holding space
You can fart.
You can laugh.
You can cry.
You can be pillowy fat or rail thin.
You can be all shapes and sizes.
Have tumors and lumps and moles and hair.
Scars.
You can be Hollywood beautiful.
Striking.
Studly.
A knockout.
Not a blemish in sight save for the dark smear of makeup you leave behind on the face cradle cover.
You can be perfectly average.
Plain.
Even ugly.
You can be lazy.
Eat McDonalds every day.
You can be a neurotic exercise fiend and smoothie-swilling freak.
Or just kinda healthy when you think about it and we'll chuckle and say it's better than nothing.
You can tell all the bad jokes.
I will laugh at them.
You can go on for the whole hour about your family reunion and the life stories of all your great aunts and uncles in Ohio and I will care for that hour if only to help you feel more comfortable while you lay on the table with only a blanket creating the border between me and your pain and your most naked truth.
You can complain about your loud kids.
Your rude neighbors.
Or you can say nothing at all.
I will hold the space.
You are safe here.
This is my entry for the #monomad challenge, held daily in the Black and White Community.
Give it a try. And, randomly, happy Nina Simone's birthday.
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Omf christ shitpants motherfucker balls some days holding space is so hard and I really want to complain about it but tonight I can't find the words. I take it home with me, sometimes. The habit. I confuse the boundaries of unprofessional relationships and find myself sucked into the therapeutic role when all I want to do is cut loose and have fun and not talk you up out of your self-dug hole of deprecation. God damn it all I don't know where the line is for that boundary but I do know it's getting crossed. It's up to me to set it. The work is never done. Fuck. Some days I want to be a fucking bitch and make no apologies for it.
The bison photos right away brought this to my mind:
The very last sentence... me too!
Me too!
YEAH!!!! Bison and straight-up bitches. Fist bump.
👊
Thank you!!!!
So I'm guessing massage is another one of those 'unlicensed therapist' occupations?
Lol like bartenders and hairstylists? Yeah, sometimes. Fortunately we here in Oregon actually ARE licensed and have scope of practice on our side that we can/kinda have to (some people don't 🙄) use so that we don't have to give any advice or do any psychoanalyzing or think/care about it when the hour's up.
But when your friends and family start abusing your therapeutic nature, that's when you have to go rant in fine print about wanting to be a bitch because it's not in your nature to actually be that kind of bitch.
Therapy was great today! MY THERAPY with MY THERAPIST that I go to because I don't rely on my friends to "fix" me. Lol. Ok rant done.
I forgot about hair stylists, was thinking of bartenders and servers but aside from the booze I imagine that's much the same. Licensed here too, had a friend who'd graduated from massage school but never actually took the test to get the license, so she did it on the sly and had to deal with an insane amount of gross, sketchy bullshit. Lol, I bet that scope of practice comes in handy.
I used to have a rotating cast of characters that'd come sit on my couch and tell me all their troubles. Could never understand why, don't think therapeutic will ever be a word that describes me and certainly didn't then. Lol, you should just start handing your therapist's card out to everybody that comes to you.
I'm guessing you're the listening type. I bet people tell you their life stories in the grocery line, too.
Your poor friend. I see the reasoning behind not wanting to get licensed but man does it ever protect you from general sketchy gross bullshit with all the professional environments available. Not that gross sketchy doesn't still happen there, on occasion. I work at a clinic with doctors and the stealth creeps still manage to sneak in a "has anyone ever thought this was something else" every once in a while.
I do refer to my therapist sometimes, but not too often, because she's amazing and I need to be sure she still has time for me.
Oh god, everywhere. Most insane night of protests (my life?) here in 2020, I'm strapped and acting as perimeter security for the church that was sanctuary for protesters, ended up having to deal with two different people doing that. It was so fucking absurd. First one said "Oh" and left when I let him know I wasn't traffic control/parking, I was there in case the militias showed back up. Second one was a teenage runaway type that I finally had to tell 'look, you're calling attention to my position and I can't have that.'
Yeah, there was some substance use issues involved as well that didn't help anything either. I think she was mostly finding clients on craigslist, it was bad.
Ohhhhhh, she was THAT kind of massage.
What nice photos. Especially the photos of the mountains. Mmm, how I love this!
Thank you @ratel! It was very cold and it made the camera lens a little hazy, but it worked out great for black and white!
Congratulations. Today's #monomad second place is yours.
Thank You very much for participating and for being part of the Black And White Community!
Thank you!!!
Congratulations on your second place in the Monomad. The photos are really interesting and what you wrote... I don't know what is more interesting.
Hey thanks! Hopefully nothing is less interesting. Or disinteresting.
I had to take a break because I was busy being uninteresting. Very.