The most empty and corrosive place I can go is where I am taken to when I start a sentence with ‘If I just -’ ‘I just need -’ or ‘If only they -’. Like most people in recovery, I was born with what felt like an inherent loneliness, which skirted the edges of a missing piece. The more I tried to fill the space with the many ‘if I justs’ and ‘I just needs’ the wider and more jagged the gap became - but it didn’t change its tune of wanting. It kept telling me that if I just, if only, then it would feel different. I would feel different. It would be ok - that ‘I just need’ didn’t work, but what if the next one will?
I have been cursed with a face that can conceal nothing, an unwanted gift of recovering my authenticity, it gives everything away even when I’m desperate to be aloof and unbothered. About two years ago, after three literary agents rejected my proposal which didn’t hurt as much as the thirty that ignored it, my friend asked me what was wrong as we walked to a meeting together. I told him ‘I just need an agent, I just need someone to believe in me.’ As he parked his bike, swinging the chain around its body he replied ‘So that’s the most recent thing you think will make everything ok.’
I wanted to argue and tell him that I was ok, everything was fine, I just needed this as well. But he was absolutely correct, I was lost in my perpetual quest of finding the next thing. Practically, having a literary agent was important for my next steps and I could not be more grateful to have one now, but realistically this desire was the load bearing wall for everything I was feeling. It completely consumed me, I wouldn’t be enough without it, it was the promise and prospect of a better life, if I was worrying about that, I didn’t have to worry about anything else. If I got it, the ‘anything else’ would cease to matter. It might be enough this time, this might be the thing.
A therapist introduced this idea to me when I was 20. I was in therapy as one of the conditions for continuing my training as an opera singer, I had to prove I was mentally sound enough to handle it. I remember telling my therapist that I just needed this career to work out, because I needed to make all the pain of the past worth it. He asked me what the career ‘working out’ would look like. I told him, instantly, it would be singing at the Met. Up until that point he had never spoken in absolutes, we investigated things gently with an attitude of ‘could be’ and ‘that might be right.’ So it shocked me when he said ‘In this place, with this mindset, you probably will sing at the Met one day, and your first thought will be ‘ok, what now?’ It will not satisfy you, it will not fix what you want it to fix.’