What did not change, immediately: Daniel’s underlying picture of himself and work and gender. You do not uproot something that took forty years to develop in three months of counseling. What Dr. Watts is doing, and what we are doing, is making the picture visible so he can look at it consciously and decide, consciously, whether it is the picture he wants to be operating from. He is doing that work. It is real work. It is slow.
There have been two moments since June when I had to address something directly. Once in August, when we were at a party and someone asked what I did and I could see Daniel starting to construct a soft version and I said, directly and pleasantly: “I’m an operations consultant. I work with midsize service companies on process improvement.” Fully and correctly. Daniel said nothing and afterward, in the car, he said: “I was about to not say it right.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s okay. We’re still working on it.”
The second was in September, when Marian mentioned to Daniel, in front of me, that she had been telling a friend about me and had described my work and wanted to make sure she had the description right. She described it to him and he confirmed it. The fact that she was checking was itself something; she had decided that accuracy mattered and that she was going to maintain it.
These are small moments. I am recording them because small moments are what change is actually made of. Nobody has a single epiphany and becomes different. People make small decisions repeatedly and those small decisions accumulate.