Grundoon calls me on Tuesday morning. I tell her that the beau broke up with me about a month ago. She talks about friends in California and what she is doing. I have the thought: "She has her husband and friends and caregivers. She doesn't need me."

I wake in the morning Wednesday and think Grundoon doesn't need me. The beau doesn't need me. The kids need me a bit, the introverted thinker at 14 and the extroverted feeler turning 19, but not that much. That is, they are separating as they should. I am probably helping some patients, but they would find another doctor if I disappeared. No one needs me. I don't feel lonely or sad. Instead, my longing has lifted.

I've been swamped with longing for years. In the emotional process of individuation as an adult, I've unearthed and recovered and processed grief, fear, humiliation and others. Unearthing any bit of old stuffed emotion is rather like hitting oil, an overwhelming geyser for a while. I don't seem to run out. I have less and less anger as I do it, because anger was the capstone on the stuffed emotions. But the whole thing has been suffused and underpinned and overlaid and overwhelmed with longing. For intimacy, I suppose. If you stuff/bury/hide large parts of yourself, then intimacy is a challenge, right? Meaning "in to me see". How can you get close to someone when the closeness may uncap one of those deadly oil wells? I have gone after the wells once I figured out that they were there, like a magnet towards iron, like a homing pigeon, like an arrow from cupid's bow. But longing did not feel like a single well. It was just there, as if the earth was made of it, as if the sky was full, the very air made up of oxygen, nitrogen and longing. If there are many emotions and thoughts that are not safe with your parents, or whoever is there when you are a baby and need to attach, you still have to go through that developmental attachment stage. As an adult, you have to parent yourself until some core part believes that it is not only lovable but loved.

Feeling not needed, I would have thought that would give me the opposite feeling. Depression, loneliness, feeling useless, I'll get old and die alone, I'll follow my children and grandchildren around begging for attention. Instead, I feel light. Happy. Slightly high. Untethered, weightless. I swim laps in the morning and I am light in the water, float higher than usual. I want to hold on to the feeling even though I know one doesn't hold on to any feeling. As soon as I want to hold onto it, I tell the feeling to return to the Source and give a good report of me. It waffles and then stays for a while.

I watched a musical last night, Fred Astaire, Leslie Caron, Daddy Long Legs. Romantic and dancing. Longing returned, but more like a habit, an old coat that I was pulling on. I took it off again.

What next?