I was speaking to a psychotherapist friend, who asked if I would consider becoming a therapist myself. A fair question, given my intuitive and psychoanalytic abilities. The fundamental difference though, is that I don't want to take on others' emotional burdens or be the one to guide them toward change. There's a distance, he said, a clinical detachment that's implicit/necessary - but for me, makes things worse. I want two-way relationships, I want my self to be a part of the back and forth, for emotions to be felt as part of the exchange.
The intellectualized empathy that is therapy got me thinking about home businesses, the kind of thing that many immigrants end of doing, working and living in the same space, compartmentalized. How there is a door or sometimes just a curtain separating the spaces of home and business, and how any work in emotions requires that separation. However flimsy the divider might be, it's there. As a customer you walk in, and the garage is a salon or the foyer is a health clinic, but at the end of the day the proprietor retreats and the space is rearranged for the next person.
And it's interesting to conceive of everyone having an anteroom where they host others. For professionals it's a space of business, intentionally blank in ways to facilitate the goods and services others can't provide for themselves. For regular people like us, that room actually part of our living space, where our preferences became furniture and our mementos line the wall. Having others come into our space is deeply personal, and everything they bring and everything they do affects us and how we live. Someone can ruin our furniture or tear down our walls, and we have to cope with that trauma.
It's not easy to keep our room open, because there's no guarantee people will abide by our standards of behavior - whether implicit or explicitly stated. But not being alone requires that we let others in. The ones who stay or make the space better become our friends. And the one who eventually lives there with us - who conjoins their room with ours - well that's when we'll have a home.