Working: Clay is messy. So is therapy

IVenus of Dolní Věstonice the Oldest Known Ceramic Figurine (29000 to 25000 BCE)

Studs Terkel wrote his book “Working” fifty years ago. He described it as being about “a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread”. He interviewed people about their work. What they do all day, and how they feel about it.

Today, the technologies, structures, and vocabularies of labor have changed a lot since the book was written. So maybe it’s worth interviewing people again? I’m interviewing average workers about their meaning, exhaustion, pride, humiliation, boredom, and identity. All of the people I interviewed so far have been strangers I found on Reddit. This below is the first interview I did.

---

When people hear “ceramics,” they think pottery, a wheel, maybe a mug. But for me, it was actually a sculpture. I’m interested in art in the broadest sense. I did two years at community college as an art major, getting a little taste of everything, and then I transferred, planning to do printmaking. Woodblock prints, that kind of thing. And then I took a pottery class because I had to.

And that was it.

Clay felt different. As an artist, you interact with it directly. Whereas with paint, for example, you’re separated by the brush. In photography, you’re separated by the camera. But with clay, you are hands in. You get messy. You get clay in your hair, in your face. It’s impossible not to feel that connection to the material. I get really excited talking about it, because it’s so visceral. It feels communal. It feels like getting in touch with the ancestry of humanity. People have been making little clay figures since the dawn of time.

That feeling took me from the East Coast to the Midwest, which is, weirdly, where it’s at for ceramics! I moved there for an artist residency and lived on the property for a year. There were three of us, living and working side by side. We each had our own rooms and spaces. The other two were definitely closer to each other, but I’m generally a person who keeps to myself and prefers that. So I was doing my own thing. There, I helped fire kilns, taught classes, and used the studio for my own work. I was teaching wheel-throwing, the kind of pottery people usually imagine. It was good. It just wasn’t my favorite. After a while, I got burnt out on it.

After a couple of years, I just thought, this doesn’t feel as alive and energizing. I need to do something that feels more fulfilling. At first, I thought maybe art therapy. Maybe I’d work with elderly folks. It felt like a forgotten group, and I was interested in it. But the more I looked at art therapy, the more I realized it wasn’t really the work I wanted to do. A lot of the time, it was more like, okay, we’re going to do our coloring sheets for an hour. And that’s not therapy where I come from.

So I went back to school for counseling.

Now I’m a mental health counselor, provisionally licensed, which means doing the full-work but still under supervision. The license process takes between two and five years, 3,000 hours of clinical practice. I started seeing clients in January 2024. I get paid now, but less than a fully licensed clinician. Before that, in grad school, during the last three semesters, I was seeing clients in internships and not getting paid at all.

I work in a private practice. That means more freedom, more control over my schedule, more private insurance and private pay. It’s different from the community agencies, which are more government- or state-funded and tend to see more severe issues: more psychosis, more substance use, more lower-income folks, more Medicaid. We do some pro bono work where I am, but mostly it’s private insurance or private pay.

People sometimes are a little iffy because I’m new. They will say “You’re so new to this, you don’t have that much experience”. However, in my short time practicing, I have seen some very interesting, varied, and sometimes dramatic cases.

I work with teens and adults, fourteen and up. There are many cases I work with: anxiety, trauma, family dynamics, and career uncertainty. (This is related to your research).

But if I’m honest, my favorite population is young women. Girls, college-age women, women in their twenties, trying to figure out how to be humans. We don’t always get taught that. I deal with trauma recovery and I’d discuss family dynamics. Boundaries with men is an important thing to talk about with my patients. There are so many issues that are really specific to young women, and a lot of the time we just don’t have guidance on those things. We don’t. So when someone sits down with me and says, “I haven’t ever been able to tell anybody this,” that means everything to me. Truly. Nothing makes me feel more fulfilled than being a safe person. What a privilege, to be trusted with somebody’s deepest fears.

And maybe that’s connected to why I answered your reddit post. Because I think about work a lot. I think about how people choose it, how they get trapped in it, how they survive it. My dad had the most classic version of work you can imagine: finance, salary, desk, forty-hour weeks, for forty-five years. He was unhappy. Stressed all the time. Chained to his desk. He just retired, and I think I grew up watching that and deciding, very early, I’m not going to do that.

My mom was different. More creative. She worked in nail art, crafts, little business ideas, and office jobs too, but she moved around more. I definitely took after her. My mom was always like, yeah, go to art school, do what you want to do. My dad would say you should get a real degree so you can get a good job. And I would respond, let me do me. Now I’m a therapist, so here we are.

There’s a theory in career counseling called planned happenstance, and I love it. The basic idea is that you never know what’s going to happen, so when an opportunity comes up, you might as well say yes because you don’t know what it’s going to lead to. That feels like my whole career. Community college leads to printmaking, printmaking leads to clay, clay leads to Missouri, Missouri leads to a fiance, but also burnout (that is not from the fiance though!!!!), burnout leads to counseling, counseling leads to this deeply meaningful work of sitting in a room with another person and trying to help them make sense of their life.

Most of what I do is traditional talk therapy. Somebody on a couch, and we’re chatting and going into the deep stuff. But my art background still shows up. Sometimes I’ll bring out drawing materials, especially with teens. I like having them draw a picture that represents their family dynamics. Then you can literally see how mom relates to dad relates to sibling, who is close, who is far away, who is looming over everything. Sometimes they’ll look at what they made and say, “I didn’t even think about that.” That’s the good stuff. That’s when a door opens.

Art school prepared me for therapy in another way, too. Critique. You make something deeply meaningful, something autobiographical, something that feels like it came right out of your own insides, and then you put it in front of a room and people critique it. You learn very quickly that a critique of the work is not a critique of you. That has been so useful as a therapist. Because sometimes clients leave. Sometimes they come for a few sessions, I start pushing a little deeper, and they realize they’re not ready. They stop coming. And I have to remind myself: it’s not because I did something wrong. They were not in a place to receive what I was doing for them.

The training is broad. Multicultural counseling, crisis counseling, diagnosis, and treatment planning. The license varies by state. Not all states let mental health counselors diagnose, but Missouri does. So in an intake, I can listen to what’s going on and start narrowing things down: okay, this sounds like anxiety, let’s look closer. I like that part. I really do. Diagnosis is kind of fun for me. Problem-solving, mystery-solving, that’s how it feels sometimes. How can I best help this client? I’ll think about it after work, do some research, and come in with a plan.

And the sessions themselves, they are never exactly what you think they’re going to be. It varies. I see seven clients max in a day, though I can’t do more than four back-to-back or my brain turns to soup. Mostly in person, but I offer some virtual if needed. Every hour is its own weather system. Sometimes somebody comes in, and it’s a chill little yap session and you think, okay, this will be easy, and then suddenly it’s, oh my God, my entire life has collapsed. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes you have what we jokingly call a “crisis of the week” client, where every single session there’s a brand-new emergency, but then there is that rare week when they are relaxed and you can do deep work with them.

And then there are doorknob lines, which I love as a phrase and hate as a phenomenon. That’s when the session is ending, your hand is practically on the doorknob, and the client says, “Oh, by the way, my car got broken into last weekend and I’ve been having nightmares ever since.” Wow. Really wish we had started there. Time management is a skill. We have big clocks in locations where the patient and I can see them.

I prefer in-person sessions. There’s just so much more information in the room. Body language, energy, all the little clinical things you can observe. If someone is self-harming, for example, that’s a lot easier to notice in person than on Zoom where maybe you can’t see their arms. But also it’s not just about assessment. It’s about sharing space. Sitting in a room with somebody is different.

I write notes after sessions, but they’re very minimal. Confidentiality. You never know. I put in just enough that I can glance back and remember: right, grandma was in the hospital, we talked about this six weeks ago, let me ask how that’s going. It takes me about five minutes per note, and I usually do them during lunch. There are so many therapist memes about being six weeks behind on your notes. I am not that therapist. I refuse.

I share an office with my supervisor, and sometimes the clinic owner. There are pros and cons. I can keep my stuff there, and it does feel like mine, too. But when my supervisor is using it, I’m bouncing around. Still, I like that I’m not alone. I like collaboration. I like being able to say, “hey, I’m stuck on this case. have you worked with something like this before?” I don’t think I would want to be one of those clinicians just seeing people virtually out of my house, one-person business, no one to bounce ideas off of. I need a little more community than that.

In most clinics, you have the freedom to decorate your room with your style. Just keep it calm. Stress balls, plants, and room spray are fine. Skip the loud stuff, definitely no heavy metal posters on the wall.

We have a few stereotypes in the space. For example, the most common one: Everything comes back to Freud (laughing). Everything somehow comes back to childhood. Also, cardigans. It’s so real. I wear more cardigans than I ever thought I would. And every time I hear myself say, “And how does that make you feel?” a small part of me dies, but also, sometimes, that really is the question.

I think that’s what I love about the work. It’s serious, and strange, and intimate. It asks you to think on your feet and to stay humble. It asks you to meet people where they are, even when that’s nowhere near where they said they’d be when they sat down. It asks you to be present for pain without taking all of it home.

I think I do a pretty good job of compartmentalizing. Some clients are dealing with really heavy stuff, and sometimes it’s hard to leave that at the office. There are days when I think about the work all the time. But never the way my dad did, dread and a desk I’m chained to. More like a mystery or a conversation, that’s hard to leave.