Sophia

I once wrote a poem for a woman I believed held the light by which I could see. I called her Sophia. By the time I learned to distinguish what was hers, what was mine, and what had arisen between us, we had already come apart.

I wrote:

Years later, I read it again and realised I had written a mirror and sent it to her as though it were a portrait. I thought I was writing about the cost of her role. Instead, I was writing about mine. The poem was not wrong. It was inaccurately attributed.

Her light was real. Her wisdom, grace and friendship were real. Finding my own did not make any of that an illusion. I had not imagined the light in her. I had made her the keeper of all of it. I had added the unrecognised gold in my own shadow to what was already hers, then mistaken the brightness for proof that she held all the answers.

We tend to think projection means seeing something in another person that is not there. Sometimes it does. But sometimes projection is not fabrication. It is recognition without accurate attribution.

We see courage, brilliance, tenderness, beauty or wisdom in another person and experience it as entirely theirs. We do not recognise that part of what allows us to see it—part of what responds so intensely to it—may also be something in ourselves that we have not yet learned how to receive. That does not make the other person an empty screen. Their light may be entirely real. But we can cast our own light across theirs until we can no longer distinguish what burns within them, what originated within us, and what became visible only because we encountered each other.

I would later learn to call some of this projection, and some of it transference. At the time, it felt like recognition. And it was recognition. I simply did not yet know what I was recognising, or where it belonged.

I would write the poem differently now.

The change in name matters. Sophia was the woman onto whom I placed wisdom. Camille was the woman who could recognise wisdom everywhere except within herself.

Our coming together made the light visible. Only our coming apart made its sources distinguishable. Separation did not reveal that the light had been mine all along. It revealed that I had been unable to see its different sources. Some was hers. Some was mine. Some belonged to neither of us independently. It had arisen through the particular composition of us.

Accurate attribution does not require diminishing another person so that we can reclaim ourselves. Her light does not have to become false for mine to become visible. But admiration becomes a load when we make another person the bearer of capacities we have disowned. No person should have to carry all the wisdom, beauty or possibility we cannot yet recognise in ourselves.

By the time I could see what had also lived in me, there was no longer a between in which to stand beside her in it. Finding my own light did not make hers less real. It did not return her wisdom, grace or friendship to my life. And it did not answer the question of what might have become possible between us if I had known how to stand in my own light beside hers.

That possibility cannot now be tested.

I can see her light now without disappearing from view. I can see mine without reducing hers. I can see that something else existed only between us. I can see the difference now.

And yet, there is still a gap in my heart where what was genuinely hers was once given to me.