In Defense of Counseling

When people ask me what I want to be when I grow up I tell them I'm still in-between majors: Psychology and Creative Writing. Then I brace for the laughter, the witty catcalls and comebacks about how I will doubtless end up unemployed and living in the streets for the rest of my life. I have taken to simply saying I'm considering going into social work or counseling because those sound like more solid career choices...but the truth is that these are just jobs I admire and have actively been a part of in some form or another. Whether or not I end up in one of them is yet to be determined. Unfortunately those busy doubts inside my mind have convinced me that I am incapable of truly helping anyone the way counselors and social workers I know have helped dozens, and until I can fight through those doubts, I will probably stay on the sidelines.

But that's not to say I don't believe in counseling. There was a time, let's say about 80% of my life, when I just assumed like many people do that to go to a counselor or to seek some form of emotional or mental help was a major form of weakness. It meant that you were broken. Flawed. Crazy. Whack-job. I felt that way until I actually met with a counselor for the first time, and I had to analyze myself and see if I was any of those labels. Fortunately, I'm just depressed. And we depressed ones aren't too complicated a bunch.

The first time I walked into the counseling office at my dad's work I was scared. I was nervous that I would end up sitting on a couch with a box of tissues sobbing to a stranger, and that he would nod and smile for an hour before sending me away. What ended up happening changed my perspective on the profession forever, and I began to write. Really write. From the heart and soul. There is a post on this blog entitled "Rewriting Myself" from April of last year that describes that experience better. Rather than retelling it, I'll just let you go look if you're interested. All I will say here is that to me, counseling is not a Charlie Brown cartoon.

You know what I'm talking about. You can picture Lucy in her little cardboard stall giving terrible advice to poor Chuck, who is always told that he's too sad, too boring, and just too darn wishy-washy to really amount to anything. Lucy had all the bedside manner of a porcupine while Charlie tried to figure out why the things in his life never seemed to go right. Stepping out of those cartoon panels, there may be some counselors who don't have a love for their job, or have difficulty in connecting with their clients. I've never met one. From my experience, to be a counselor at all you have to begin with selflessness and empathy. You're not there to tell someone how to live or what to think. You're there just to listen.

My social welfare professor at the college explained counseling in a way that, as a lover of words, I couldn't help but connect with. "Counseling," he said, "is about story-telling. You are there to hear stories, to get others to tell them and write them and share them so that they are no longer locked away inside, where they are causing harm." I am a story teller. There is nothing I love more than to bring someone's story to life, especially if they are funny, or touching, or deep or thoughtful. The only stories I have trouble telling are my own.

I think this is true of most people. Whenever we feel embarrassed or hurt or begin to despair because of a mistake we made or an event in our lives that shook us to the core...the first response is not to shout that story to the world. It's to hold it in like holding in a breath of air, waiting for a time when the water seems calmer to come to the surface and let it out. There are some stories that simply never get told, and peace that is never found. And it is for this reason that I defend counseling so strongly. What more could you ask for than to find someone who is willing to listen to all of the burdens you carry in your heart without judging you or trying to fix you--someone that you have never met before who you may never talk to again. Someone who just wants to take that burden from you and leave you feeling lighter.

Now I know that thinking practically, sometimes it's hard to find access to a counselor. Or, if there aren't any volunteer positions at a school or business and they cost money, finding the money to pay for it. If this is the case then I would suggest finding a friend or family member who knows how to listen with an open mind, who wasn't a part of your past and can see you as you are; or starting a journal and writing in it.

I say from personal experience, the most painful stories are the ones we never let escape. Go share a story with somebody today--and breathe easier.

*Image by Google*

One Small Hop For Frog- Kind...

Two years ago destiny had an amphibious hand in my decision to adopt a trio of small African Dwarf water frogs. You know the saying about how the best things come in small packages--well this Christmas present became an instant source of entertainment.

It became very obvious to me early on that the frogs, whom I named Clarence, Harold, and Maude (after the unique 70s comedy) were not the brightest tadpoles in the pond. While they were fun to feed and fascinating to watch, they had a bizarre habit of launching themselves at their food pellets several times and missing their targets entirely, swallowing water or gravel or occasionally each other while the pellets bobbed happily untouched. When they actually managed to accidentally get food in their tiny mouths, they would immediately spit it out, then re-swallow it, and then repeat the process. It was a wonder to me that they matured to frog-hood at all, and a miracle when their tiny frog bellies began to swell over time into healthy tiny pot bellies. It took several months before I realized that along with their lack of frog marbles and gracefulness, the frogs also happened to be blessed with the ability to escape.

While it's pretty impossible to know for sure which frog was which, the one I believe to be Harold escaped early in their first year and proved to me that lurking behind those tiny beady eyes wheels were turning. He flung himself from my hands one day when I was scooping him out to clean the frog-tank, hitting the ground hopping he headed in a straight bee-line for the door. The thing about frogs is that they happen to be very slippery, particularly when the person holding them has soap on their hands, and he managed to get halfway down the hall before I got a good grip on him, the eyes of my amused hall-mates watching the whole show.

The frog I thought was Clarence got picked on by the others as he matured, and it wasn't long before he stopped eating entirely and had to take the porcelain express to frog heaven. Another year passed without too much excitement, and I settled back into my comfortable assumptions that my two frogs were nothing more or less than adorable little morons.

One day I noted that Harold had stopped eating. At least, I think it was Harold. Maude had grown rather fat at this point, and had slightly better aim when it came to feeding. It only took him half a dozen tries to catch a pellet, where it took Harold several dozen. In an attempt to give poor Harold a fighting chance I separated the two, putting Maude in a Tupperware container on my desk for the night. It occurred to me that Maude may actually jump out, so I loosely taped a piece of printer paper to the top of the Tupperware as a make-shift lid.

The next morning I knew something was wrong. There wasn't enough movement in the water. I peered down into the tank and saw Harold happily swimming away, but the Tupperware was empty. I stared for several seconds at the water, looking at it from every angle in hopes that Maude was simply hiding or had learned to be invisible. But there was still no frog. In a rising panic, I searched the desk-top but found nothing. No spilled water, no frog-sized puddles, not even a pebble of gravel. I began to search in earnest then, looking in and under everything that was frog level, combing my floor several times to no avail.

It occurred to me suddenly that my door had about an inch of space underneath it, a perfect frog-sized exit for a bite-sized desperado to crawl through. I felt a mixture of horror and, I'll admit, respect for the little monster. To have enough strength to propel himself out of the water, squeeze under the paper, fall off the desk (a fairly decent drop for an animal only a half-inch high) and be on the lamb in my hallway...it was obvious that Maude was on a mission. But to where?

I alerted my hall's RA to the situation and asked her to spread the word, and did the same in the boys' hall on the same floor. After asking the janitor to keep an eye out for Maude ("a WHAT?" she said, like she'd never heard of pocket-sized water frogs before) and being laughed out of the room I stopped asking people to aid in my search. Instead I made a "Missing" poster complete with a sketch of Maude and my name and phone number in case he was found. I was under no delusions at this point that Maude was still alive. Even if he had escaped moments before I woke up, unless he had found water and found it soon, he was a goner. And time had run out for my search.

I had to be on a bus heading home for the holidays soon, and after twenty more fruitless minutes of looking I left Caldwell, dark thoughts of a matchbox casket and tiny funeral services filling my mind. I had already imagined a thousand ill fates for Maude, and each one ended with a webbed pancake, dime-sized. Several days later I returned to college and found a note stapled underneath my "Missing" poster on the dormitory billboard: "Frog Found," it said, "ask Hillary."

I found Hillary and there learned of the last adventures of Maude. He had indeed escaped under my door and waddled into my next door neighbor's room, where he took refuge in her laundry basket. Not necessarily being used to watching out for miniature frogs in her clothing, my neighbor had dumped the load into the washer, where Maude had evidently had the ride of his little life. She found him an hour later after pulling everything out of the dryer, his crispy body mummified next to her socks.

Word spread like wildfire around the dorms until it became a common joke to warn people of frog attacks in the laundry room, and quite a few people came up to me to offer their condolences and to visit Harold, who seemed oblivious that his tank-mate had just kicked the bucket. After a few weeks of swimming solo he seemed to know that something was up, and with a broken heart he too--excuse the pun--croaked.

Now I suppose I should have grieved a little more for Maude who, true to the character for which he was named, longed for adventure beyond the confines of a small plastic box. But I can't begrudge him his last great escape; it's a story that might have been passed down from tadpole to tadpole for generations, (providing Maude had ever met a female,) and stands to me as a testament that he was smarter than I gave him credit for.

As Junior year looms I'm considering getting another pet...

...preferably one that's too big to fit in the laundry.

The Summer That Almost Did Me In

Guido fist pump! School is over! Grades are in! I SURVIVED!!!

I returned to Idaho Falls in the middle of May with the assumption that I was in for a long, relaxing, much-needed stress break…but alas…the whole first month of my summer break has done its best to kill me.

Within a few days of arriving home, I came down with a double ear infection and dust allergies from cleaning out all the old crap in my room to make room for my new crap from college. I awoke each morning with my throat and ears on fire, and went to sleep in the drugged out haze that rides on the back of allergic reactions. A large red rash began to spread along one side of my forehead, and assuming it was allergies or acne, I ignored it.

By the end of the week my room was clean and organized, but the unidentifiable rash had spread and developed an odd sensation similar to sandpaper rubbing along the nerves in my skin. That week was also painful in other ways: after a frightening night an old friend wound up in the hospital, my two only job interviews ended with a “thanks for trying, but we don’t want you,” I had to say goodbye to another friend—probably indefinitely, a couple of family feuds unfortunately heated up, and my insomnia came back.

I’m not sure if the soul has an immune system, but if it does it was just as shot as my physical one by week two. Even the weather seemed to be against me, raining every other day until flood warnings were being issued up and down the Snake River.

I finally went in to the doctor to check out the rash, which by then felt more like a sandblaster against my head and had the puckered, pot-holed appearance of severe sunburn. It took one glance for the doctor to identify my problem: Shingles, the adult version of chicken pox. The scientific name is Herpes Zostra, my medical-school brother Ryan told me with a laugh—is there anything more humiliating than having Herpes on your face???—and it could be “easily taken care of” with antibiotics. (Coupled with pain pills and my prescription for the ear infections, there were a couple of times I took upwards of nine pills daily!)

For two days I stayed home with a fever and slept, hiding my scarred face from the world until I couldn’t take it anymore and dragged myself out for more fruitless job-hunting. My other brother Jordan was getting married in a few days, and our whole family was in a tizzy trying to make the arrangements and organize the receptions. Except for my blemished face in all the photographs, the wedding was nothing short of a beautiful success, and by Monday all the time with family and friends had left me more confident to go back out and look for employment.

It was on just such a search that I hit another hitch in my perfectly-sane-and-normal-summer-plans. Or rather, it hit me. While pulling out into an intersection by a Common Cents gas station on my way to drop off applications, a large van that had been hidden by a turning truck seemingly came out of nowhere and smashed into my parent’s poor Ford Taurus—with me inside.

I closed my eyes and felt my heart stop as it hit me, and distantly I heard one part of my brain say “I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead” while another part of my brain laughed from the impossible irony of it all. The airbags were deployed and luckily I had my seatbelt on, and the people in the van were extremely kind and understanding. Somehow I walked away from that accident with no damage except for shock and a strong desire to never drive again. The Taurus faired a lot worse, and was declared “totaled” and towed away.

Two weeks later, the scar from my Shingles is all but faded away, my household has settled back to normal, and two restaurants have taken pity on me and hired me part time. But I can’t help thinking: “What next?? Pneumonia? Atomic bombs? Rabid squirrel attacks??”

While I’m finding out, I think I’ll turn to writing some fiction. Although as I’ve learned lately, life can definitely be stranger.