I’ve been thinking.

Maybe you should go for therapy.

I hesitate to say that because therapy has become one of those words people use when they want to sound concerned without having to remain present.

Go for therapy. Heal. Work on yourself.

The phrases are offered so cleanly, as though a person can be repaired in the same way one resets a phone whose applications have stopped responding.

Still, I have been thinking that you should go.

Proper therapy, though.

Not the scandalous fly-by-night kind where someone learns the language of trauma over a weekend and begins excavating childhoods by Monday. Not someone who will tell you that every disagreement is abuse, every difficult person a narcissist, and every uncomfortable feeling evidence that you are surrounded by enemies.

I mean someone trained enough to resist making your life fit neatly inside the few explanations they already know.

Perhaps someone before whom you could say the thing exactly as it happened, rather than the edited version in which you were always reasonable and everyone else was cruel.

I wonder what that would feel like.

To tell a story without arranging yourself favourably inside it.

Maybe this is the actual difficulty. We say we want to be understood, but often what we want is to be acquitted. We want someone to examine the wreckage and confirm that none of it carries our fingerprints.

I know I have done this.

I have narrated old injuries so many times that the narration itself has become polished. I know where to pause. I know which details make the other person look particularly careless. I know how to present my silence as restraint and my withdrawal as wisdom.

Perhaps therapy is where the story becomes unfamiliar again.

Where someone asks what happened immediately before the part you always begin with.

I’ve been thinking that maybe you should talk to someone too.

This sounds simpler than therapy, though it may be more dangerous.

There are people who ask how you are because they want to know. There are others who ask because information has a strange currency in certain friendships. Your pain enters the conversation as confidence and leaves it as anecdote.

You discover later that people you have never trusted know the private architecture of your life.

This makes silence feel intelligent…and after a while, you begin to confuse secrecy with safety. You tell yourself that you are private, when perhaps you have simply lost faith in being held carefully.

Maybe you should talk to someone who has demonstrated the ability to keep another person’s humanity intact. Someone who will listen without reducing you to your worst season.

I am unsure how one identifies such a person in advance. Betrayal only becomes obvious after the information has been shared. Trust always requires that first reckless offering.

Perhaps start with something small.

Or perhaps this is how we remain alone, forever testing people with pieces too small to reveal whether they can carry the whole.

I’ve been thinking.

Maybe you should take that trip.

I know the trip you have in mind. It appears whenever life becomes too repetitive. There is always a beach, an old city with narrow streets, or a quiet room facing water.

In the imagination, you arrive rested. Your clothes fit properly. The light is kind to your face. Nobody needs anything from you.

The fantasy is less about the destination than the version of yourself waiting there.

I understand that…But maybe you should take a different trip from the one you usually plan.

Not the trip with four flights in six days, three cities, twelve outfits and a schedule that begins before breakfast. Not the trip where every moment must justify the money spent on it. Not the one that leaves you exhausted, financially embarrassed and vaguely depressed by how little transformation occurred.

There is something cruel about needing a holiday after a holiday.

Perhaps go somewhere and stay still.

Wake up without an alarm. Eat without photographing the plate. Walk until the road becomes unfamiliar, then turn back. Let an afternoon pass without converting it into memory, content or evidence.

I have been wondering when rest became something we also had to perform.

Even our leisure must now be impressive. We return from holidays with photographs for people who never asked to see them and stories arranged to conceal the argument at the airport, the headache that lasted three days and the quiet disappointment of discovering that we travelled with the same mind we were trying to escape.

That is the inconvenience of distance.

You always arrive with yourself.

Maybe the trip will still be worth taking. Not because it will change your life, but because a different window may help you see the same life more honestly.

I’ve been thinking that perhaps you should go back to school.

This thought has embarrassed me more than the others.

We come from a place where school is rarely spoken about as a place of curiosity. It is an escape route, an insurance policy, a family project. You go to school so that you can become something, which usually means becoming employable, respectable and difficult to dismiss at gatherings.

You study so that nobody can speak to you anyhow.

The qualification acquires a moral weight that knowledge itself never had.

Maybe you should go back and, this time, actually learn something.

I realise how insulting that sounds.

You already learnt enough to pass. Enough to write what the examiner expected. Enough to recognise the shape of a question and reproduce the corresponding answer. You learnt the discipline of deadlines, the politics of group assignments and the peculiar skill of reading an entire chapter while absorbing almost none of it.

I mean something else.

Study a subject that has no immediate use.

Read something that leaves you less certain than you were before. Follow a question beyond the point at which it stops being profitable. Sit with people who know more than you and resist the urge to remind them that you are intelligent too.

Maybe education begins where the performance of intelligence ends.

I am thinking of how easily we confuse familiarity with knowledge. We have opinions on politics, religion, parenting, marriage, grief and countries we have never visited. We speak because silence can resemble ignorance, and ignorance is the one condition education was supposed to cure.

Yet perhaps the educated person is simply someone who has developed a more accurate relationship with what they do not know.

I would like to learn that.

To say, I do not know, without feeling diminished by it.

To change my mind without experiencing the change as defeat.

To encounter an argument that unsettles me and remain with it long enough to discover whether the discomfort comes from its weakness or from mine.

Maybe you should go back to school.

Maybe I should too.

Not necessarily to collect another qualification. We have enough evidence that we once sat in classrooms. Perhaps go back to recover curiosity from all the practical things we forced it to become.

I’ve been thinking about all of this, therapy, conversation, travel, education, and I suspect I am trying to describe the same desire in four different ways.

The desire to meet yourself somewhere beyond the explanations you have rehearsed.

In a therapist’s room, perhaps.

Across a table from someone trustworthy.

In a city where nobody knows your history.

Inside a book that refuses to confirm what you already believe.

It may be that nothing dramatic happens.

The old grief may survive the appointment. The person you trust may misunderstand you. The trip may end. The course may become tedious by the third week. You may remain difficult in all the familiar ways.

So this is what I have been thinking. Not that you are doing anything wrong. Only that there is a version of each of these things that costs more to find and gives back more once found, and it seems worth saying out loud, in case you had stopped looking for it.