I’m a fan of Evelyn’s imagination.
The metallic ball-and-stick set used to build pyramids transforms into rooms, playgrounds, and ships for a battling world. Three-inch toy dinosaurs—orange, yellow, and green—inhabit this miniature landscape. Marbles and extra magnet sticks become food, while an empty paper towel roll and a rubber bracelet make occasional cameos.
But oh, how I miss the days of “Clippy”—a pair of fingernail clippers who once starred as the leading character.
Thoughts jostle in my mind, wrestling for attention. Like a tenured teacher, I wait them out with honed patience. If my mental space were a classroom, the busy “to-dos,” future plans, and half-finished ideas would be squirming in their seats, raising their hands, blurting “but teacher!” or asking to go to the bathroom. It’s a tornado of noise heading straight for Dorothy’s house.
But I’m already in Oz. Immersed in Evelyn’s world of animated luster, adjusting to the technicolor haze and a bubble-traveling “good witch” in a ball gown.
Then my mind travels back to an office on the second story of the New England Building in Pioneer Square. In that room: me, a colleague, a 17-year-old client (we’ll call her K), and her mother. The meeting was meant to review neurofeedback results. K had made one request: that her eating disorder not be mentioned.
I held that boundary in the front of my mind as the neuroscientist walked through images and brain activity patterns. But then came the pause. My colleague turned to K and said, “And I hear you’re purging less. That’s wonderful.”
The moment dropped like a guillotine.
K’s horrified face locked eyes with mine. All I could say was, “Do you want to go?”
We left. Walked through Pioneer Square, past Grand Central Bakery, around the corner to Occidental Park—a spot that normally shines in summer, full of metal chairs, ivy, string lights, and beatbox poetry. But that day, none of it registered. K was all that mattered.
I remember saying, “I know she meant well,” and K replying: “That doesn’t matter. She said the one thing I asked her not to. That can’t be undone.”
Up until that point, our sessions had been her cocoon—a place to mend, to be honest. And whether she would’ve returned or not, that rupture plays in my mind like the crumpled first page of a story tossed toward a wastebasket—but missing.
I’ve done it too. With a couple I was counseling early in my career. The wife—my client—shared something in confidence, and I, the overeager baby counselor, let it slip in session. She was furious. Like a spitting cat. The backlash came in emails and echoed in my chest for weeks.
Holding someone’s confidence is a big flipping deal.
Maybe that’s why it’s the barrier I face in sharing deeply with others myself. Not because I don’t have things to say—but because the cost of a broken trust is so high.
Do I have my confidence? I do. I know I’m a balance of craving deep connection and finding a strange security in letting myself be brash and borderline nihilistic at times. In those moments when I turn the volume up on that part of me—the one that “doesn’t give a damn”—I feel a release. A lifting of the pressure I place on myself.
It’s there that I remind myself: I have my own back.
Even if I sometimes fear I won’t.
Even though, time and time again, I continue to.
It’s hard to know how to hold people’s hearts sometimes. To get it right, to be safe for someone, to protect what they’ve handed you. I’ve dropped things I wish I hadn’t. I’ve learned the hard way. But I’m still showing up. Still listening. Still learning. And I think that matters.
Love, Jaclynn
Going On 40 