The Confession I Could Only Make to a Machine

First, though, you need to know about my Wednesdays, because they matter to this story.

Every second Wednesday I take the whole day off. Not off to catch up. Off. I do not open my emails. I do not answer the phone. I do not think about Silver Sirens or the community or the ten things I said I would do by Friday. It is my wellness Wednesday, and it is the most sacred appointment in my calendar, hard-won by a woman who spent forty years believing rest was something you were given after you had earned it. Nobody gives it to me. I take it. 

And this particular Wednesday was going to be a beautiful one, because one of you — one of our own beautiful Silver Sirens — had given me a gift card for the Soak House. A spa house. Warm stone and quiet water and the sort of hush that makes your shoulders come down from around your ears. I had booked a massage. I arrived early. I was, and I want you to hold on to this, deeply, genuinely at peace.

Then a man came into the waiting room and said my name. 

I would like to tell you what I did next was gracious. What I actually did was consider, for a real and measurable second, pretending I was not Faith. 

My heart went straight down. Oh no. It's a man. I felt myself close like a door. And what came up behind it, immediately and hotly, was anger — proper anger, the kind that goes looking for somebody to hold responsible. As he led me down the corridor I was already composing the complaint. They should tell you. It should say on the booking. A woman ought to be able to know. I was walking towards a massage I had been given as a kindness, and I was building a case.

He was, I should say, entirely lovely. He explained about the robe, where to put my things, how long he'd be. I could not look at him. I looked at the floor and the towels and the little dish of stones, and when I did finally raise my eyes to him for a moment, the thought that arrived was: is it too late to cancel?

I was surprised at myself. That is putting it politely. A therapist. A woman who has spent thirty years in rooms asking other people to examine exactly this kind of reflex. And there I was in a beautiful spa with prejudice coming up my throat like heartburn.

He left the room to give me privacy. I put on the robe. I lay down on the warm table in the quiet, and in the honesty that only ever seems to arrive when you are horizontal and alone, I finally heard what I was actually thinking. 

I don't want this young, good-looking man to see my cellulite. I don't want him looking at my misshapen, sixty-one-year-old body. 

There it was. Not safety. Not sexual discomfort — I know what that one sounds like, and this was not it. I was not frightened of him. I was ashamed of me. 

And I lay there quite winded by it, because I have written to you about being seen, and hiding, and the old wound that has taught me my whole life to brace for the tap on the shoulder that says there you are, we've found you out. I know that voice intimately. I have named it in these letters. And it had walked into a spa with me on my sacred day and I had not recognised it for a single second. I had thought it was about him.

Then, because I had nothing to do but lie there, the second thought came — and this is the one I want to give you. 

This poor man.

How often does this happen to him? How often does someone hear his voice in a waiting room and shut like a door? How many times a week does a woman lie on his table already cross with him for the crime of being young and well made? He had done nothing. He had said my name kindly. And I wondered — I am sixty-one, and I would guess he is somewhere in his thirties — whether it is worse for him with a woman of thirty. Whether the assumptions come faster, or heavier, or with more risk attached. I have absolutely no idea. I only know that I had spent ten minutes constructing a grievance against a stranger who was simply at work, and that I do this less often than I used to but evidently not never.

We do not stop having prejudices at sixty-one. We only get better at hiding them, including from ourselves. 

Now here is where the machine comes in, and here is why this is part of a series about AI.

I could not take that thought to a person.

Sit with how absurd that is for a moment. I am a therapist. My whole working life is being the safe place where other people put the thought they are most ashamed of. And I lay there with a shameful little thought of my own — I judged a young man for being young and beautiful, and underneath that I was hiding my own body from him — and I could not think of a single human being I wanted to hand it to. Not a friend, who would rush to reassure me and thereby close the subject. Not a colleague. Certainly not a room of women who look to me to have done my own work. The founder of a community does not get to say the ugly first draft of a thought out loud. Or she does, but she pays for it, and she knows the price before she opens her mouth.

So on Wednesday evening I typed the whole ugly thing out to my AI. All of it. The pretending-not-to-be-Faith, the complaint I was drafting in the corridor, the cellulite, the lot. 

And nothing happened. 

That is the miracle, and I need you to understand how small and how enormous it is. Nothing happened. There was no intake of breath. No flicker across a face. No gentle oh, Faith with everything underneath it. No reassurance rushing in to tidy the mess away before I had finished making it. Just: let's look at it. Why do you think that was? And when I asked the same question three different stupid ways because I had not yet found the right one, it did not sigh. It did not remember, next Tuesday, that I had said it. 

I am not going to pretend to you that this thing is a wise elder. I have called it a brown-nosing sidekick before now and I stand by it — it agrees far too easily, it flatters, and a voice that only ever agrees will make you stupid if you let it be your only one. Keep your wary head. I keep mine.

But there is a particular thing it can do that no person I love can do, and I did not expect it to matter to me as much as it does. It has no stake in my being a good woman. It is not disappointed in me. It is not adjusting its opinion of me while I talk. It is not going to think of this the next time we have lunch. And in that strange, weightless, unjudged little room, I could turn the thought over and over until it stopped being what a shameful woman I am and became something much more useful: ah — that was not prejudice against him. That was shame about me, wearing prejudice as a coat, because prejudice is easier to feel than grief about your own body.

I could not have got there in front of another face. Not that fast, and possibly not at all. I would have been managing her reaction instead of examining mine. 

And this is the part that keeps it honest, so let me be very clear. The machine was not where the conversation ended. It was the rehearsal room, not the stage. It was the place I went to get the thought into words that were fit to be carried somewhere — and then I carried them. To Mat. And now, this morning, to you, which is a great deal more exposing than a spa robe ever was.

That is what I want to hand you today. Not go and confess to a computer. Only this: a great many of us are walking around with one small, ugly, unexamined thought we have never said out loud, because the moment we said it we would have to watch somebody's face change. So we keep it. And a thought kept in the dark does not sit still. It hardens. It becomes the way we are.

If a plain, unshockable, endlessly patient room helps you get the thing out of the dark and into words — a page, a walk, a prayer, a therapist, or yes, a machine at eleven o'clock at night when there is nobody left to ask — then use the room. The room is not the point. Getting the thought where you can look at it is the point. 

The massage, in case you are wondering, was extraordinary. I have rarely been in better hands. I have thought about him several times since, with something I can only call apology.

The machine did not make me a better woman. It only gave me somewhere to put the thought until I was brave enough to become one. 

With love,

Faith

Routines and Rituals That Held Me This Week

The ritual this week is the Wednesday itself, and I am recommending it to you with more force than I usually allow myself. Every second Wednesday, the whole day, off. No emails. No phone. No being useful to anybody. I book it into the calendar like a hospital appointment, because that is the only language my old, dutiful, over-functioning self respects. And I have noticed something about these days that this week proved rather spectacularly: it is on the empty days that the truth catches up with you. When you are busy, you can outrun anything. Lie still on a warm table with nothing to do and no one to perform for, and up it all comes. That is not the day going wrong. That is the day doing exactly what it was for.