By 1998, I had accomplished what I had spent years working toward.

I had earned my Master of Social Work, completed the required clinical supervision, trained in clinical hypnosis, and become a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. The painfully shy young man who had entered Georgia Tech was now qualified to practice psychotherapy independently.

For years, my professional life had depended upon institutions. At Brynn Marr, financial priorities affected treatment. At Duplin– Sampson, a receptionist could interrupt therapy because a psychiatrist was ready. I had learned from those settings, and I had helped people within them, but I wanted a place where the therapeutic relationship would not always be subordinate to an institutional hierarchy.

Private practice offered that possibility.

It also emerged during a period when Lynn and I were each creating things of our own and things together. I was building a practice. Lynn was creating pottery and writing poetry. Together, we had created Word Salad.

This was not a story in which I pursued meaningful work while Lynn stood beside me as my support person.

We recognized talent in one another.

Beginning with Chris

I remained involved with the New Hanover County chapter of the North Carolina Society for Clinical Social Work. The meetings allowed clinicians to discuss cases, share ideas, learn about training, and consult one another about the difficulties of practice.

Through those meetings, I remained connected with Chris Hauge.

Chris had known me since shortly after I moved to Wilmington. He had supervised my volunteer work at The Oaks, welcomed me back for my second-year internship, and watched me develop from someone preparing for graduate school into a licensed clinician.

When I told him I wanted to begin seeing clients independently, he offered the use of his office during hours when he was not there.

I paid approximately fifteen dollars for each hour I used it.

The arrangement gave me a way to begin without committing immediately to a lease. I could learn whether clients would actually come, whether referrals would continue, and whether private practice was financially possible.

They came.

The practice grew faster than I expected.

The warning that Wilmington was already saturated with therapists proved less important than the relationships I formed with clients. People returned because they felt heard. They referred others. Professional contacts began sending people to me.

Before long, the cost of using Chris’s office by the hour approached what I would pay to rent an office of my own.

The decision became practical rather than hypothetical.

An office of my own

I found an available office on Chestnut Street in downtown Wilmington.

The building had a waiting area, a receptionist, and a hallway containing several professional offices. A conference room was available for groups and meetings. The office itself had enough room for individual therapy, couples, and a small number of additional chairs when needed.

Lynn came with me to see it.

The receptionist explained how she greeted visitors and contacted the appropriate person when a client arrived. There was a telephone in my office, but I could indicate when I was in session and should not be interrupted.

That detail had particular meaning after Duplin–Sampson.

A client would not reach the most vulnerable moment of a session only to have someone announce that the doctor was ready.

Here, the therapy session had protected time.

When the numbers showed that renting made more sense than continuing to pay Chris by the hour, Lynn and I began preparing the space.

We visited yard sales and stores, looking for furniture that was comfortable and professional without being extravagant. We found a couch, chairs, a desk, pillows, and lamps that softened the room.

I needed the office to feel safe to clients, but I did not possess Lynn’s visual instincts. She could look at an object or arrangement and recognize whether it belonged. Her judgment gave me confidence that the office did not look improvised or clinical in the wrong way.

That was not merely emotional support. She possessed an aesthetic intelligence I trusted.

My MSW degree went onto the wall, along with my license and certificates from clinical training. These were not decorations. They represented the years of work that had brought me there.

I also added a whiteboard and materials I might use when explaining ideas to clients. I purchased a toy box, dolls, and other toys in case I worked with children.

That choice brought me back to my first internship in 1994, when I had felt lost on the child and adolescent unit. At the time, I had not understood what clinical play was supposed to accomplish, and I had not received enough guidance.

Now I had studied play therapy. I understood more about how children communicated through activity and imagination. The experience that had once made me question whether I belonged in social work had become one part of a much larger education.

The office was ready.

Lynn and I went to dinner to celebrate.

I wanted to mark the occasion because it was more than another job. I had created a place where I could practice according to the values that had drawn me toward social work in the first place.

I had done it.

And I had someone with whom the accomplishment could become a shared joy rather than a private fact.

Lynn’s pottery

While my practice was taking shape, Lynn continued creating pottery.

I remember the first Azalea Festival booth distinctly because I felt awkward. I did not know what my role was supposed to be among the pottery artists and their friends. Lynn had a place in that world that did not depend upon me. She knew the people, understood the work, and belonged naturally within the creative community.

I cannot now say how often she participated in the festival afterward or whether her involvement became less frequent. I do not want the clarity of that first memory to become evidence for events I cannot recall.

What I do remember is that pottery remained part of her life.

She worked at the Art Center. Sometimes I met her there or picked her up when she finished. She could show me a piece at a particular stage and explain what still needed to happen before it was complete.

Clay was shaped, dried, glazed, and fired. The finished object contained decisions invisible to someone who saw only a bowl, cup, or decorative piece on a shelf.

Lynn sold pottery on consignment through shops in Wilmington and occasionally displayed it at events. Consignment meant that the shop presented her work and retained part of the sale price when someone purchased it.

I was proud when I saw her pottery displayed for sale.

I believed people should pay more for it. That was partly the response of someone in love, but it was not only that. I believed she had genuine talent. I did not praise the pottery because I thought a loving partner was supposed to say something encouraging.

I admired what she could do.

We also discussed the possibility of buying a kiln so she could fire pottery at home. A kiln would have given her more control over the process and reduced her dependence upon shared facilities.

Her income had to remain within limits connected to medical benefits, which complicated how much she could formally earn. But financial restrictions did not determine the artistic value of what she created.

Pottery was not merely a pastime that occupied her while I built a career.

It was work produced by her hands, judgment, patience, and imagination.

Word Salad

Our shared creative project was Word Salad Poetry Magazine.

We had begun it in 1995, when publishing a literary magazine on the World Wide Web was still unusual. There was no WordPress or simple content-management system allowing us to select a template and upload submissions. I created static pages and linked them together into each issue.

The name came from a term used in psychiatry, but it also played with an older anxiety I had once felt about poetry—that it could appear to be a collection of words whose meaning remained inaccessible.

The technical construction was primarily mine. The literary judgment belonged to both of us.

When submissions arrived, I initially wanted to review them on the computer. Lynn asked me to print them.

She spread the poems out and began sorting them into piles: poems she wanted to accept, poems that might deserve further discussion, and poems that did not belong in the issue.

Sometimes I approached her with a judgment already in mind. Sometimes she changed it.

I did not defer to Lynn because she was my partner and I wanted her to feel included. I sought her judgment because I believed she was more talented than I was in important ways. She had studied English, wrote poetry, and possessed an instinct for language that I respected.

The same principle had applied when she reviewed my graduateschool papers. She was not merely correcting typing errors as a favor. I asked her because I trusted her ability to recognize unclear language, awkward construction, and places where my meaning had not reached the page.

Receiving help from her acknowledged her expertise.

Word Salad began attracting submissions, including work from writers we did not already know. The project became visible enough to draw the attention of Ben Steelman at Wilmington’s Star-News.

Lynn and I met him together outside near the newspaper’s office.

The interview mattered because an established newspaper was treating what we had created as culturally significant. We were not merely playing with a website at home. We were contributing to a new form of literary publishing while the web itself was still taking shape.

I do not remember every question Ben asked or every answer we gave. What remains is the experience of sitting there together as the people behind the magazine.

I was not being interviewed while Lynn sat beside me as my supportive partner.

We were being interviewed as collaborators.

Word Salad joined abilities that neither of us would have possessed in quite the same way alone. I understood the emerging technology and could construct the publication. Lynn brought literary judgment, editorial confidence, and creative authority.

It was ours.

Work that meant something

My private practice, Lynn’s pottery, and Word Salad were different forms of creation.

In therapy, I helped people find language for experiences that had overwhelmed them.

In pottery, Lynn shaped clay into something that could be held.

In poetry, we helped writers place language before an audience.

All three depended upon noticing what might otherwise remain unseen.

The practice grew. Lynn continued writing and making pottery. Word Salad developed beyond our first experiment. We had a home, two cats, books filling the shelves, creative work around us, and a relationship that had not become less passionate because our lives were now established.

This was the beginning of the pinnacle—not because the earlier years had been less loving or less good, but because more parts of life were now flourishing simultaneously.

I had found professional independence.

Lynn had creative work that carried her own identity and talent.

Together, we had made something neither of us could have made in exactly the same way alone.

Love did not require one person to become the supporting character in the other person’s life.

At our best, Lynn and I became more visible because we were able to recognize one another.