The guarding does not change the outcome

SATURDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER

saturday, and the house is quiet enough that you can hear what you actually think, which is the whole trouble with saturdays.

the star turns up after a stretch of things being hard, and what it describes is not a guarantee that they improve. it describes the return of the willingness to hope they might, which is a separate and much more fragile thing.

most women who have been disappointed a few times develop a policy about hope. keep the expectations low, prepare for the version where it does not work, and then you cannot be caught out. it is an intelligent policy with one flaw. it costs the same amount of your present whether or not the bad thing ever happens.

that is the whole argument. the guarding does not change the outcome, it only changes how much of the waiting you get to keep. you are allowed to want it plainly and out loud without that being naive, and without it obliging you to anything if it does not come.

what is worth leaning into today: wanting it openly. you are not tempting anything by saying it.

what is worth staying away from: rehearsing the disappointment in advance. the rehearsal softens nothing, it only means you live through it whether or not it ever arrives.

my advice for today: say the thing you are hoping for out loud today, once, in plain words. to a person if there is one and to the kitchen if there is not. hopes said out loud stop being superstitions you have to protect.

what are you hoping for. say it to me plainly if there is nobody else to say it to, and i will not tell you whether it is likely.

/ a reflection

on being the woman who was right about the bad thing

i have been thinking about what happens to somebody who was right the last time.

she had a feeling about the job, or the man, or the money. she was talked out of it, and then the thing went the way she thought it would. after that, the feeling gets a promotion. it stops being one input among several and becomes the thing she trusts most, and she starts calling it realism.

and it does protect her. she is rarely blindsided now. what it also does, quietly, is make every new thing arrive already half rejected, and after a few years of that the world is a good deal smaller than it was, and she cannot quite trace when that happened.

i do not have a clean answer for it, because the feeling was right once and that is not nothing. the only thing i have noticed is that the women who get out of it do not manage it by trusting people more. they manage it by making the bet smaller. they give something a month instead of a commitment, and they say out loud that it is provisional, which turns out to be far more possible than deciding to be open again.

so the question i would leave you with is a smaller one than whether you can trust it. what would the smallest version of it be, and could you stand to find out.

if there is something you have half rejected already, tell me what it is. the small version of it, if the whole thing is too much to type.