Changing Wells

The first real peace I remember was not a beach, or a holiday, or anything that would photograph well. It was an ordinary quiet room, late, everyone gone, no notifications, no meeting to prepare for, nobody to manage. Just me and my thoughts, and the small surprise of discovering that my thoughts were decent company once nothing else was shouting.

For months I had assumed the noise in my head was me. Then I stepped away from the people and conversations I had been occupied with, and the noise did not follow. I had become so used to reacting that having nothing to react to felt like discovering an ability I had forgotten I possessed.

I could think about a question without also thinking about how I would defend wanting to work on it. I could be interested in something before deciding what it would make me look like. Sometimes an idea I had been circling arrived while I was alone, after I had stopped trying to produce one.

I had been treating that quiet as whatever remained after everybody else was finished with me. No wonder there was so little of it.

An argument takes longer than the time spent having it. There is the hour afterward when I replay what was said, the evening it colors, the reply I start composing the next morning while the work I actually wanted to do sits open in another window. Then there is the question of what a sentence in a meeting meant, whether being left off an email was deliberate, and what I should do about something I cannot even establish happened.

I have had entire months where I was busy every day, exhausted every night, and could not name one thing I had learned.

It is embarrassing to remember how important those questions felt. Each conflict seemed to be the one I could not afford to ignore. I was defending a position, or my understanding of a position, among people whose opinions had become much larger in my life than I had ever agreed they should be. The work kept getting the tired part of me.

Taking a break helped me notice that. A real break meant being away from the channels, the group, and the obligation to know what everyone had said about everyone else. A weekend could disappear into the effort of continuing an argument in my head. It took longer to reach a morning when my first thought was about something else.

What returned in that space mattered to me. I wanted to find things out again. A problem I had stopped thinking about became interesting. I had been worrying that I was becoming less curious, or less disciplined, while spending most of my attention on things that made neither demand on me.

Going back could make the difference harder to ignore. The first message, the tightening before a conversation had properly started, the familiar fatigue arriving quickly. I began paying more attention to those first days back. After a while I would get used to it again, and being used to it had already persuaded me to stay longer than I wanted.

The well is the image I keep returning to because it explains how local something can be while still feeling like the whole world. From inside, there is a circle of sky. Everyone nearby sees roughly the same circle. You can spend years arguing about your place beneath it without thinking to ask what lies beyond the wall.

When I finally stood somewhere larger, I felt embarrassed. I could see how much time I had spent on alliances, slights and questions of who was ahead of whom. People had been fighting for a bigger share of something whose importance did not travel very far.

Including me. Especially me.

I had enjoyed some of the standing I now wanted to dismiss as local. It had reassured me. Moving meant finding out how much of what I called confidence depended on who happened to be nearby.

A thing that made me notable in one place could be ordinary in another. People already knew it. Some had gone much further. I had to work out how to be interested in what they could show me while feeling the loss of being the person who could show everyone else.

Nothing rearranged me faster than meeting people whose ordinary work was beyond something I had been quietly proud of. Someone could know a field I had been circling for a year. Someone could have built the thing I was still describing as an idea and already found the difficulty I had not reached.

The first reaction was sometimes ugly. I went looking for a reason to discount them. A flaw, a limitation, something that would let me leave the comparison without having to change my opinion of myself. I could find one if that was what I wanted to find.

But I had come to learn. It was difficult to admit how quickly I could forget that when learning began with somebody being better at something than I was.

Once I could get past the flinch, there was something useful in seeing the work up close. I could begin to tell what I needed to study, what I had been overlooking, and what care looked like in practice. The person who had made me feel small could become someone I learned from, if I stopped making their ability an argument about mine.

And the new place was another well. A larger circle, perhaps, but still a circle. I found that thought relieving. I could take the work seriously without treating the people around it as the final authority on how much there was to know.

I needed some confidence that could come with me when I moved. Could I learn something difficult? Could I finish it? Could I admit I was wrong before the error cost someone else more work? Those were questions I could do something about. Being known as the impressive person in a particular group was much harder to carry.

I have not become indifferent to how people see me. I have become more suspicious of how much effort I can spend preserving a description of myself. Some arguments lose their urgency when I no longer need the same people to confirm it every day.

There are still things I need to say plainly. I can ask for time to work. I can stop participating in a conversation that exists to rehearse the last conversation. I can notice what happens after I say something is costing too much, and whether anything changes.

Sometimes I need to go. Sometimes I need something a place cannot offer, even if I am grateful for what it did give me. I do not want to spend another year arguing myself out of noticing either possibility.

The harder part is remembering this after arriving somewhere I am pleased to have reached. Gratitude can make me very willing to adapt. A ritual wastes everyone’s week, a person has to be handled, a cruelty passes as rigor, and someone explains that this is how things work here.

I believe them. People do get used to it. I have got used to things I could see more clearly when I first arrived.

That is why I want to keep some of the discomfort of being new. Enough to notice the habits I am being asked to acquire. Enough to ask whether the work requires them, or whether everybody has simply become tired of the question.

I want the quiet too. An evening in which nobody needs managing and I can hear what I think before preparing an answer for anyone else. It was such an ordinary thing to discover, being able to enjoy my own company. I would like to stop making it the last thing I protect.

Changing places has cost me versions of myself I was rather attached to. It has also let me find out how much there was beyond the importance I had given them.

That is worth every ego I have had to lose, and I expect to lose several more.