Of blank slates and sleeper sofas

I moved offices almost two months ago. My previous office, aka “the coffin” was an ok-enough rectangular room with dim lighting, two windows facing on a hallway, and a mysterious therapy couch that turned out to be a sleeper sofa complete with sheets and blanket (something I never would have suspected had one of my kid clients not removed the cushions one afternoon). My new office has skylights, a window with a glimpse of cloud and sun, and furniture (no sleeper sofa!) and artwork of my choice. Oh, and a door that I can lock and unlock with a key, which my previous office lacked.

The (open) coffin was located in a building downtown with downtown problems, including expensive, hard-to-find parking and a ubiquitous, generally mentally ill contingent of folks who were homeless and sometimes difficult. My new office is not completely inoculated from urban issues, though the parking situation is better. The building itself is homey, from the bathrooms with post-it notes (“Baby, it’s cold outside,” read one by the window lock, “use incense.”) to my suite’s comforting aura of herbal teas and reheated casseroles. Even the therapeutic naïveté that allows clinicians to leave a lighter by that bathroom incense charms me. There are apparently no fears of clients with pyromaniacal tendencies putting it to a less altruistic use, such as lighting the rice paper that lines the window or creating a conflagration of paper towels. Here we are all in pursuit of self-knowledge, our inner demons keeping a curious, respectful distance while we politely and thoroughly fumigate bathrooms after use.

It’s a building that engenders affection in me for my adopted hometown and my chosen profession, strange as the job feels at times. And the ability, the privilege, to decorate my office from floor to window has been wonderful. I have a room of my own as a grown-up, a neat and tidy space that houses my working life and provides a physical frame for my sessions.

But it’s also very “me.” While I don’t think any office decorating decision is neutral, some are more personal than others. My choices reflect my quirks, known and unknown. I am aware of the potential for clients to respond to my furnishings in a variety of ways and have done my best to choose inoffensive items that also do not appropriate from other cultures. Still, reactions are inevitable. What happens when a client has a strong response to my décor and art?

It happened (out loud) in a recent session and it was fascinating. And unnerving. I wish I could tell you about it. Instead, I’ll file it away in the “grist for the mill” category, recognizing that no interaction—and no therapist—can occupy absolutely neutral ground. We take a stance through how we look and how we talk, through the artwork on our walls (even when that artwork is not of our choosing), and the clothing we wear. The client forms an idea about us based on their own experiences, assumptions, associations, and memories. It’s what we do with this stuff of the mind, how we hold room to talk about and reflect on it, that creates the space for meaning and connection.

But I can give you one piece of advice. If you are a therapist in the market for an office couch and find yourself contemplating a sleeper sofa, go ahead and buy it if you’re getting a good deal. But don’t outfit it with sheets and blankets. Don’t use it for sleeping. A nap stretched out on an office couch is one thing. A sleep in between the sheets on a pull-out couch in your office is another. One is restorative. The other is a bit creepy. Yes, even the supposedly neutral act of sleeping is not without meaning, but make meaning of this one with your therapist on your own time.

(This post originally had a picture of my office, but with privacy in mind, I decided to remove it and put up a vibrant picture of rhododendrons in bloom instead.)

While some fire remains

I was in a strange bed last night in a house of unfamiliar sounds, rain pounding intermittently against the century-old façade. My 3:00 am wakeup was spent preoccupied with the thin threads of life, the contingencies of existence, the way we can cling to something that adds up as it slips away.

I once lived passionately, with drama, tears, and tender, aching pain. While there is something compelling about such intensity, it cannot be sustained. The dependency of infancy, the skill acquisition of childhood, and the tinder of adolescence feed adulthood’s warm flame. And here I am. The fire still burns. The light and heat are companionable. But flame eventually turns to ember, the wood to charcoal and ash.

The people who moved this cottage here almost 90 years ago are long dead. The mid-century day trippers who smoked on its porch live on in memory. The local gamblers of the polyester 70s, disco-slim with a wide roiling of bellbottoms, have slowed down for the final curves. My hair is turning grey; my grip relaxing. And the boy grows into himself while we watch, supportive, present, observing with wonder how a healthy plant grows towards the light.

What will he remember of us, of this time? Thirteen for me was tension and silence. It was never doing anything right. It was that feeling of sap rising, of enormous widening possibility. Thirteen smelled of nervous sweat and White Linen. It was crushes and code names, Ralph Lauren and Esprit, the go-go, name brand 80s, over and done with. The story repeats and yet is never the same way twice.

I’m still figuring out how to handle the narrowing of possibility, how much to feed the flames. I am philosophical about it, prepare myself in advance for the slowing. I wonder what will open up for the boy, am excited to see him unfold as I relax into what life will become.

Ant by ant

There are ants swarming the dry cat food. Periodically they breach the moats we’ve created to protect the bowls, a collective culture victorious over human ingenuity and ant bait. We have moats. We have traps. We have orange-scented, not so toxic ant spray. We have paper towels and cleaning solution to mop up the bodies. Nevertheless, the ants persist, slowed but not disheartened by our killing campaign.

 It is January and the ants come in. It is January and Facebook reminds me on an almost daily basis of early 2017, a time filled with illness and death. First it was Nora-dog, followed by my father, followed by my father-in-law. The memories pop up intermixed with sweeter memories from prior years (the boy fitting his impossibly small frame into a circle cut out in a wall at a local playground; the story about Nora’s fear of beeping appliances; the visit my father and stepmother made to see us when the boy was in fourth grade).

It is January and it is cold in a Northern Californian way here in Berkeley, not freezing, but with a chill that gets into your fingers and eats at your toes. The ants come in. Facebook reminds me of life on the precipice of death. My body, anticipating fifty, reminds me that I am getting older. I develop chilblains. I lose my patience easily. I wake to a bolt of anxiety at 3:00 a.m and stretch out my battered feet, one haggard digit at a time.

January. I am alive and surrounded by life, by dogs, cats, and those perpetually optimistic ants. My human family, a tight group, is here, augmented by the boy’s friends and their dads playing playing out a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I don’t dwell in the past. I grieve the conversations I will never have. I wonder what lies ahead, but will take this moment in the sun, peaceful and warm, a dog curled at my side, a group at my table.

Resolution

I woke up from a too-rare nap on Sunday afternoon with a strong sense of my own mortality, that existential ache that sometimes comes from a nap in the late afternoon in fall or winter. Sleep has been elusive over the past month or so. My awakenings, at 1:30 a.m., 2:30 a.m., 3:00 a.m., have generally been fraught. Anxious. During the day my heart beats out gratitude for my amazing good fortune to be doing what I love while supported by a stable family, comfortable financially, with a child who is doing well. At night I ride a river of anxiety.

Granted, there’s a lot going on. I’ll be moving to a new office at the end of this month, one that I am furnishing, and adding another day to my practice. I’m also picking up an (extremely) part-time job with my agency and have been doing a small proofreading and editing freelance job for them as well. I’m kinda-sorta running my own business and am also finally able to see that I should be a fully licensed therapist by my 50th birthday, which is ten short months away.

But that nap. It came after a family visit that was too much. I was too much—too cranky, too overloaded. I was keenly aware that this Christmas tradition of ours was contingent on all its players being present and that none of us will be here forever. Though it’s the second Christmas since my father died—and it’s been a long time since I saw him in person on the holiday—I felt the permanence of his absence so concretely. My father-in-law’s absence was palpable as well. This small family will morph. Its members will drop off, one by one. I wished a large second family for the boy when he grows up. I wished him a partner that could bring him acceptance, connection, and other people. I worried that we were not enough and that he, too, would too soon have to get used to the contingencies of life, the fact that traditions do not protect you from the necessary shifts, and that sometimes those shifts are the result of earthquakes.

I understand change. Nothing stays the same. I wouldn’t want it to. But I am scared that all of this will shift before I have a chance to see how it plays out. I have no choice but to hold this feeling loosely, to move forward anyway.

The word for 2019 is courage—the courage to live as if it couldn’t all fall away while remembering that it can all fall away; the courage to be present with anxiety while continuing to be grateful; the courage to connect when connection feels scary. I wish courage for me this year, and for you, no matter the way the earth may crackle under our feet. The earth will do what it does. May we be brave, with the presence of mind to choose how we respond.

Burn before reading

We walk around in masks, our mouths obscured, the cityscape soft and confused by smoke. Entire conversations happen without seeing a lip move. This is nothing, really, but the environmental aftershock of tragedy up north. We breathe in the remains, take death into our lungs. Trees, people, animals, houses, reduced to this clinging haze.

My brain ping-pongs between faded associations. Fire=my grandfather. November=loss. Anyone between the ages of 7 and 33 could be a child of mine and yet still parts of me lay unclaimed in childhood. I sacrifice myself to the smaller cause (a seeded pomegranate; in a moment, dinner— both interrupting the flow, just when the flow started; other times it’s laundry or an idle comment that requires my attention. Who, dear Reader, is paying attention to my needs? It has to be me, which is not in my nature.).

Do you require a narrative? Do I owe you that? I do not have it in me. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Even green wood can burn. Metal pools and hardens, bone becomes ash, if the fire is hot enough. But there is nothing to see here but a mask that catches my words before they reach the open air.