Tess Langan is a community-based coach. She lives in Oakland, California.
I loved Alan Chien’s piece “Can You Count to Ten” (Intima, Fall 2022) and the powerful healing moments he creates for patients through magic tricks. These beautiful, liminal moments, which occur beyond the broken bones, blood samples, and bounds of Western’s medicine’s penchant for evidence-based practices, help a patient remember life outside of their diagnosis and imagine what it is to feel normal, dignified, jubilantly joyful—and alive.
As I read, I was intrigued by the trepidation in Chien’s piece, the laced fear of “will I get in trouble for bringing unbridled joy to this child through magic?” This is a sign of our systems which, in my case as a counselor, ask me to account for my productivity and the medical necessity of every intervention I use for every minute of my time. But, as Chien implies, there are things that can’t be accounted for in medicine or psychology. There is a touch of magic at the borderland of the known and unknown.
For example, I’ve learned the importance of play in healing and not always addressing the “problem” directly. In my poem “Even the Ground is Moving” (Intima, Fall 2022), we play a round of Uno. Play necessitates presence and allows my client to move away from the trauma of the past and the uncertainty of the future. Later, we took his mom to play soccer and she stood, shaking, trying to re-engage with life and with a game that she loved dearly. “I understand,” I told her. “It’s like grief for a part of yourself you put away.”
“Can You Count to Ten” ends with impermanence. Like another magic trick, the boy has disappeared, and, the reader assumes, he is in recovery. My poem is also about impermanence. It asks, “How do we as providers, clients, and people deal with the ground shifting beneath our feet?”
The family in my poem now faces the risk of deportation. The mom cannot afford the legal fees and struggles with migraines; she begins canceling our meetings and considers returning to El Salvador. The ground is moving beneath their feet once again. In moments like these, we dig our heels into the preciousness of this moment, the boy who appeared in my life, like magic, and who will disappear again. I enjoy this moment, playing soccer or Uno, and notice the sneaky magic, the sleight of hand, hovering there, like a hummingbird. There and then gone.
Tess Langan is a community-based coach. She lives in Oakland, California.