will AI one day make men redundant, he asks, not humans, I mean just men because women will always be useful, and do you know how existence travels in cycles, and men have been on top for millennia, well it is probably women’s time now-
and you can’t get rid of him, the college student who arrives in your class before you, and leaves after all the students are gone, despite the torrential rain and the assignment deadlines, he likes to follow these threads of thoughts, likes to ask your opinion-
the day before you are sinking your own fingertips into miniature tubs of sticky acrylic paint. Your client is drawn to the IKEA bottles that squirt paint like tomato sauce and he is delighted with the swirls of gold and silver and fluorescent orange on the A4 paper. Earlier another little girl is painting a sunrise with glow in the dark rave colours, and there is colour everywhere. On everyone’s hands, on the table, on school uniform, hijab, wall, floor mat
and these are children whose minds slip-slide from surface to surface. Never settling. Yet here with this beautiful, fractal rainbow mess they are calm, and it makes you wonder whether therapists should simply be replaced by artists and acrylics, watercolours, oils, pastels available at every medical and allied health service-
before the colour smear, you sit three hours with a grandmother, a guardian of a teen whose mind doesn’t conform and therefore no one else will have him, but the grandmother talks and you lean into her talk, which is both direct and circuitous, and anyway
you have been trained to hold space,
and she says, no he cannot tell the time or understand his multiplication tables, but he can play the piano by ear just by listening to a song once. You tell her that perfect pitch is rare, a unicorn skill,
and she says,
yes,
my grandson has a gift.
**
Later, you remember what your mother once said, that nature seeks an equilibrium, where one talent or gift is outweighed by a deficit-
earlier that day you had called your own therapist because there was that familiar hatred, the urge to slam your skull against a jagged stone surface and over and you would do it, damage the parietal and temporal lobes to have a moment’s respite-
because you were never enough for people who charged inflation prices for their metered love.
Then you think maybe this is nature’s balance, that your patience, that your ability to hold space and colour and meandering thought, your patience with paper cup water turned muddy with children’s paints, your ability to delight in strength over deficit-
Is nature’s counterbalance.
Or, or as you want to tell the other therapists, the teachers, the condescending colleagues who say you are too kind, as though kindness is an intellectual deficit-
Maybe this is nature’s law, and there was no gentleness, no kindness in a home that forced psychic and bodily submission, that now, as an adult, you would sell your right eye and left lung and excess haemoglobin to live in a kinder world.
Word upon Word 