The evening nobody wanted to speak

What was happening

Four of the eight had been flat for more than five months. Two had had a dose increase in the autumn that did nothing. One had come to say she was stopping and had not managed to say it. Everybody had, at some point in the previous fortnight, been told by somebody outside this community to trust the process.

What I had not accounted for is that a circle of people in long plateaus, in January, with nothing to report, has nothing to give each other in the way it usually does. The circle normally runs on somebody being further along. That night nobody was.

What I did and what I would do differently

I named the silence, which was right. Then I filled it, which was wrong. I talked for about four minutes about what a plateau is physiologically and I could hear myself doing it — reaching for information because information is comfortable and sitting in a flat room is not. Annika said afterwards, kindly, that she had stopped listening.

What worked, eventually, was much smaller. I asked each person for one sentence about something that was not this. Not a lesson, not a silver lining. Just one sentence. Somebody's dog had been at the vet. Somebody had finished a long book. By the third sentence the room was a room again.

Where we left it

Twenty minutes short. I ended it early rather than stretching it, and said so. Three people stayed on afterwards, which is when the person who had come to say she was stopping said it, and two others said they had been thinking about it too. That conversation was the reason the call mattered and it happened after I had formally closed it, which tells me something about the shape of the hour that I am still thinking about.