THE DIRECTIONS OF YOUR HEART

The Directions of Your Heart

Before killing myself, methods of which I’d been devising in my jumbled mind for several weeks, I decided to consult a professional. Not a professional in self-destruction—I didn’t think I even needed one, since my ideas of how to end my life had been predictably creative—but one of those people trained in what’s optimistically called Mental Health. 

I couldn’t afford a real one; I had to depend on what I could get from government assistance, so my expectations weren’t high. But when I walked into the office and saw what the government had given me, my heart sank. Of course, the hearts of people who need therapy are always sinking, that’s part of their problem—but still! This was my assigned therapist? A fledgling female who had barely stepped out of the egg, what could she possibly know? 

I sat observing this tall, robust, curly-headed child through a lens it had taken me five decades of life experience to grind and polish, and I can’t say my assessment improved her case any. Her cheeks were full and lightly freckled. She wore a silky cream-colored blouse which, though buttoned to the chin, didn’t hide the robustness, and a straight skirt which, though pulled modestly over her knees, didn’t hide the strong calves of a girl who doubtless climbed mountains on skis when she wasn’t psychoanalyzing middle-aged women with out-of-joint noses. And lo, after listening to me talk for thirty minutes, she had called me a gifted child. Gifted child!

Not ‘called me’ as in accused me. She’d been watching me through lenses of her own, framed in suitably psychoanalytic horn rims, and she had made this pronouncement: “It seems to me you were a gifted child.”

“Well, yes,” I tossed it off impatiently, “of course I was.”

“And that must have been very hard for you.”

“Not really.”

“I mean, what if you had brought home a bug in a jar, to keep and study, would your mother have shrieked and told you to get rid of it?”

“My mother was an entomologist.”

“What I’m trying to say is,” the girl went on, as patient as I was impatient, “didn’t you often feel that the adults around you misunderstood the directions of your heart?”

The directions of your heart—nice phrase, I mused. She probably didn’t know how nice it was. I made up my mind to steal it. I might use it, in a song…a short story…

“Did the question make you uncomfortable?” she was asking. Her smile irritated me. It seemed more maternal than professional, and by maternal I mean like other people’s mothers’ smiles. Not mine; my mother’s smiles had never been maternal. Proud, almost aggressively encouraging, but not maternal. What, then, did I imagine would constitute a maternal smile? Oh, just, I don’t know, a smile that expressed love. Not love as pride, or approval, not love as a reward for brilliance. ‘Unconditional love,’ I guess they call it, though the expression always made me cringe; unconditional love, la-di-da, what the fuck kind of love was that?

“No, I’m not uncomfortable in the least.” I shrugged one shoulder. I was more on the level of killing myself, not feeling uncomfortable. “Why would it make me uncomfortable?”

“You stopped talking when I mentioned the directions of your heart, and I wondered if something had come up for you.”

‘Come up for you’—they teach them this jargon in psycho school. I looked at her pityingly. She still wore that smile, on lips that still wore the glister of youth and hope. Well, yes, I did feel somewhat uncomfortable, and in a way it was her smile that made me so. If there were such a thing as unconditional love, this might be what it would look like. And suddenly, or creepingly, I had a sense that it was unconditional love being aimed at me right now—and I didn’t deserve it. Alright, Dr. Freud, you heard me from your grave. Aha, she duss not fink she is deserving of der unconditional luff! I giggled.

“What is it?” the therapist asked kindly. 

“What is what?”

“Something made you laugh.”

“It was nothing.” I gave her my own smile, which is actually pretty damn conditional, and at the same time—because I couldn’t meet her honest brown eyes—I looked off at the Dracaena plant growing laboriously in a dim corner with a half-inch of water in its saucer. To tell the truth, I felt myself wilting, as indeed that Dracaena might do if exposed to an overly direct beam of light. 

“That term, ‘gifted child’—” I grumbled. “It’s become so popular of late! But it always has the implication that the child is misunderstood because its parents are morons. I think that’s the lucky kind of gifted child; it can just retreat to its own world, with its own rules and validations. But what about the gifted child whose parents are both geniuses? That child lives under a microscope. It can’t pick a leaf off a tree without being told it’s a natural scientist. It can’t press three piano keys without being told it’s going to Julliard. It can’t even cry without being told it’s grieving for the injustices of the world.”

“I’m sorry,” said my young lady. I really wished she would stop smiling. It was small, the smile, showing no teeth and not stretching her face out of shape, and it demanded no return from me, so why were my knickers in a knot over it? Alright, rhetorical question; we’ve already established that I didn’t deserve an unconditional smile.

“Don’t be sorry,” I said, speaking toward the plant. “It’s not your fault.”

“I meant, I’m sorry that you’ve had to live under a microscope. You must have wished people would leave you alone sometimes, so you could just do your thing.”

Just do your thing. My thing was to kill myself, remember? Or hadn’t I mentioned that to her?

“This is making me feel very cross,” I said, crossing my legs to illustrate my point.

“I can see that. Do you know why?”

“Yes.” I uncrossed my legs to cross them the other way. “No.”

“Would you like to talk a little about it?”

“You’re inviting me to talk?”

“Yes, if you wish.”

“Well, I can’t. I can’t talk under those circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

“Of being invited to talk. Or cry. Whenever someone invites me, I clam up.”

“Alright, that’s natural,” she said. Natural? I hardly thought my response was natural. “We don’t have to talk. We can just sit here quietly and relax.”

“Thank you.”

We sat, quietly, relaxedly.

“But you’d have to stop smiling at me.”

“Of course.” The smile disappeared. Her face nonetheless retained a pleasant peacefulness which was almost as unconditional as the smile had been, and I couldn’t very well ask her to remove her face. We kept on relaxing quietly, until the silence whined like a hornet in my ear.

“Okay,” I cried. “I was a gifted child. I was lonely and misunderstood. I was a nut. Mediocre kids with ordinary talents were applauded and I wasn’t. And when they stuck me in a ‘Gifted Child’ program, that was the worst yet, because I was expected to perform, to shine, to invent something, to be smart on socially recognizable terms. And what I wanted most was to be ordinary.”

“It didn’t work for you, then, the program?”

“It didn’t work for anyone! Who wants to be a gifted child? Grownups do not understand what gifted kids need, and the grownups with degrees saying they do especially don’t.”

“Do you?” She half-rose, to hand me a booklet: Understanding the Gifted Child.

I leafed through it quickly, cursorily, and handed it back. Certain phrases had popped out as my eye cruised by, but I didn’t need to see them, since they were the usual bullshit. “Nobody asked me what I wanted,” I said. “If they had, I wouldn’t have been able to answer; I wasn’t that gifted.”

“Could you answer now?” She cocked her head a little to one side, an adorable little bird— although not little, way bigger than me.

“Why? I’m not a gifted child anymore.”

“You seem like one to me.”

“A gifted child?”

“A child.”

“Oh. Not gifted, then.” 

“Gifted or not, it doesn’t matter, does it? Any child can cry.”

Any child can cry. I had not forgotten that only minutes ago I’d seen this therapist as a child—a ‘tall, robust, curly-headed’ one, but nonetheless a child. It seemed unfair that she was so easily seeing me as one now. Maybe a short, nervous, graying one, but I wasn’t paying to have some clever college girl practice her empathy lessons on me. (Not that I was paying.)   

I said, “I think you might be overwatering that Dracaena.”

“Do you think that’s its problem?” She gave it a critical glance.

“Yes. You should let it dry out for a week.”

“And should I let you dry out for a week, too?” she asked. “Have I overwatered you?”

“No, no, not at all!” I laughed, rising. The clock said our time was up, and I didn’t want her to have to tell me that. “You’ve done a good job.”

She rose, too. “I mean, will you be back next week?”

Now, that was a hard one. I sure hadn’t planned to. I barely made it through this one session without biting my own fingers off. I believe I’d wanted my problem to be, 1) something arcane, impossible to identify, and 2) darkly romantic, the slimy tentacles of madness tearing asunder my fragile—gifted—perspective on life. I wanted to need to kill myself. I did not want to be told by some neophyte that I suffered from a malady so common it could be seen the minute I entered the room. I have my pride, even if it’s fed by the crumbs of self-delusion.

“Yes,” I heard myself say. “Sure, I guess so. Next week, then.”

“And you’ll think about this child inside you and what it wanted—what it still wants?”

“Okay, I’ll think about ‘my inner child,’” I smirked.

“Don’t make fun of it,” she said. 

“I’m not.”

“I think you are.”

“It’s just…” I felt very strange. My eyes were wet. I have a hard coating, like a beetle, and at that moment I felt it sliding off me in sheets, leaving me helplessly exposed. I said, “I think I want something pretty simple, really, and always did.”

“Does that surprise you?”

“Of course. I don’t want to be simple, and I don’t want to be solved simply.”

“Aww. I don’t blame you.” 

We were both standing. It was natural enough for her to take two steps toward me, natural enough for her to put her arms around me and draw me against her shoulder. It was natural of me to accept it, even while feeling inwardly that I should be more complicated than this, more complicated than a fifty-year-old child shedding ancient tears on a young stranger’s cream-silk blouse because I’d been unconditionally invited to do so.

“This is ridiculous,” I murmured.

“No,” she answered, “it’s not. A gifted child wants even its problems to show genius, because that’s what they’re going to be loved for. But wouldn’t it feel good just to be held, like babies are?”

“A gifted baby,” I laughed, pulling away. “Smart enough to accept a hug and get on with its life, eh? You’re pretty clever.”

“No,” she said, “I’m not. I’m a student working toward my Master’s. But I didn’t hug you out of being taught to; I was taught not to, if you want to know. It’s just…the heart knows when another heart’s in pain, and if you were raised on a ranch, like I was, you just kind of do what’s natural.”

What’s natural. I climbed the stairs and emerged into warm sunlight, thinking about what was natural. What was natural was not killing myself; indeed, that was most unnatural. What was natural was the heart, always listening, always reaching, always holding close to itself its personal road map and following the directions without a second guess. And right then, sitting on the broad concrete steps of the building, I wrapped my little self in my arms—shhh, shhh, shhh.