The practice was called residue counseling, which was clinical language for a simple and fairly new problem: people who had been making emotional loans for years and had come to notice, late, what the cumulative lending had done to their own interior. The problem had been documented for about a decade. Cern had been practicing for six of those years, which made her one of the more experienced practitioners in the field, which was not as reassuring as it sounded because the field was small and still figuring out what it was doing.
Her eight current clients ranged from a man who had been lending fear tolerance for twenty-three years to a woman in her late thirties who had only been practicing for four and had already noticed a thinning in what she could locate of her own joy. The thinning was the earliest symptom. Most lenders didn't notice it until the thinning had been happening for years. By the time they came to Cern, the deficit was usually substantial.
The work was partly assessment and partly something harder to name. Assessment she could do: she could identify what was depleted, whether it was recoverable, and on what timescale. The harder part was helping clients understand that the depletion was not a failure of practice or of self. It was a structural consequence of a particular kind of giving, and it had been inadequately documented in the field's early years because the people most likely to notice it were the same people least likely to report it.
She had not told her clients that she had started lending herself at twenty-seven, informally, to people she loved. Not professionally. Just the natural extending of steadiness and calm and occasionally grief to people in her life who needed those things and didn't have enough of their own. She had done this for years before she ever heard of the practice formally. She had probably been depleted before she started her training. She had never formally assessed herself.
She thought about this sometimes, sitting between sessions. She had built a practice around identifying and treating a condition she might have. She had not taken herself on as a client because she did not know what she would find, and she had kept not doing it for long enough that not doing it had become its own habit. She understood, professionally, that this was a notable gap. She understood it in the same way she understood a lot of things about herself: clearly, from a distance, without doing much about it yet.