Kittens.

I have the best job. Last October, I started working as the Student Affairs Counselor at the law school here in my town. Going into it, I thought it would be a dilluted, safer version of the therapy I practiced prior at the community mental health center-- gone would be the borderline severe and persistent mental health clients, and in would be the high functioning law students whose problems were certainly valid, but wouldn't leave me wanting to curl up in the fetal position after. I could use my degree without returning home feeling completely drained and devoid of all emotional energy.

It wasn't always this way. I used to be able to hear trauma after trauma, in extensive detail, without even batting an eye. If I felt kind of yucky after a session, I'd just flip on Cuteoverload.com, and dancing baby hedgehogs would have me feeling warm and fuzzy and would erase any secondary trauma that may have started. What changed was the birth of my first child-- and suddenly, the scary awful that I was hearing about in the world became something potential, and its potential was that it could happen to this person who was my world.

So now, I don't do stories about children being abused. I can't even do stories from adults recounting abuse they experienced as a child. After enough intake sessions, I had resolved that my children would never have anyone babysit them ever-- only I could be trusted with their care to ensure that no evil monster could prey upon them.

As you can probably imagine, I'm delighted to help law students process the stress of their coursework, the pressure of success, and the doubts of whether they are cut out for law school, or whether law school is cut out for them. It's rewarding, and not triggering. The best of everything.

The thing is, though, life still happens. And it's a startling reminder that we cannot educate ourselves into immunity. Research has always been my defense mechanism-- if there is something that is wrong in my life, I can just read the crap out of it, and then I become the one with the power-- and I can make it go away. I can know enough about it to know its rules, and exile it into a part of the universe that doesn't involve me. So in a very roundabout way, it can feel safe to go to school, to get more education, to have more letters at the end of my name-- because those letters should protect me. They should provide me with the knowledge I need to keep a lot of the bad stuff at bay.

So when an issue comes up with a student that deviates from "Law School is stressful" into "Life hurts sometimes," I am confronted with the reality that so many things are out of my control. There is so much pain out there that is nondiscriminant with its target. It is unfathomable how much can cause so much hurt that you physically, emotionally, and mentally cannot imagine how you haven't died as a result of it, and yet there you are when the alarm goes off in the morning. Sometimes, I think that is one of mortality's greatest cruelties-- that the pain doesn't have mercy and release us from the awful. Usually, I think that when I'm in the throes of it. I would include some uplifting anectdote about how it is empowering to endure, to become strengthened through the overcoming of a hardship, but in the deepness of the suck, I'd rather pass on the strength and empowerment. I'd prefer to keep my coccoon of security and safety, and leave the hurt in that part of the universe that isn't me.

I'm not sure what my point is. There is power in gratitude for what is good, and there is something in acknowledging the terrible. It is there, it is real, and it often doesn't offer notice of its impending arrival. I'm going to work harder to make snuggles with my two (almost three) little ones the most important thing I do each day. Perhaps that will add the needed balance to the things that I cannot influence.


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