’s it.
Poets need doctors and engineers need musicians and veterinarians need painters and and and.
And when you– I– stop being afraid of being afraid, it feels deeply supported and really good. To need. To be helped. To show up unpolished. To tell this human truth.
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