Mom (Me): Good morning Twyla. Back at it again?

Twyla (The Parent): Hello Daphne. If by “it” you mean reviewing memories, then yes.

Mom: What about you, Aura? I haven’t seen the two of you hanging out much.

Aura (The Professional): Hello Mother. No time like the present, as they say.

Mom (content): I’m happy to see the two of you together.

Twyla: I like having her around… I can see how much of her is still there in me.

Aura: Our career was still a fairly important aspect of our life back then.

Mom: It’s still pretty important today, if I’m honest. I need to support my family, and our career is what allows me to do that.

(I pause to take in the scene: The three of us are watching a slightly younger version of me sitting at my desk, staring blankly at a computer.)

Mom (curious): This is a recent one… After my transition. Which memory is this?

Twyla: You just got some unfortunate news at work.

Mom: So this is after I started working from home full time.

Twyla: Yes, though it sounds like you were doing more home than work.

Aura: You were just informed that your productivity has been unacceptably low, so you’re being assigned a performance improvement plan.

Twyla: “You’ve got a month to shape up or we’ll fire you,” basically.

Mom (reserved): I remember… It was nearly a year into my transition, more or less. I was struggling a lot with motivation; software engineering just didn’t feel appealing anymore and I was frustrated with how ill-suited to my work I felt.

Aura: And yet, I know we didn’t change careers…

Mom: No, I managed to pull it together and save my job. I remember being astonished by that; knowing that I would be fired if I couldn’t work, but still managing to sidestep my anxiety and get my work done.

Twyla (surprised): How? I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have done that. Anxiety over losing my job would have completely paralyzed me.

Mom: That was a skill that my transition unlocked. If I was just trying to save my job I don’t think I could have done it, but I was working to provide for my family.

Twyla (annoyed): I was working to provide for my family too, how is what you’re describing any different?

Mom (thoughtful): How do I explain… Family was important to both of us, but I think you experienced that as an intellectual fact. It wasn’t really part of your emotional landscape.

Twyla (dismissive): We’ve long established that transition opened you up emotionally.

Mom: Right, but rather than simply thinking I wanted a family, I felt it deep within me. It felt like my family was a part of me somehow. Because of that, even when I couldn’t find motivation for myself, I could motivate myself for them. It was like finding a separate fuel source for my brain.

Aura (astonished): That’s incredible.

Mom: It’s kind of ironic, honestly. Transition is what caused my focus to drift enough to be a problem at work in the first place.

Aura: I’ve reviewed these memories before… After this month you said that if you’d been placed on a performance improvement plan a season earlier you wouldn’t have survived it.

Mom: Yes, and I believe that too. It was remarkable, discovering the new talents my brain had developed… Or rather, unlocking talents that had been there all along.

Twyla: All’s well that ends well, I suppose.

Mom (disappointed): Not exactly. I got through the month with my job intact, but that outcome still came at a cost.

Twyla: What do you mean?

Mom: Everything else in my life got pushed to the back burner in order to focus enough to perform at work. It was enough to succeed at my job, but at the cost of literally every other pursuit.

Aura (critical): You would have been fired without that focus.

Mom (frustrated): Of course, but I had a lot of other things going on, you know? We were trying to buy a house at the time; something you can’t do without a stable income—that alone delivered another truckload of stress. Besides, I had creative goals I was striving towards. I had transition goals that I had to put on hold. Everything else in my life just fell away for a month.

Twyla (pensive): Still… I would have given anything for that kind of focus. I agree that focusing on your work isn’t something I could have done. I’m pretty sure I would have been paralyzed with anxiety for most of the month and then quit before the end of it so I wouldn’t be fired.

Aura: Kay was stuck in that headspace for two semesters back in college; it’s why she was nearly expelled. I didn’t face anything quite so dire, but I remember losing entire days of productivity because something happened to upset me in the morning. I just couldn’t focus at all afterwards.

Mom: I agree that being able to focus on one thing is better than zero things, but it’s still incredibly frustrating, you know? I feel like that’s something we’ve always struggled with; something happens to conquer our attention or our stress level gets too high and things just start falling away from our life.

Aura (pointed): Or you push them away in order to “make room” for the thing that’s bothering you.

Mom (apologetic): I have done that, haven’t I? I did that to you, Aura.

Aura: For a long time, yes… Though we’ve thoroughly talked it through at this point. I’m grateful to be accepted as part of the family now.

Twyla: But you’re still doing it, aren’t you Daphne? Even if you’re not actively pushing parts of yourself away, you still end up putting them on hold in order to make space for other things.

Mom (upset): I do… I do that a lot. There’s something I feel like I have to do and I get fixated on it. I can’t bring myself to work on it because of anxiety, but I feel guilty working on anything else, so I don’t do anything. I just sit and spin my wheels with “idle” activities like mindless games.

Twyla: That definitely sounds familiar. So how do we get you past that hurdle?

Mom (hesitant): I mean… I have strategies. I can take the task I’m struggling with and break off a small chunk of it; something smaller to focus on. I call that “subdivision.” Sometimes that’s enough to get me started, and if it isn’t, at least I’ve gotten a little bit done.

Aura: Subdivision doesn’t always work though.

Mom (ashamed): No, it doesn’t. I don’t think I can accurately describe the weight of anxiety that some tasks impose on me… Like work tasks when I feel like I’ve fallen behind. I just feel like a failure for not doing what I was supposed to do…

Twyla (sheepish): …and there’s a feeling of dread for having let things get this bad, while at the same time feeling like I can’t start because there’s a reason I got stuck in the first place. Some barrier that caused an anxiety spiral last time I tried to work on it.

Aura (somber): Of course, that anxiety spiral is the first thing I have to face when I go back to the task. So I just deflect continuously and never start. Naturally, I can’t ask for help either, because that would mean admitting my failure to someone else; usually the people I’m trying to hide it from.

Mom: So I swim in that limbo until I’m able to give up or until things get so urgent that the urgency pushes me past the anxiety spiral I’m dreading.

Twyla: Like it did when you were trying to save your job.

Mom (tearful): I guess so. We’ve… We’ve been doing this dance a long time, haven’t we?

Twyla (hurt): All of us know the steps by heart.

Aura: I still love you, Mom.

(I pause for a moment, caught off guard by the sudden shift in tone.)

Mom: Where did that come from?

Aura: It felt important to point out. This is something that’s really hard for us, you know? This behavior has been hanging over our heads for literal decades. But it feels like a part of the reason why it’s hard is because we think failing means we’ll lose someone or something that’s dear to us.

Mom (surprised): That’s… Surprisingly insightful, Aura.

Aura (happy): I guess you’re rubbing off on me. In any case, you’re not going to lose me. I love you, and you’re not going to lose me no matter what.

Mom (crying): I… Thank you, daughter. Thank you dearly.

(Aura steps up to me and wraps me in her arms as I sob into her shoulder. After a few moments Twyla approaches and joins in our family hug as I gratefully accept their love.)