The Unseen Burden of Pebbles

A therapeutic fable.

Fran has been a therapist for twenty years. She has a self-care routine. She takes her morning walk. She does her breathwork.

And yet she is permanently exhausted.

This is a fable about the weight that accumulates in caring professions and for anyone who cares, and what happens when we finally put it down. It’s for anyone who has spent a long time holding things that were never entirely theirs to hold.

Fran wondered why she felt permanently exhausted. She wondered why she had a headache at the end of nearly every day. She had a self-care routine that she stuck to, within reason at least. She took a walk every morning and did her breathwork straight afterwords. ‘It’s more than some people do,’ she told herself.

She decided she was just getting old. She’d been a therapist for twenty years. ‘That’s a weight to carry,’ she thought to herself, sighed and went to her office to wait for her first client of the day.

The client didn’t arrive. Fran had suspected this might happen. As she became more experienced this happened less and less but it still happened from time to time.

After she’d waited for half an hour and accepted the client wasn’t going to arrive Fran went for a walk around the garden, something she when there’d been an ending with a client.

She picked up a small pebble and painted it scarlet. It suited the client who had gone AWOL. They’d always been vibrant and fiery.

She opened her cupboard door and placed the scarlet pebble in the basket along with all the others. The large basket was full to the brim. She’d need to get a new one to put alongside it.

She looked at the basket and felt sad and weary.

Then something happened. The moment Fran placed the scarlet pebble on top of the basket, the shelf the basket was on broke. The pebbles plunged to the floor, some of them hitting Fran on the way and stinging her skin.

‘This won’t do, this won’t do at all,’ Fran said, frowning.

She picked up some of the pebbles and looked at them. She remembered she used to paint patterns or flowers on the pebbles. She could see some of these pebbles from the early days and even remembered some of the clients they represented. The daisies, daffodils, trees and broken hearts on the pebbles had faded.

Fran cried. She cried for a very long time. And then she shook. She felt a bit sweaty. It was like the past was exuding from her pores.

A few days later Fran took all the pebbles and washed the paint off them into the bath. She smiled as the water turned murky and the pebbles were returned to their natural state.

She took them to the stream just beyond her garden, throwing handfuls of them and watching them return to nature where they belonged. Some of them settled on the bed of the stream and some of them rippled away.

Fran realised that the clients, the stories, the pebbles weren’t hers to hold. Nature - the universe in fact - could hold them for her.