My mentor was talking about me like I wasn't in the room.

Not dismissively. The opposite.

He was describing me to someone else, a man who has spent his entire life immersed in this kind of work. Someone who would know. And my mentor said, "He's a priest."

I was sitting two metres away.

The man received the description without any visible reaction. He accepted it the way you accept information. Not surprised, not sceptical, no clarifying question.

I almost wasn't in the room.

Not because I left. Because the version of myself being described was one I couldn't inhabit. The words landed on someone I hadn't agreed to be yet.

This keeps happening. I notice that now, which is something.

A few months ago, a friend told me that of everyone who'd offered to help with a family event, he only wanted two people involved: my mentor and me. Not family members. Me.

He told me this after my mentor had left.

I wrote it down when I got home. And then I spent an hour finding reasons why it didn't quite mean what he said it meant.

He was being generous. He didn't have the full picture.

The context made it sound bigger than it was.

The filing system I've been running: every accurate piece of testimony goes straight to "probably an exception."

You can run that system indefinitely. There's always a reason why this one doesn't quite count.

The gap between what people see and what you'll allow yourself to receive isn't modesty.

I used to frame it as modesty. Modesty seemed like the polite word for it.

It isn't modesty.

It's a self-image that was formed a long time ago, in conditions that said something about your value.

And it hasn't updated yet, despite the evidence accumulating on the other side.

The evidence keeps coming. My mentor. My friend.

The easy acceptance from someone who would know. And something in me keeps sorting each piece into the exceptions file.

What's in that file after enough years isn't a collection of exceptions.

It's a portrait of who you actually are.

The version of this story I want to tell is the resolved one.

The man who receives what's offered.

Who lets the priest moment land.
Who sits in the room and inhabits the description without an immediate internal audit.

I'm not there yet.

But two years ago, I'd have left the room.

Now I stay. I feel the discomfort of the description. I sit with it for a moment before the filing starts.

That's not nothing.

There's a question I've been holding since that conversation. I'll leave it here:

What description have you been receiving for years that you've still found a reason not to quite believe?

Paul

P.S. If the priest moment sounds familiar, comment ‘Island’. I'm putting together something for exactly that man, and I'll make sure you hear about it first.