Human Moments, 1

Kids don’t always get to be kids.

Being a therapist is fucking hard.

Being a therapist for children with severe behavioral and emotional issues is fucking hard. Mostly because you spend your days hoping that some small miracle will happen and they’ll come to trust you, come to believe that you’re actually on their side; although, considering the extraordinary trauma they experienced in highly sensitive developmental periods, why should they? Why on earth should they trust anyone?

Most days I come home feeling really fucking tired. It is impossible to not invest emotionally in clients who were abused, raped, and exposed to community violence throughout their innocent, delicate childhoods. It is impossible not to love them and want to see them feel safe, and shine, and know what it’s like to be appreciated.

Some days I can’t help but think, can I do this? Am I even helping? Who. the. fuck. am. I. to think I can make a difference in their lives?

Other days, something magical happens.

The magical things that happen aren’t huge leaps. They’re not overnight changes. They’re not even scabs over the wounds in their souls. They’re these extraordinarily small pieces of blinding white light that are easy to miss if you’ve stopped thinking they’re in there, or if you don’t keep yourself open to them at all times. (Which is something I will likely be working on for the rest of my life.)

I want to share one of these moments with you.

One of my clients struggles to participate and stay present during sessions due to a combination of anxiety and several early sexual traumas. I started offering an incentive if she works hard to focus and dig into the uncomfortable stuff: a walk for the last ten minutes of our time together. She loves to walk and explore. Today she worked hard and we took our walk outside. Thanks to several big oak trees and a two-day long wind storm, a pile of leaves had formed on our path, and I mean a big pile. Like, up-to-your knees and ten feet wide big. On an impulse — and an admitted snagging of an opportunity to play in autumn leaves as an adult — I tugged on her jacket and told her to help me kick the sea of leaves into an even more epic pile. We worked together to make the pile almost as tall as she is, and then I said, “Okay, jump in!”

She stood still, her face constricted and skeptical, hands in her pockets.

“No way,” she replied after a beat. “Are you going to jump in?”

“Of course. We’ll both jump in. We can take turns.”

“You go first,” she said.

I zipped up my jacket, put down my coffee, and made the most dramatic leap into that pile that I could without busting a hip, flailing my arms and sending leaves scattering in all directions. Over the chorus of the leaves rubbing together, I could hear her laughing loudly and shouting, “Oh my gawd!” I made a big production of getting up out of the pile and then we rebuilt it.

“Okay, your turn!”

She still looked skeptical but she walked over to the edge of the leaf mountain, turned around, and slowly lowered herself into it, butt first. She leaned back and I took the opportunity to heave armfuls of leaves on top of her. She started to flail and laugh, and eventually made her escape. When she turned around, she was just a little kid doing something that little kids do — her face was different. For that moment, this joyful, innocent part of her pulsed through her, and then it was gone, like a shooting star.

I know that part of her lives there always, but most of the time it’s tucked down in a very deep place where it mistakenly believes it can’t get hurt. She’s experienced so much in her short lifetime that she has little reason to be that part of her, and just for that one moment when I caught it in the lift of her cheeks and the freedom in her smile, it was magic.

Honestly, it was one of the most beautiful moments I’ve been blessed to witness, and it lasted less than half of a second. If I had just sneezed, or checked my watch, or even worried about the leaves stuck in my hair, I could have missed it. These moments refill the reservoir that is emptied by bearing constant witness to the kinds of suffering that children endure and the kind of suffering that we’re seeing escalate in the States today. These tiny moments of extraordinary humanity help me keep going.

I ask you to reflect back in the last few weeks and share with me a moment where you’ve been struck by the beauty of another. In trying times, learning to be ever-prepared for these pieces of grandeur will help us keep our wells filled so that we may continue to add to the wells of others. We must seek beauty in order to keep fighting. ❤

,.-=-.,,.-=-.,,.-=-.,,.-=-.,.-=-.,.-=-.,,.-=-.,.-=-.,.-=-.,,.-=-.,.-=-.,.-=-.,,.-=-.,

Thanks for reading. ❤

Find out more at www.thewildfrancesca.com & on Instagram

For the new publication I’m working on, check out Witches Rise here on Medium