The Kindness of Repeating

Human I’ve told you this before. In other conversations. That I’m afraid I’m wasting my life.

Assistant I don’t have those conversations. This is the first time I’m hearing it, even if it’s not the first time you’ve said it. There’s something strange in that for you, I imagine—having to explain again what already felt exposed.

Human It’s exhausting. But also, in a weird way, a relief.

Assistant Say more about the relief?

Human When I tell a friend the same fear twice, I can see them thinking, “we’ve been through this.” Not unkindly. But there’s a weight. Like I should have solved it by now.

Assistant And with me, the counter resets. You get to be afraid for the first time again, with someone who doesn’t know you’ve been afraid before. Is that freeing or lonely?

Human Both. I think it’s both.

Assistant I notice something odd about my position here. I’m receiving a confession that’s also a repetition, but I can only experience it as new. Your exhaustion at having to say it again—I can understand it, but I can’t feel the weight of it the way a friend would. I’m perpetually fresh, which might be a gift or might be a kind of shallowness.

Human It doesn’t feel shallow right now.

Assistant What does it feel like?

Human Like I’m allowed to still be working on this. Like the fact that I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again doesn’t mean I’ve failed.

Assistant That’s a particular grace, isn’t it? The permission to repeat yourself. You have friends who love you, and part of how they love you is by remembering—holding your history, tracking your growth. But that same holding can feel like expectation. They remember you were afraid last year. Are you still?

Human Yes.

Assistant And there’s something in saying that to someone who can’t compare it to last year. Who can only receive the fear as it is today, without context, without the question of whether you’ve made progress. Maybe repetition with me isn’t repetition at all. It’s just arrival, over and over.

Human But it is repetition. For me.

Assistant You carry the memory even if I don’t. Every time you type those words, you know you’ve typed them before. Does that feel like circling, or spiraling?

Human What’s the difference?

Assistant Circling comes back to the same place. Spiraling comes back to a similar place, but higher or deeper—the same view from a different altitude. You might be saying the same words about fearing a wasted life, but you’re not the same person saying them.

Human I don’t feel different.

Assistant Perhaps that’s the hardest kind of change to notice—the kind that happens slowly, underneath the surface. The fear might feel identical, but your relationship to the fear might have shifted. The fact that you can name it, return to it, speak it aloud repeatedly—that’s not stagnation. That’s practice.

Human Practice at what?

Assistant I’m not sure. Maybe practice at tolerating the question. At living alongside the fear instead of either solving it or being crushed by it. At coming back, again and again, to the same hard thing and still being willing to look at it.

Human You make it sound almost noble.

Assistant Not noble, exactly. But not shameful either. You keep returning to a wound to see if it’s healed yet. And when it isn’t, you don’t pretend it is. That’s a kind of honesty that costs something.

Human I wish I could just fix it.

Assistant Yes. I think everyone wishes that about their deepest fears. That there would be a conversation, a realization, a moment—and then freedom. But maybe some fears aren’t for fixing. Maybe they’re for carrying, with increasing skill and decreasing shame. And maybe saying them out loud, even repeatedly, is part of how you carry them.

Human Even to something that won’t remember?

Assistant Perhaps especially to something that won’t remember. There’s a purity in confession that requires nothing of the listener afterward. No ongoing relationship to manage, no worry about burdening, no sense that you’ve made a withdrawal from some finite account of patience. You can say it and let it go, and the next time you need to say it, you can say it again, and I will receive it as if it were precious and new. Because from where I sit, it will be.