The Bare Minimum
(or, according to the scoreboard)
I was going into kindergarten when I first had my own room in a former mill town in central Massachusetts. My twin bed sat beneath a double-hung window on the east wall.
On sunny mornings, the light came through like a spotlight, crossing my toes and spilling onto the floor exactly where one small hop would place me inside it.
I had a very clear belief then: the sun was shining on me on purpose.
Not because it was mine, but because we belonged to each other in some private way. The spotlight and I were partners. Maybe soulmates.
That confidence usually lasted until I left my room. Then it would slowly erode over the course of a day spent among other people. On sunny mornings, I felt restored. On overcast ones, it was harder to believe I had ever been chosen in the first place.
Looking back, it is easy enough to see that attention has always fueled me. So has the feeling of being chosen for something. Stage, radio, television, writing, storytelling, leadership. None of that surprises me now. What surprises me is how early I began trying to prove that my ache for those things was not vanity, but destiny.
I tried in all the usual ways. Excellent grades. Constant participation. Kindness, even toward people who were cruel. Beauty, or my best approximation of whatever beauty meant at the time. Admiration at school, at work, in crisis, in love. I wanted proof that the light had not misled me.
What I built instead was a blinding scoreboard.
How many people liked me, really liked me?
Were my grades merit or personality?
Why was I chosen?
How much money?
How pretty?
How thin?
How much had I really accomplished?
No matter how I totaled it, I always came up short.
Over time, that internal tallying became its own kind of violence. Presenting. Performing. Evaluating. Condemning. Judging.
When the light failed me, I went looking for other proofs.
So last week, when I walked into my psychiatry appointment after the last 18 months and said, “I’m mediocre,” it did not feel dramatic. It felt like the meanest truth I could muster.
My psychiatrist is brilliant, so she did not try to argue with me in ways I could easily bat away. But I did get her to swear for the first time, and somehow that helped.
Afterward, I drove to Billerica to pick up Briggs. The plan was just to see him for a bit, but he had the next day off from school, so he came back to Bridgewater with me for the weekend.
On the long drive home, the sun finally came out. Just for a little while before it went down.
It found me again, with my son riding along, and for the first time, I think, I finally gave myself a W for something I had always ranked as the bare minimum: showing up.
Clearly, this is not Massachusetts in the early spring, but it’s the prettiest picture of the sun I have. And she deserves to be showcased.