A scramble.

This morning I want to write about how keeping confidentiality for clients over the years has made this therapist weird. Okay, weirder. I also want to make sure I have time to walk the dogs and then walk myself to work. This morning I was hoping to have the wherewithal to link confidentiality, loneliness and gossip together, but I still need to make my lunch and begin packing for the trip I'm taking to Sacramento tomorrow. It's chilly in the cabin and I've already voted against making a fire by donning my sweatshirt, but I still haven't rummaged around for my slippers and my toes are cold. I think my slippers are in the closet in a box marked, "winter clothes." A box of wool and polypro that will soon be replacing cotton t-shirts and shorts. I've been thinking about how it was, and to some degree still is, a special burden to hold peoples' lives in my heart and mind, to be at a party and have the group there talking about someone I'm working with and not be able to participate in the conversation. How the code of keeping confidentiality makes the therapist be a therapist instead of a person at the party or sometimes even a friend.

But, I've got some things to get to before I head to work. I want to be able to put something good in my training journal, after all, and a brisk walk to work, and then home, would be just the thing. I also want to be out in the fall chill, see the yellow in the aspens beginning to show, maybe catch a bear on her way in for the day. And I need some time to walk myself through a conversation I'll be having at work with a therapist who did not keep her oath all that well and now has some trouble with the legal system as a result. She said, "you don't know how hard this is," and rather than be offended, I was reminded-oh, but I do.

Anyway, I'll get to it. I'll write about therapy and confidentiality and about how the client will say, "you only show up, you only care, you only say nice things to me because I pay you." I'll write about the work of a therapist to keep a relationship safe, I'll write about the strangeness of being so involved in that relationship but having that involvement be invisible, I'll write about love.

Now, instead, I'll get outside and freeze my ears, watch my dogs chase the impossible to catch squirrel and breathe in some of the thin air. I'll wander a little and be glad for the trees and squawking jays. Later, I'll write.