We were talking about a promotion. My boss and I were going through my responsibilities and what the next step in my role would look like. Then he stopped and asked me something else.

“I’ve worked with you for years,” he said. “And I still don’t know who you are. Who is Katya?”

He was not criticizing me. He was curious. He had noticed something for a long time and finally decided to say it out loud. Then we went back to discussing the job.

I don’t remember what we decided about the promotion. I remember that I had no answer to his question.

At the time I did not even understand what he was asking. I don’t mean that I dodged the question. I genuinely could not see what he meant, or what he thought was missing. The answer came about a year later, and it came through the worst months of my life.

But the story starts earlier.

In my family, nobody talked about feelings. My parents didn’t, and neither did my grandparents. It was not concealment. That generation was never taught how — nobody had given them the skill, so they had none to pass on.

I moved to Israel from Moscow at twenty-seven. Two years later I realized I needed a therapist. Those first sessions were not about my problems. They were about learning to name what I felt — to look inward and find the word for it. I was twenty-nine years old, and I was learning basic vocabulary. But naming a feeling to yourself, in a quiet room, once a week, is one skill. Showing it to another person is a different one, and that one I still did not have.

That, I think, is what my boss had been looking at for years. Not a person hiding something. A person keeping up a front — no anger,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)