Eleanor rehearses the line in her head while she waits.
My default thinking is that no one likes me.
It sounds both dramatic and true, overly self-indulgent and that annoys her. She considers softening it – I sometimes feel people don’t like me – but that sounds evasive. She wants to be honest.
Across the waiting room, a framed print of a misty forest hangs slightly crooked. She wants to straighten it, but tells herself to sit still. There’s a low table stacked with mindfulness magazines she has no inclination to flick through and a box of tissues that looks too deliberately placed. On the door opposite her chair, neat lettering reads: Dr Miriam Clarke, Psychologist.
Eleanor wonders if it’s called an office. It feels too intimate to be a room, too small to be a practice. Office sounds right, though sterile. Her thoughts drift – as they do – and she has to remind herself why she’s here. Then, because she can’t help herself, she wonders why am I here?
Before she can answer herself, the door opens.
‘Eleanor?’
She stands, grabs her bag, and out pops the line she’s been practising.
‘My default thinking is that no one likes me.’ Her heart double beats as the words leave her mouth. She stops abruptly. Too soon! At least get into her office first. Absurd and self-indulgent is not the look she was going for. She wonders if her face has already frozen into permanent cringe. Should she tilt her head slightly? Smile? Nod like a normal human?
Dr Miriam Clarke, a woman in her early 40s with silver-rimmed glasses and a calm voice that Eleanor suspects is not the one she uses with her children, gestures toward the chair. Eleanor tells herself it’s fine, though her mind argues otherwise. Maybe I should have started with something neutral. Weather. Shoes. Hers are nice. Mine look a bit worn. She puts her bag down, sighs, and sits.
‘What makes you think that?’ Miriam asks, calm and measured.
Good question, though not one I was expecting. She realises she’s talking internally, and Miriam’s slightly raised left eyebrow suggests that’s not useful. Eleanor flattens a crease in her pants and says out loud, ‘I’m too blunt, or too much, or not enough, or something … I don’t know. I ask questions that aren’t polite, say things that don’t sound as gentle as I mean them. I think I’m being honest, but apparently honesty needs padding. I never did learn how to pad.’ She stops abruplty, embarrassed by her burbling.
Outside the window, a bird lands on the railing and gives itself a shake. Eleanor focuses on its movements, letting the silence lengthen. The city noise is faint beyond the glass – traffic, sirens, the mechanical sigh of a bus pulling in to the stop a floor below.
When she’d first arrived in the city, she’d taken a long time to settle in. The city disoriented her – it was too loud, too fast, too much. It hadn’t helped that she’d spent too long finding a proper place to live. She’d spent months house sitting, staying with friends of people she knew, renting a room above a garage that had a bathroom but no kitchen. She felt disconnected and she so desperately wanted to connect.
She’d gone to a women’s book group in Toorak for a few months. Nice enough women, though she sometimes wondered if any of them actually liked to read. They talked more about retreats in Provence, how the Amalfi coast ‘just isn’t the same these days’, about having to ski in Denver this year because they just couldn’t make Switzerland work. Eleanor had wanted to talk about books – not the cover art or the author’s holiday house, but the writing itself: how they were written, what made them work or fall apart, the sentences that stayed with you for weeks, and the ones that stopped you in your tracks.
Then there was the writer’s group, which had a meet-up one Sunday a month in a pub in Fitzroy. She was determined to go, to meet people, to talk writing, to hear about what others were writing, to share stories of the struggle of writing good sentences, to learn how others cope with rejection. Outside the pub door, she felt the familiar flutter – the one that comes before entering a room full of people who could dislike you. She’d pushed through the door anyway, spotted twenty people talking in tight little circles, walked closer and waited for someone to notice her. She’d stood there for what felt like ten full minutes, waiting for just one person to look up … no one did.
‘I thought it best to just leave,’ she tells Miriam, and instantly recognises how it wasn’t best to just leave.
Miriam says something measured about connection taking time, about shared interests and patience, but Eleanor is lost in her thoughts and only half hears her.
Later that afternoon, at home, she makes tea and sits at her kitchen table. A shaft of light catches the rim of her mug, turning the steam gold. She’s been trying to photograph light again – the way it illuminates the flowers she’s stuck in a vase, how it changes what you see – and grabs her camera. The light is still strong, creating bright edges that lose all detail.
It made her think of a photographer she follows on Instagram who once said something about “protecting your highlights.” She searches his YouTube channel till she finds the video and watches it again. He means it technically – exposing correctly so the brightest parts of the image don’t blow out – but then he gets philosophical. Protect your highlights in life too, he says. Those moments of brightness that remind you who you are.
‘Interesting’, she says aloud.
On a whim, she goes into her room and pulls a box down from the top of the wardrobe. Inside are things she’s kept without understanding why, things she hasn’t looked at in years: scrawled feedback on an old piece of writing: Your analysis is thoughtful and original. Beautifully expressed. A card from a former student: Thank you for helping me see what I could do. A note from a friend on her 50th birthday: Visiting you today was more like visiting a sister. A reference she’d kept from her first workplace, the paper yellowed at the edges, the letters slightly uneven, unmistakably typewritten: Miss Eleanor Hardy is a highly competent and diligent employee. She approaches her duties with professionalism and care, and would be an asset to any organisation.
She lays them all out on the bed, one by one. Evidence, small, steady reminders of her highlights.
It is clear, not everyone has disliked her. Some people, it seems, have clearly liked her.
Eleanor goes back to the table, and writes herself a note:
Protect your highlights.
She props it against the vase of mini gerberas she’d been photographing earlier.
The following week, Eleanor is back in the psychologist’s office, still unsure about her motivation for being there.
Same chair, same muted city noise beyond the window. She flattens the same crease in her pants, then looks up.
“I’ve had a thought,” she says slowly, pleased with herself for waiting till she’d sat down before speaking. “Maybe the problem isn’t that people don’t like me. Maybe it’s that I don’t believe them when they do”
Miriam’s left eyebrow lifts slightly. “That’s a powerful thought.”
That afternoon, at home, Eleanor takes another photograph of the late light spilling across the table. This time, she adjusts the exposure, careful not to lose the detail in the bright edge of the mug.
She saves the image to a new folder: Highlights.
Musings from the cold 