The Map Nobody Else Can See
The garden centre has two car parks and you use the far one.
It is a longer walk and you do it anyway, because of where the far one puts you once you are out of the car. You worked that out a while ago, on some ordinary Tuesday, and you have used it ever since. Nobody has ever asked you about it. You have never mentioned it to anybody, because there is nothing to mention. It is just how you go to the garden centre.
There is a version of this for everywhere you go often. There is a provisional one, assembled in about four seconds, for everywhere you don’t.
What you are actually keeping
Call it a map, because that is the nearest word available, although a map is a flat thing and this is not.
It holds the route and the second route. It holds which end of a row of seats is worth having and which one is not. It holds the places that are fine, the places that are fine on a good day, and the two or three you have quietly written off without ever announcing that you had written them off.
And it is current. That is the part worth stopping on. You update it. Somewhere last autumn you learned something new about a building you go to regularly, and the map took it in that same afternoon without any ceremony at all, and it has been right ever since.
You have never once sat down to do this. There was no evening when you got the map out and worked on it. It maintains itself in the background of an ordinary life, which is exactly what makes it so difficult to see from the inside, and it has never been finished, because a map of that kind cannot be.
The same job of work, in three different buildings
If it is your body, the map is routes and distances and where the lavatories are.
If it is rooms, the map is doorways. Where the exit is. Which corner has something to lean against. Who you already know, and roughly what time the evening will have gone on long enough that leaving is reasonable.
If it is being seen, the map is angles. Which photograph you can stand to be in. Which side of the group. Which version of your own face you have approved and which you have not, and the small continuous correction that keeps you on the approved side of it.
Now stop looking at what the three are made of and look at what they do. Each one is held in advance of anything happening. Each one is kept current without anybody asking for it. Each one runs quietly while you are getting on with something else. And not one of the three has ever been written down anywhere. It is the same job of work in three different buildings, and the woman doing it in each building is fairly sure the other two have an easier time of it.
Why it has never gone in the column marked effort
Because you are good at it.
Work you are bad at announces itself. You come home from it tired in a way you can account for and describe to somebody over tea. Work you have become excellent at across fifteen years does the opposite. It goes quiet. It gets folded into your sense of what a normal day costs, and after a while there is nothing left to compare it against, because the last day you spent with the map switched off was a very long time ago.
So when you are flattened on a Wednesday evening and the day on paper held almost nothing, the arithmetic does not add up, and you reach for whichever explanations are lying about. Your age. Your energy. The sort of woman you have apparently become. None of those was the thing.
The last series closed with ten lines on the back of an envelope, the invitations you had turned down, with the reasons left off, so that you could see them in a row for once. The map is the same trick pointed in a different direction. Those ten were the decisions that surfaced. This is the work going on underneath them, every day, including all the days you said yes.
The ugly part, said plainly
You have been doing skilled, continuous, unpaid planning for years and you have never counted a minute of it.
And here is the bit I would rather tell you straight away. A good deal of that map is load bearing and should stay precisely where it is. I am not going to ask you to take any of it down this week, because some of it is the reason you get out of the house at all. Keep whatever you actually need, and keep your GP in the loop about anything that belongs with them.
What I want is narrower, and it is an accounting job rather than a brave one.
One thing, and it is only noticing
Pick one journey this week. Any journey, somewhere entirely ordinary.
Afterwards, count what you did that nobody else saw. The checking before you left the house. The two things you worked out in the car. The adjustment you made on arriving, and the other one you made when you decided it was time to go.
Then say that number to yourself and call it by its name. Work. Not fussing, not being careful, not being a worrier about things. Work, done well, by somebody who has had no training in it, no help with it, and has never once been thanked for it.
That is the entire exercise, and it will be the first honest piece of accounting you have done on this in years. Everything else that becomes possible here runs through it, because you cannot look squarely at a cost you have never written down.
Next Sunday, what the map charges you. Somebody suggests something on the spot, tonight, now, and you hear yourself asking for time that you do not need for any reason you would want to say out loud.
When your body has been making your decisions for you, that is the work I do. Book a Reset Session at HypnoGirl.
Confidence Connection is the Business, Social and Body confidence blog written by Kathryn Dunn, a cognitive behavioural hypnotherapist based in York, Yorkshire and working online. One essay each week, in plain language, and one thing worth trying. More at ConfidenceConnection.co.uk
Twelve Minutes Before You Walk In is a free relaxation recording, about twelve minutes long, for the times you want to feel calmer before social events or business meetings. It’s a general relaxation recording rather than a treatment for anything. Sign up here and you’ll also join Confidence Connection, my weekly email, which carries each new post to your inbox along with a bit extra.
Hypnotherapy is not a substitute for medical care and does not diagnose any condition. The essays and the recording are for information and relaxation, and sit alongside the care you get from your GP.
