I look at trees more than I used to. I don't fully know when that started.
There is one on the way to the lab that I have now walked past several hundred times, and I could not have told you a single thing about it for the first hundred.
It has been doing something
the entire time I have known it
and I have never once seen it happen.
growth you cannot watch
This is the part that gets me.
You cannot observe a tree growing. Not with attention, not with patience, not by standing there. The process is real, continuous, and permanently below the threshold of the instrument you are using.
You can only ever observe that it has grown, retroactively, by comparison, and usually by accident — an old photograph, a branch that now reaches something it did not used to reach.
I find that reassuring and slightly unbearable in equal measure, mostly because I have spent this entire website trying to check whether I am getting better yet.
Question
Am I actually different, or am I just describing myself more articulately?
What I learned later
Unanswerable from inside. The only evidence available to me is the occasional old photograph — something I wrote two years ago that I now disagree with, a situation I handled a way I would not have handled it before.
standing
Trees don't get to leave. That's the constraint the whole organism is designed around.
They cannot relocate away from a bad season, or a neighbour, or a drought. So everything they have is adaptation in place — deeper, tougher, differently shaped, dropping what cannot be carried through winter.
I spent a long time believing the answer to a hard season was to go. Different school, different city, different version of myself, keep the calendar full enough that nothing can catch up.
Some of the most useful growth I have done happened in a season I could not leave. Same campus. Same friend groups. Same rooms as someone I could not be around comfortably yet.
Nowhere to go, so the only available direction was down.
standing
waiting
growing
wondering
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.