Our lives are built from the stories we were told from the time we were old enough to have the ability to remember – and if you ask me, maybe even before that. Sometimes those are very happy stories that make our hearts overflow. Sometimes they’re traumatic stories that nobody remembers quite the same way you do. Sometimes they’re just goddamn funny stories that make you laugh right out loud at the mere glimmer of their memory.

My new therapist has been trying to teach me about the concept of willingness. I’m struggling with this notion more than I’ve struggled with so many of the very many psychological concepts that Cheryl, my OG and most precious therapist, tried to teach me over the last twenty years or so.

But willingness? Willingness stymies me. Willingness is at its core about the stories of our lives and being willing to uncover them, examine them, sit with them and not run from them in abject terror. These stories are the things we were taught to believe to be most true. The things we believe to be true at the very core of our beings. The stories that shape the things we aren’t aware of, the things that haunt us without even making themselves known to our conscious minds, the things our brains desperately cling to so they can easily conjure up that most wondrous of brain reactions that chomps on so many of our days and turns them into sinister looking dioramas instead of the regular old days (and nights) they could be. That brain reaction referred to as crippling anxiety.

Learning about willingness, like so many psychological concepts therapists introduce to their patients, involves a worksheet. I’ve had this particular worksheet open in Acrobat on my computer for weeks. When I go to open a PDF file for work, a thing I do very many times a day, there’s that goddamn worksheet staring at me. Mocking me. Taunting me to try and give it a shot and actually type something into it’s open slots. This particular worksheet asks me to consider the following:

What is the punch line of the story?

When did you tell it?

Who did you tell it to?

What was the result?

Dr. KB, my miraculous new therapist, has started the last three of our sessions asking me how I’m doing with the willingness worksheet. You can imagine how well that goes.

“I can’t get my head around it, Dr. KB. What are these stories? I don’t think I tell them. I don’t think I have them. I think the stories were told to me and I just believed them and I’m not sure how to even articulate the punch lines. This worksheet is asking the wrong questions!” I blathered at her.

“What questions should it be asking then,” she asks sweetly. Dr. KB is sweet like peach pie, but this peach pie is secretly wily and a little bit evil, I suspect.

“It should ask me what stories I’ve been told throughout my life. Who told them to me is irrelevant. Whether it was me telling them or someone telling them to me the result is the same. I believe some ridiculous things and I believe them with the ferocity of the most ardent cult member. I’m not sure I can be taught to un-believe these things because they’re just true things.”

Ok. You’ve been reading my writing for long enough now that you surely can see where this is going and yet I’m gonna go there anyway because as I’ve said over and over again, this writing is a selfish thing that’s for me and only me. That you read it is a mystery to me! But that said, I started spouting my stories at Dr. KB and bless her heart for not laughing in my sad, overwhelmed and riddled with anxiety face on her computer screen.

The story about being pleasing is my most fundamental story. That story says that it is my primary job in life to be pleasing to everyone I come into contact with. I want to please you on so many levels it is a bit difficult to know where to begin listing them.

I want you to be pleased by my appearance most of all. I want your eye to be absolutely tickled when it lands upon my form. From my stylish hair, to my long eyelashes to my perfect eyebrows to my artistically applied makeup and my (formerly) extremely stylish outfits – I’ve curated me to please you. All of you.

If you happen to be a man I might extend my focus to making sure my under garments match (just in case) or blinking my eyes more frequently and looking at your lips over and over again because I know if I do this you’ll probably want to kiss me. And that’s just the beginning of my pleasing ways when it comes to men.

For most of my sex-having life I didn’t even realize I was supposed to enjoy it. I was too busy giving the performance of my life attempting to win the Oscar equivalent of awards for sex. What would that award be called? The Best Fucker? The Ultimate Nymph? I don’t know all I do know is that I thought it was my job to win this award regardless of how unworthy the man was with whom I happened to find myself. (God I hope my mom isn’t reading this post.)

I’ve had exactly one sexual relationship wherein the partner I chose taught me that sex was for me, too, and I destroyed one of the most important friendships in my life at the time just to have the chance to feel that good for the first time in my life. This is something I torture myself about to this day but I don’t regret that decision even a little bit. I had to know what that felt like. I had to know what being pleasing AND being pleased was like because I didn’t really believe that was a real thing.

The second story I shared with Dr. KB was far less titillating, but no less true in my mind and that is the basic truth that I am useless unless I am doing something hard. Doing hard things, making hard things go away, conquering all hard things placed even adjacent to my human path is also one of the fundamental reasons I exist. If I cannot win over these hard things I am worthless and a failure.

I must problem solve before I can live. Read that sentence again. It blew my mind when it came out of my own mouth because the truth bomb left me in tatters on my office floor while staring at Dr. KB on my computer screen.

This obsession with problem solving is probably why I’m so good at my actual job. It’s why I’ve found myself in relationship after relationship with ever more broken men or troubled girlfriends. It’s why easy things make me feel instantly guilty. It’s why I felt like I was getting away with something horrifically evil when I used to loll about in my bed covered in cats for entire days on end because good, worthy people do not loll about. They do things. They fix things. They clean the thing that needs cleaning and they do not rest until all of the things, all of them, are done and done well.

If we do rest before the time when all of the things are done and done properly, we are worthless and lazy and will never achieve our full potential (or finally write that goddamn book we’ve been saying we’re going to write for most of our lives).

The story I’ve told myself that’s also so ridiculously obvious to anyone but me is the one where the only right way to live is independently. To depend on others is like taking the express train to disappointment town. To depend on others is like passing Go and being rewarded with a broken heart instead of $200. To depend on anyone but your incredibly capable and utterly indefatigable self is like hiring toddlers to design a skyscraper.

I’ve looked down on people, shamed people, felt superior to people (let’s just be really honest here shall we?) who can’t be alone. If you’re the kind of person who’d rather eat glass than spend an entire weekend all by yourself you can bet your fanciest knickers that I have deemed myself better than you more times than I can count.

I’ve spouted quotes by everyone from Pascal and Emily Dickinson to Buddha and famous rabbis, written these quotes in so many shades of ink in so many journals that it’s a wonder there’s any paper left in the world upon which I haven’t gleefully scribbled a famous quote about the merits of solitude. Alone is the only noble way to be. If you don’t know this, you haven’t spent enough time alone to learn it. Even though my solitude was imposed and not chosen when I went from wife to widow at the age of 30, way down deep I told myself I was actually lucky.

Yes. You read that right.

I told myself that the luxury of spending one’s thirties and forties focused on studying oneself was a gift. A gift not many people got to experience. Yes. The pain of getting this particular gift sucked a lot. But the self-awareness and insight into the depths of my own soul would never have been achieved if I’d traveled the path I thought was mine to travel: being a wife and having a few kids.

Once you become a wife and mother you never get the gift of focusing 100% of your time figuring out what makes you you and how to achieve true happiness. You focus on being a good life partner and on raising the stellar little humans that you created. And rightfully so! But not me. I got to spend decades learning how to live the happy life that was specific and particular to me. By the time I was in my late 40’s I really thought I’d finally found nirvana.

I’d faced my demons. I explored my ugly underbelly and learned how to give myself grace. I knew my self-absorption came at a price but I found it a price I was willing to pay. I was happy. Truly happy.

And then this on December 1, 2015.

“It appears that all of this can be explained by what appears to be multiple sclerosis. You’ll have to get a lumbar puncture to confirm the diagnosis but I’m nearly certain you have MS.”

Then I was told the story about how I’d likely not even need a cane until I was in my 70’s. Then I was told the story about how my aggressive decline into ever worsening degrees of disability was mysterious and atypical and would likely level off (probably?). Then I was told the story about how my spinal cord actually looked like fancy Swiss cheese by that nice doctor at the Cleveland Clinic who said it was kind of a miracle that I was even standing in her office. And then I was told the best story of all. The one that told me everything would be ok as long as I kept using it so I didn’t lose it (it being the use of my useless legs) – everything would be ok if I could just work hard enough.

And all of the sudden it was fairly obvious why the Willingness worksheet and all of it’s annoying questions about stories dogged me so. Suddenly my newly acquired and debilitating anxiety makes a whole lot of sense.

My life is so full of stories that even the act of writing them down and sharing them publicly, much to the chagrin of nearly every member of my immediate family, doesn’t seem to help me identify them in my weekly appointments on Thursdays at 3pm any easier.

I’m buried in stories. Stories I can’t stop telling even if I don’t realize what the stories mean while I’m telling them.

I find it mildly amusing that my appointment time with Cheryl for twenty years or so was also Thursdays at 3pm. My team at work knew not to ask me to attend meetings on Thursday late afternoons because my sanity (or lack thereof) absolutely depended on me not missing my standing 3:00pm Thursday “meeting.” Nobody wanted to deal with the version of Beth they got to deal with on the days I was forced to cancel that particular meeting.

I’m sure there’s a story there somewhere.