Chapter 15

 Diving back into his work also meant prioritizing his own self-care again, and he wanted to make sure he was up to the task. He reread some of his old Yalom materials, and focused in particular on the idea, ‘Let your patients matter to you, let them enter your mind, influence you, change you – and not conceal this from them.’ 


Driving towards the west side of Auckland, he thought back to his early days in Chicago. He had been so broke he used to take two busses and a train to get to his job on the south side of the city, and every patient had been a new kind of adventure. He had a natural talent for therapy, and quickly made a name for himself, first in the city, and then even nationally. 


Looking back now he missed those days. He was so eager. So passionate. It had been in these early days that he first noticed a kind of heightened empathy, and slowly with the help of his mentor Dr. Paul and others, he began to make sense of this talent. 


 He wondered what had changed since that time? Was he more effective now than he was back them? As empathic? He knew from both the research and his own experience that therapists often lost some of their empathy with more experience. But they also got more effective with their technique, and these opposing factors often balanced each other out. 


  At the end of the day he felt invigorated, which he took as a good sign, given how fatigued he had been over the past couple of weeks at the end of his days. He was returning to something he loved, and it felt like he was starting over. 


 One thing he had lost site of over the years was how the ravages of poverty and inequality affected people’s mental health. Much like Chicago, Auckland was a city of haves and have nots, and he was working with a number of the city's less fortunate. 


He thought about his own rise from poverty to relative wealth in his life, and remembered what it was like to search for change in the couch cushions, and hope to God your car could go a few more miles on empty. It put a tremendous strain on people to live like that, and poverty was often a precursor to alcoholism, drug abuse, and domestic violence.


He reached his home thinking about all of these things, and what he might do to help. In his work he was in a position to help others, but often only to a point given their external circumstances. What more might he do, and how might he challenge himself? At the end of Friday afternoon, he decided to go the gym, and then the coffee shop with his laptop. For now he would fight the battle of the written word, as it kept his mind occupied and his body out of the bars. He had written an early story years ago about choosing a coffee shop over a bar, and he thought this was yet another one of these moments where life was folding in on itself. Hemingway had said all it took to be a writer was the ability to sit at a typewriter and bleed.


He had opened that wound again.