The Venus Fix

Thirty-Five

It had been a long day, and after my four o’clock patient left I got up and stretched. It was already dark outside and the street lamps cast a warm pink glow that seeped into the office.

The smell of chocolate made me turn around. It was intense. Bitter. Orange. Spicy. Sweet.

“I made these last night and thought you and Dulcie would like some,” Blythe said from the doorway. She was dressed in a lavender sweater with a starched white collar and cuffs peeking out, slim black slacks and pointed cowboy boots. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her face was scrubbed clean.

Some people have utterly transparent faces. You can look at them and know without any question how they are feeling. Blythe was like that. She really was pleased to be making this offering and it touched me.

“That’s so sweet of you,” I said, not meaning to pun. She smiled. I took the plate from her and peeled back the tinfoil.

“Do you want one?” I asked her as I tore off a corner of one of the thick, soft brownies.

“I only have a few minutes. I have a patient coming,” she said, clearly nervous. Something was bothering her.

“First one today?”

“No, I have two on Mondays.”

I chewed the chocolate treat. She watched, waiting to see my reaction.

“These are delicious. Thank you. Dulcie will love them. So how did your first session go?”

“Not great. I’m still feeling too much emotionally. I’m trying to separate myself from my patient, but it’s not working. At one point, I had to bite my cheek to stop myself from crying.”

“We’ll keep working on it. We’ll solve it.”

“Can you really listen to your patients without feeling anything?”

“No. The point isn’t to stop your feelings but to use them to inform the therapy and steer you in the right direction with the patient. That’s healthy. What we have to work on is not reacting.”

She nodded, but she still looked defeated. Being a good therapist mattered to her so much. “Sometimes I think I’ll never get there and that I’m crazy to try.”

I wanted to reach out and touch her hand and give her some kind of comfort. It was ironic that what she struggled with-connecting too deeply to patients-was what I was struggling with, with her. What was it about Blythe that tugged at me and made me want to shelter her?

What she had been willing to sacrifice to get to this point made me frightened for her. At first, I’d thought she had a self-esteem problem. Now that I understood she didn’t, I cared about her even more. And I wasn’t supposed to do that. Wasn’t that what I was telling her her own problem was?

We are not supposed to care in a way that keeps us up at night, but some of us do, because we know that with effort there can be change. We’ve seen it. We’ve been part of it. Just a little bit of hope is all it takes, and you can’t give up even if it destroys you to keep waiting to see it again.