There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be

I remember when Mindy Kaling’s memoir came out and I dripped with jealousy over the title even as I felt seen by it: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? It’s a question I’ve asked myself all my life, one that either niggles at the edges of any self-worth I’ve managed to shore up or downright devours it and leaves me shivering in a cold pool of insecurity. (And melodrama. Possibly.)

Recently something occurred that sent my psyche back into high school or even earlier, back when I had never darkened a therapist’s door or considered that my baseline anxiety might be a shade beyond the pale or wondered if my value as a person might lie beyond what others thought of me. The happening left me feeling…left out, even as I was aware I could be grossly misinterpreting the situation. But feelings often don’t care about facts, or don’t initially leave much space for them anyway, and I found myself shedding tears in bed and wondering if this just might be about something more.

I think we carry all the different versions of ourselves around with us–the little girl who wanted to please all the adults, the teenager who both wanted to fly under the radar and get noticed, the young adult who was skirting rebellion and bad ideas, the new mother who didn’t know which end was up on this foreign planet to which she’d been exiled. When certain things happen–not all things, but certain things–they happen to all these people, piercing through the layers of ourselves and gutting/thrilling/grieving every one of them.

I must have grown a bit over the years, because I only shut down temporarily before remembering I could actually face things. Conversations were had, misunderstandings were resolved, and it was all healed into something better than before.

But the thing about healing is that there has to be a wound first. That’s the tricky part.

I decided I’d do something productive with my wound: I would turn it into a teaching moment for the kids. What a mistake. I am kidding of course. Sort of. Once I told the story, at bedtime in the dark between them, to the boys about how even grownups feel left out and sad sometimes, they decided to turn it into an endless inquisition. Now, weeks later, I’m still getting requests from them to talk about a time when I was excluded. My brilliant plan backfired, is what I’m saying, because their initial reaction–an incredulous “That’s never happened to ME”–has morphed into an exhausting cross-examination that shows no sign of ending.

Maybe it will all be foundational. Maybe one day, when they do realise they’re having a left-out moment, they’ll think back to that teaching moment and feel equipped to deal with it. Maybe The Husband will eventually stop laughing at me over their heads. Until then, all that’s left to do is distract them from their questioning, because this delving into my past is exhausting and I don’t have time for more therapy right now.

It’s a delicate balance for an introvert though, this line between being lonely and alone. I blurred it as a kid, yelling that “I want to be LONELY!” when I craved space for myself apart from my family, and I still crave that space so much that a couple of my favourite recent memories include seeing the movie Yesterday by myself (and a cinema full of others) while the boys watched Spider-Man with TH; that and an hour I spent at the hotel bar where we’re holiday-ing with a book, fire, and glass of sparkling wine. I want, and need, these moments; I just don’t want everyone else to be hanging out without me while I’m having them.

“There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be,” sang the Beatles, and the guy who ripped them off in the movie, and once I realised I was going to be a certain kind of mother, a certain kind of person–the kind who finally accepts that both she and at least one of her kids are pretty different, that image-polishing would be futile, that it was time to run clean out of f—s and call it a day on pretending to be anything other than the mess I am (we are); the kind who ugly cries at movies and life and is never going to get rid of those neck wrinkles that insist on showing up in photos; the kind who feels things painfully and inconveniently and gloriously deeply–I embraced that lyric as mantra. We are who, and where, we are meant to be. Period.

“It’s easy,” the Beatles go on, though, and that’s where I have to take issue. It’s a lot of things, this real life: messy, fraught, exhausting, beautiful, grace-filled–but it ain’t easy. It can even be lonely.

But I’ve learned that, after awhile, it’s really not. Because people show up–the right people. The kind of people who are also tired of pretending, who have stopped accepting the dividends on selling their souls and have instead started inhabiting their lives. And you all sit on your wonky little bench together. The bench that just happens to have a spectacular view and, no matter how many are sitting on it, is always perfectly full.