Dear fellow travellers,
I have been living a full life lately. Packed, moving, surface-level busy in the way that feels productive but doesn’t quite reach the bottom of things. Outside the temple, there are no bells to remind you to stop. No shrines at the corner of the street. No towers quietly suggesting that you slow down, examine your greed, consider your karmic debt. The ordinary world is very good at filling all available space with motion.
I am trying to remember how to stop in the middle of it.
Yesterday I went to a local artisan festival with a friend. There was music, stages, booths selling things made by hand. My friend is not particularly talkative. She is quiet in a way that is not absence — she is there, physically, firmly present, in the specific way that some people are present without narrating it. I have always liked that about her. We became close quickly, which surprised me a little. She seems to ignore whatever doesn’t interest her, which sounds like detachment but reads, in person, as a kind of honesty.
We were talking about each other’s patterns. The kind of conversation I like — direct, slightly diagnostic, the mutual examination of two people who have decided to be frank with each other. At some point, I had laid out a theory about her patterns. She listened. She agreed or disagreed with specific parts.
And then, at the end of it, I said: well, but I guess you’ll forget most of what I say. Or not mind it. Because I don’t really matter to you. I’m not your family. I’m just nam to you.
Nam. Someone else. A stranger, or nearly one. A person who exists outside the circle that counts.
She paused.
Then she said: why do you think so?
And I went blank.
I don’t remember what I said after that. My mind folded inward and I lost the thread of the conversation. I was cheerful about it — I had said it in a light voice, the way you say things you mean but are not ready to mean — and she asked the one question I hadn’t prepared for.
Later, alone, I understood what had happened.
I had done it again.
I cancelled myself before she could decide.
Before she had the chance to choose whether I was someone who mattered to her, I had already answered for her. I removed myself from the list. I told her, in the most casual possible register, that she would not miss me — so that when she didn’t, I would already have predicted it. So that it would not be a surprise. So that I would not have handed myself over and been handed back.
This is not new behaviour. I recognise it. What is new is that I can watch myself doing it in real time and still not quite stop.
What I said to her was not a question. It was not even, really, a statement about her. It was a pre-emptive rejection — of myself, on her behalf, delivered cheerfully so that neither of us would have to feel it land.
I knew she cared. I just didn’t want to find out that she cared less than I did.
So I answered for her.
She asked why do you think so and I went blank because no one was supposed to ask that. The script doesn’t have that line in it.
There is a thread I keep pulling.
I have always chosen my partner before my family. Not as a conscious philosophy — as a fact about how I love, which is completely and without reservation. My parents were not a place I could rest. I chose the people who chose me back. I built family out of choice rather than blood, and I believed in that building, and I think I still do.
My ex chose me for a while. And then she didn’t.
I am sure she had her reasons, along with her historically questionable taste. But that is another essay.
What she said when she left, when I told her but you said I was your family — she told me to be my own family. To return to the blood. To the system that says: at the end of it, those are the ones who stay.
I don’t believe that. I have never believed it. Blood is not thicker than water — with the right amount of water, it dissolves without a trace. The people who stay are the ones who choose to stay. That has always been my conviction.
But I had been told, in the months before everything ended, that my chosen people didn’t want me. That my friends found me too much. That my presence was something people tolerated out of habit rather than love. I had been told this by someone I trusted, someone I had chosen as my family, and the telling had done its work. It had gotten in.
So when I walk next to a friend at a festival and find myself saying you don’t really care about me, I’m just someone else to you — I know, now, what that is. It is not an observation about her. It is the old damage, speaking in my voice.
One thing therapy has taught me, finally earning a portion of its invoice, is that chosen family is real. That the people who pick you, who turn toward you, who stay past the point where they would have been forgiven for leaving — those are family. Full stop. The word belongs to them as much as it belongs to biology.
My friend at the festival chose to be there. She chose to ask why do you think so instead of letting me slide past it. That is a choice. That is the beginning of the thing I keep trying to cancel before it starts.
I know what I need to do. I have known for a while. You meet people. You go to therapy. You let yourself be chosen without announcing in advance that you probably won’t be. You stay in the room long enough for trust to have a chance.
Knowing it and doing it are different skills, and the gap between them is exactly where I live right now.
But I went to the festival. I walked with her. I said the wrong thing and she asked the right question, and I went blank, and later I understood what had happened.
And I am here, writing it down instead of swallowing it.
At least that.
Emotionally yours (present, if slightly cancelled),
Suinny
From home, where I am trying to stay on the list long enough to be chosen
P.S. — If you have ever removed yourself from someone’s list before they had the chance to decide: I think you know exactly what that costs. I think you’ve been doing it for a long time. So have I. Reply to this letter.
P.P.S. — She doesn’t know I wrote this. She would probably shrug and say something precise that I’d have to think about for three days. That’s why I like her.