The grades hold, the season goes well, and adults keep telling your parents how impressive you are. Praise lasts about a day.
Then the next test and the next game get to decide all over again whether any of it counted.
Somewhere in there, being good at things turned into the reason people stay.
You’ve gotten good at the face that stops people from asking follow-up questions.
Once or twice you came close to telling somebody anyway.
Then you pictured how they’d look at you, or the words “something’s wrong with you,” and the moment closed.
So you go on assuming you’re the only person alive running this particular version of it.
Trust doesn’t get forced on you by an adult who keeps saying the word.
You don’t want to be in the room with me, because you don’t believe I can help. Understood.
I’ll sit there as a sounding board while you make up your own mind about me.
Five-plus of my twenty years were spent in residential treatment with teenagers. None of them owed me trust on a schedule.
Being certified in DBT means I’ll hand you something usable inside the ten minutes when a feeling gets too big to hold.
You’ll practice the skill on a group chat that turns, a meet you’re dreading, a dinner where someone asks how school is going.
You’re worth care on the days you produce nothing.
Believe that on whatever timeline you want. I’m in no rush.
High school ends. The rooms after it are ones you get some say in, and the people in them are ones you pick on purpose.
You haven’t met most of your chosen family yet.
The work between now and then is figuring out whose standards you’ve been graded against, and then writing your own.
You matter, and you’ll feel like it.
If a parent got here first, or is reading this over your shoulder right now, the referral is theirs and the decision to come back is yours.
Use the contact form on this site to set up a free 15-minute conversation with me.
Fifteen minutes is a small thing to hand an adult you don’t trust yet. The rest of it can take however long it takes.
