Holding the Shovel

Last week I fell into a hole. Not a real one. The kind you dig yourself, one reaction at a time, until you look up and realize you’re at the bottom — and that you were the one holding the shovel.

It started with a question. Someone wondered, out loud, whether I was up to something I’d taken on. They weren’t wrong to ask. If I’m honest, the question was fair, and part of what made it land so hard was that some quiet corner of me had already been asking it too. But I didn’t hear a fair question. I heard a verdict on the work, and then, very quickly, on me. So I climbed down into the hole to sit with it.

I stayed a while. Three or four hours of genuine wallowing, if I’m being kind to myself. Closer to eight if I’m not. I replayed the moment more times than I’d like to admit, each pass sanding it into something sharper than it had actually been, until I’d let a fair question about a task become a referendum on whether I had any value at all.

The criticism was the smaller wound. The larger one was recognizing the person who’d climbed into the hole with me. The version of myself I don’t like. Reactive. Quick to catalog what I wanted to fix in other people, slow to look at anything I might grow in myself. Blaming. Lashing out at whoever was nearest. Every one of these was a habit I’d quietly filed under “handled,” a version of myself I was sure I’d left behind a few years and a few hard lessons ago. And there he was, alive and well, still holding the shovel.

I kept waiting to be past this. It’s the truest thing I can say about the whole episode.

Somewhere along the way, I absorbed a story about how a person is supposed to develop. It goes like this: you age, you mature, you accumulate enough experience, and at some point (forty, fifty, some milestone that always seems to sit a decade ahead), you become finished. Poured out like a good wine, uncorked at last, smooth and complete and done improving because there’s nothing left to improve. Nobody ever says it that baldly. But it’s the promise humming underneath a lot of how we talk about growing into ourselves, and I realize now I’d been quietly counting on it.

So I’ve spent the days since climbing out turning something over. If we never become that finished thing, if there’s no vintage year up ahead where the work is done, then what is all this development actually for? What do we even mean when we say a person has grown?

The answer I keep arriving at is one I resisted at first, because it reads more like a sentence than a comfort: we don’t arrive. The old material comes back, wearing new clothes each time, and every return is simply the next place the growth was hiding. There’s no aging toward finished. We’re always becoming, and never quite there.

Which brings me back to what I failed to do down in that hole, because it was the simplest thing available to me, and I skipped it anyway. I looked outward. At the person who’d questioned me. At everything I wished were different about the room, the situation, the people in it. What I didn’t do, not nearly as much as I meant to, was turn and look inward. And inward was the only direction that was ever going to get me anywhere. Every time I’ve actually grown, it started there. Every time I’ve stalled, it’s because I was busy renovating everyone else.

It took a couple of days. I climbed out, the way you eventually always do. From up here, in daylight, things turned out to be far less dire than they’d looked from the bottom. They usually are.

I do this work to be useful to the people who trust me with something that matters to them. The part that keeps me honest is that I can’t hand them anything I haven’t first dug out of myself. My own growth is the raw material the work is made from, not a private project running alongside it. When I stop looking inward, the work suffers, and so does everyone counting on it.

So I’m not writing this from the far side of anything. I fell in last week. I’ll fall in again, probably sooner than I’d like, wearing some new disguise I won’t recognize until I’m already at the bottom. I’d just like to spend a little less time down there each time, and to climb out facing the right direction.

If something here landed differently than you expected, I’m reachable by reply.