From Judith's Desk: Wherever People Are

From Judith’s Desk: A collection of thoughts that didn’t make it to the blog

A few days ago, a woman sat down across from me in my office, and somewhere between the reason she came in and the conversation that followed, we recognized something familiar in each other.

We both see the world in stories.

Not just the stories people tell once everything has ended neatly and they know what it all meant. We see the ones that begin with a smell, a storm coming through, an old road, or a feeling that shows up before we have words for it. Some people experience a moment and move on. Others of us experience it, turn it over seventeen different ways, connect it to something that happened twenty years ago, find a metaphor in the weather, and eventually realize it has become a story.

We talked about how hard that can be to explain to people whose brains do not work that way. We also talked about being tested. About those seasons when life takes more than it gives and slowly wears down the part of you that once felt certain. We had both known what it was like to wonder whether our courage, determination and sense of purpose had finally run out.

Then she told me something she was afraid would make me angry.

Before meeting me, she had questioned my character because of who I had been married to and what she knew of that person’s character. She had wondered whether choosing to share a life with someone meant that I must share the same qualities she had seen in them.

She expected that admission to offend me.

It did not. It meant more to me than she could have known.

For once, someone had taken the time to separate me from the person standing beside me—or, perhaps more accurately, from the person whose shadow I had been standing in. She had met me, listened to me and allowed what she learned for herself to replace what she had assumed from a distance.

There is something profoundly healing about being seen as yourself after spending years being understood through someone else. Not as someone’s wife. Not as one-half of a marriage. Not as a reflection of another person’s reputation, decisions or character. Just as yourself.

She had been willing to admit that her first impression was wrong. I was grateful that she had given me the opportunity to change it.

A few days later, I received an email from her.

She thanked me for a conversation that had meant just as much to me as it apparently had to her. She said it was good to talk with someone who “gets it.” She told me that our conversation had restored some of the courage and determination she thought she had lost.

Then she sent me some of her stories.

In them, memories arrive as ocean waves. Fear becomes a battered lifeboat. Darkness is not simply something to escape, but something we must learn to move through. Trees, stones, trains, bridges and approaching storms become ways of understanding grief, survival, history, faith and the search for the people—and the pieces of ourselves—we fear have been lost.

Her stories understand something important: reaching the shore does not necessarily mean the journey is over. Sometimes it only gives us enough strength to turn around and look for the people who are still drifting.

What she did not know was that she had restored something in me before her email ever arrived.

She had looked past the easiest version of my story—the version assembled from who I married, what other people thought they knew and whatever conclusions had grown around it. She took the time to meet the person underneath all of that. Then, instead of quietly keeping her changed opinion to herself, she gave me the gift of telling me the truth.

Her email and her stories only deepened what that conversation had already shown me: sometimes courage is restored when another person finally sees you clearly.

I have spent a great deal of time wondering where I am supposed to be, what I am supposed to be doing, and whether the life and work I have built are tied to one particular place. I have questioned whether changing the place, the building or the circumstances would somehow mean losing the purpose I found here.

That conversation reminded me that the purpose was never the building.

My work matters because of the people who walk through the door. They bring legal problems, certainly, but those problems rarely arrive alone. People bring their families, histories, fears, mistakes, grief and hope with them. Sometimes they need legal advice. Sometimes they need someone to listen long enough to understand the story underneath the question. Most of the time, they need both.

The office matters because of the people inside it. The town matters because of the people who have trusted me here. But what I am meant to do is not confined to an address.

There are people everywhere.

Everywhere we go, there are people who have been tested and are tired. People trying to reach the shore. People searching for someone they love who is still lost at sea. People who believe their courage has disappeared when perhaps it only needs another person to recognize that it is still there.

I thought I had restored someone else’s determination that day. Instead, two people sat across from one another carrying assumptions, histories and private wounds. We talked long enough to recognize something familiar, and each of us walked away carrying a little more courage than she brought into the room.

That is what reaffirmed this for me.

I can do what I am meant to do wherever life takes me—not because the place does not matter, but because the people are the point. Wherever there are people, there will be stories beneath the stories. There will be someone who needs to be heard, someone who needs to be understood and, occasionally, someone who gives those same gifts back to me.

She ended her email by suggesting that perhaps the courage she thought she had lost could become another short story.

I hope it does.

Until then, I am honored to share some of the stories she has already written. They reminded me that the roads we travel do not merely take us from one place to another. Sometimes they bring us directly to the person we were supposed to meet.

Read her short stories here:

Short Stories

JLH

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