The therapist gave us paper and asked us to draw a picture of how we felt. My first thought, how do you draw a picture of a feeling? My second thought, this is ridiculous. My third thought, I’m a horrible artist, I can’t draw. My fourth thought, I’m going to do what she’s asking me to do; I’m paying $150 for this hour with her. Cross legged on an oversized pillow, I sat next to my then husband of eleven years, him on his own pillow, our backs against a raised built-in day bed, the therapist on her own pillow in front of us with her back against a mirrored wall, my image there to look at me whenever I wanted to glance at it. I took some crayons and started drawing. I got lost in the drawing for a minute, for two, for three, for five. I drew without thinking.

“Nikki, can you explain what you drew. What it means.” “Well, I can explain what I drew, but I’m not sure I can really say what it means.” “Well, just start there then.” So I started.

“It’s a picture of a flower on the ground and the sun in the sky, but the flower has a very skinny stem and not enough roots. The roots it has are strong, but there aren’t enough of them. There are all these things resting on the petals of the flower, and it is pushing them down rather than letting them flourish and shine. The petals can’t see the sun even though they reach for them, there is too much on the petals and not enough …substance?… at the stem.” I keep talking, explaining little details. There are three leaves on the stem, but they look more like petals.

“That’s interesting. It seems like you might know better what this means now that you explained what it is.” It was bait, the right amount, thrown at me at just the right moment.

“Things that are supposed to be meaningful to me feel superficial. There is all this superficial … stuff? superficial something? … for the world to see and look at, and people think it’s meaningful because it looks good. But it’s not. It’s not down where it is supposed to be, at the stem, I guess the stem is my heart, where I need support and something more. It’s so superficial and fake and I can’t carry it all, I don’t want to. I don’t want a fake façade, I want the real thing. I can’t get to the sun. Everything feels reversed from what it should feel like. I mean it sounds cliché, but my stem feels alone. It’s strong but it is being asked to do something I didn’t sign up for, to fake it. I don’t even know what all of that stuff on the petals is, maybe just what some of it is, but it all feels superficial, and it’s making me feel not myself. Like I can’t be me, let alone grow.” There. I said what I could, there was nothing more in me. It was all out. Partly eloquent, partly non-sense. Partly literal, partly symbolic. I threw it all out there and some of it was sticking. I looked at the girl in the mirror in front of me, and she sat crossed legged with her hoodie zipped up, biting her lower lip in stoicism and a stare that looked like a better poker face than she ever had before. Was that me? I recognized the hoodie, the crossed legs. It must be me. The therapist sat there in silence, letting my own words sink into the air, into me, into the room, into the pillows. She let the silence be. My then husband sat there, but I don’t remember what his reflection looked like. I remember him being next to me, I felt his presence, but I didn’t see him. I saw me. I just saw me. I heard the silence of the therapist and I saw my poker face in the mirror, and my bitten lip and eyes that were trying to endure whatever was coming my way and whatever was coming out of me, and my crossed legs and my hands holding the paper with the drawing and letting it almost rest in front of me, but not quite. My shoulders strong and back straight, the pose for confidence I had perfected since I was 14. I didn’t see anything else. My eyes were green and I was surprised there were not tears.

The few seconds that passed in silence were eternal; the thoughts that ran through my mind infinite. Eternity and infinity compressed into what was likely twenty seconds, maybe thirty at most. The symbols were a little muddled, the analogies a little confused, but the drawing clarified my feeling of being Alone. Maybe safe, a flower protected from the rain and wind as much as the sun because of all these Things weighing down my petals, but Safe and Alone and somehow Burdened because I was carrying everything and nothing. Those things that might have looked pretty but lacked substance and meaning were heavy, very heavy. Had they been more dense, more dense to sink down past the petals into my stem, at least next to my stem, they wouldn’t have felt like a burden. But they weren’t dense and they weren’t sinking down and they were staying up where they didn’t belong, not really doing me any good. I didn’t want to say it out loud, didn’t want to be blunt or honest, but Those Things included my Relationship. My Marriage. Those Things included the same dense void that I felt between me and the man sitting next to me. I was by myself — physically, spiritually, emotionally — down in my core.

I looked at the girl in the mirror and the man sitting next to her. I saw him sitting there, looking at the picture he drew. Was he thinking of my words or what he would say about his picture? I didn’t know. I can’t remember what his picture was, but it wasn’t a picture like mine and he wasn’t looking at me. There were no invisible wires of connection, I couldn’t feel them, they didn’t exist. I tried to take whatever was in my heart, floating around and then unnamed, and place it onto him. I tried to push whatever it was in there out to fill that heavy void between us. Maybe it was anger and red would fill the air. Maybe it was unclaimed, unappreciated love, and a deep purple would speckle the air particles. Maybe it was loneliness and ice blue would splatter between us. Maybe it was an ugly resentment and deep black would spot the carpet in between our two pillows. But nothing would come out. It built up in my heart and it wouldn’t come out at all, let alone project toward him. Whatever was building inside of me wasn’t meant to be what would connect us. Not any longer, maybe not ever. Our slow and long and painful demise was what brought me to this room, but this moment was not about him.

I looked back at myself. I looked at the woman, the girl, the woman in front of me, and I knew she could Blame. She could have blamed him, faking it for so long and keeping up some sort of appearance but never being There, with Her. One foot out the door, always, for longer than she could remember. Even then, she didn’t know everything but knew enough that some would say blaming him justified. I looked at her, her hoodie mostly zipped up, and knew she could blame his father, for not giving him a role model on how to be Present. I looked at her and thought that she could blame her father, the man he was before he stopped drinking, when she was so little and had to harden her vulnerable heart as she lay in bed waiting for the garage door to open for his car at night and for her to know he was safe. I looked at her and thought she could blame her mother, who taught by example how to endure by being tough and having resolve but not how to open up. I looked at her and thought she could blame her family, for too few I Love Yous. For too much silence when she was seeking noise. I looked at her and thought she could blame the boys that looked at her when she was 12 only because she looked 16, and taught her that keeping distance was Safe. I looked at her and thought she could blame her Best Friend, the guy who everyone thought she would marry, but the one who taught her that the way to stay close was to not quite acknowledge that they wanted to be closer. I looked at her and thought she could blame her sister, who taught her how to stay right in the Safe Middle by showing her what the extremes looked liked. There was so much blame that could be placed, and I looked at her and saw that she didn’t have it in her to place any Blame. She had too much in her to place Blame.

The Blame felt as superficial as that relationship sitting on the top of the flower. If I was drawing blame into my drawing, it would go on the petals, too, it might even make the stem weaker, skinnier, less substantive, too solitaire. The blame would be more weight, more shade, more distance. It felt too easy and too heavy, all at once, to blame these people, all of whom I loved, most of them still loved, people for whom I felt abundantly grateful, who were the part of my Roots that were not me. My legs were still crossed and my hands now in the pockets of my hoodie and the hair on the left side of my head pushed behind my ear. Blaming them was too myopic and Not Real. The room still saturated with silence, I looked at the therapist, breathing deeply. I could see the words and thoughts flying around the room, losing speed, slowly settling into some peace she was allowing me to recognize. These thoughts, epiphanies, were floating off her shoulders, bouncing around for someone else to claim.

I looked back at myself. I thought of an essay I wrote at the end of my junior year of college, on an airplane flying home to my parents for the summer. I had this big content heart when I started writing, taking off from BWI Airport, and had started crying somewhere along the way. It was a beautiful essay, one of my favorites, still today, though never shared with anyone (yet). The words capturing tanned legs and green eyes and depth and love and courage and sun freckles and laughter and gracious tears, putting words to the feelings in my heart before I wrapped them up and handed them out, out to many but to one boy in particular, one boy I loved in the most open way I knew how to then, when I was 21 and maybe knew how to do it better than when I was 30, 35, 37, who wanted me to be more courageous than he could be, and I was happy to find the courage in me. I thought of what I wanted in my life when I wrote that essay, what I had the highest hopes was just within my reach — connection, depth, openness, honesty, vulnerability. I wanted to lay my heart bare and know that it would still beat, that it would beat stronger for being Known. I wanted to have people in my life – someone – who knew the rhythm of my laugh and the backbeat of my smile and could score a movie to it. I wanted to find someone worthy, if I hadn’t yet, and Invite Him In. Invite Them In. Invite them to know me deeply; to know the thoughts that made my eyes more or less green on any given day. To have Him Know that he was Safe with Me, Safe with Me Knowing Him, Better for it, in fact. Have people – friends, family, boyfriends, neighbors, children – in my life Know this, with Me. Have Me Know this. I wanted to wrap up my Worthiness and Belong.

I kept looking at myself in the mirror, at my eyes but understanding my practiced posture remained composed. I noticed that the therapist hadn’t moved and my then husband’s legs were outstretched, his head looking at the ceiling. It was peripheral vision. This wasn’t about anyone but Me. I could blame Him, his parents, his family, my parents, my family, random cameo players in my life, all my life. I could blame, place blame, hide behind blame. And if I did, I would find myself in another therapist’s room, at some other time, trying to identify why I was drawing pictures of flowers that had weak stems. The blame would enable People to offer me something superficial, and it would enable Me to Accept it. The Blame would keep me Safe — I knew I wouldn’t break, I would endure, I would survive. But I wouldn’t thrive and I wouldn’t have that Beautiful Knowing that I captured in an essay on a plane in 1995. I wouldn’t capture all the Beauty I could, all the Beauty I wanted to. I would feel disconnected from all the things I have always Wanted and that I was always Worth, because ultimately – ultimately – the responsibility to invite this Beauty in was Mine. If I wanted connection; if I wanted a chance to fill the voids, jump into the voids and color them with all sorts of emotions, have those colors decorate a splattered, beautiful, path woven with stories and complexity and simplicity between me and someone else, have that path be one that I could viscerally feel as I sat next to someone; if I wanted depth — Blame would not get me there. This was on me. It was me. The answer was Me. The only part of this equation that mattered was Me. Those twenty, maybe thirty, seconds filled with train-of-thought words and impactful silence and the image of my eyes and legs and warm hoodie surrounding my heart, now as permanent as any memory could be. Those seconds condensed into a visual to remind Me that though I will never know the impact someone will have to my Stem, nothing can be worse than the impact of not extending the Invitation.