Adult[s] swim

About a dozen years ago, I was seeing a counselor and working on some stuff. (Obviously. Why else do you seek counseling?)

 One day after I had been rambling on about what my family wanted and what the Carmelites wanted and what my  friends wanted and so on, she asked me, “And what does Michael want?”

I was stumped. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had no idea what I wanted. What I wanted was to know what you wanted, and then I would want that. So you would like me. I guess I wanted you to like me.

A few days before I had been talking to a bunch of guys and had mentioned that I felt like Bruce Banner, the guy who turns into the Hulk when he got angry. 
         

“Don’t get me angry,” he/I said. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” 
           

And one of my best friends immediately asked, “And what would happen if we didn’t like you?” 
         

“The world would end,” I said without blinking, half-joking and more than half-fearful. 
           

As I pondered the questions, what did I want and what would happen if people didn’t like me, I began to realize that it had been so long since I let myself think about what I wanted -- instead of what was right or what should be done or what was important or what other people wanted or needed -- that I could not answer a very simple question: What do I want? 
           

 Ask me what I want to eat and I can be thrown into a quandary. My usual answer: “What do you want"

Ask Tom and he will tell you, I am far from over this. He asks, “Where do you want to go to eat?” and even though I want to go for Indian, I will always say, “I don’t care.”

Okay, I am getting better about saying i want Indian food, so maybe that's not the best example. But you get my drift.

When we were building the house, he would ask what color I wanted for walls or what furniture I wanted or what to do about the garden. 
            

“I don’t care.” 
            

At a certain level, this was true and is still true. I don’t care about an awful lot of things. Having spent all of my adult life in a monastery where the walls were already painted, where the furniture was already in the room, where the schedule had been in place for centuries, I had learned to just go with the flow. But I was going with the flow to such an extent that I had forgotten how to swim.

And sometimes, you know, adults have to swim.