I was a bad fit at school. Life at home wasn’t always a breeze either. So, when I was nine, I started seeing the school counselor.
She was a young woman with a perfected adult aura – friendly, but not your friend. She was supremely smart, too, delivering wisdom in spades. I remember knowing, after every session with her, that I’d been properly consoled. But not really feeling it.
I changed schools when I was twelve. My new counselor was an amiable, middle-aged man, so unthreatening that I felt sorry for him. After every session, I was comforted in knowing that I’d helped him do his job. I don’t know how much I was helped. Still, he was refreshingly nice in that miserable school. I only stayed there for a year and a half.
My third counselor was a sweet, silver-haired lady. In my first session with her, when I was fourteen, I related how two classmates had made a joke of my haircut the other day. Then I hastily added, as I’d been taught: “I know I shouldn’t care what others think”.
My new counselor replied, gently but matter-of-factly, “Oh, but one does care.”
She’ll always be my favorite for that.
There’s not much purpose to this story. No hierarchy of counseling that these three anecdotes denote. I just wanted to write about three people I’m thankful for, and about how one elevated herself above the others with a single sentence. If there’s a moral, that is it: Emotional validation is so powerful, sometimes just a spoonful can make a world of difference.