It pains me to admit my husband was out of town for a whole week and I failed to blog a single adventure. Perhaps its for the best, after overcoming the shock of grad school I am enjoying the calm of "normal" life. I considered if infact any adventures have been had. Adventures while alone that is.
I am not sorry to say my most recent adventures have been full of the people I love. A pleasant thought.
However, I am finding that there are things you must do, as an adult, alone:
1. Interviews.
Can you say stressful? It's worse when you are a mental health professional, trained in the art of reading body language. You spend half the time wondering what the side glance 5 minutes in meant followed by the short response at 7 minutes and 20 seconds. At some point you realize you have no idea what they just said because you are trying to analyze why they placed their coffee cup on the left side of the table instead of the right.
Then, of course, you reach the inevitable "Do you have any questions for me?"
Questions? Uh, yes. "How many employees have been murdered on the job in the past year?" What can I say? He covered everything else.
There I was, FRESH out of grad school, trying to look and be professional and all I felt was very....young.
2. Working
This is probably unique to my profession. I am required to be alone in a room with anywhere from 1 to 25 clients at a time. It is my sole responsibility not to make the worse than they were when they came in and to conduct "therapy" skillfully and ethically. While it may not seem like it, that is a tremendous amount of pressure. Nothing is worse than being in the middle of a session about fiscal responsibility and, out of no where, a client says "When I was 4 I witnessed Mr. Rogers murdering my dog with the family Bible." (*not an actual incident).
What do I do next? I follow the therapist's protocol.
-nod my head like I am really taking it in
- repeat it back, just to make sure I got it right in a less traumatic way "So you saw your dog being harmed by someone you cared about."
-State the obvious "That must have been very difficult for you"
Hopefully, by this time, you have stalled enough to consider where to go from here. There are many times my knee-jerk response is to want to say "I'm not qualified to do this." Then I would leave. (I'm not going to go into a long tirade about why I actually am qualified, the truth is I'm a brand-new therapist). I don't leave, instead I allow the client time to work through their trauma and some how leave the session with the client thanking me for helping them through it. The role of the therapist is one that is solitary. You don't have responsibilities like that when you are younger. There's always a bigger person to lend a hand. At any rate, there is SOMEONE around to help.
3. Selling yourself.
It feels like there is no end to this representing yourself to the world stuff. Whether its a job, a client, a PHD program, submitting writing or trying to propose at a conference. I have never cared to sell anything and I hope to never have a job where that's required of me. All I want to say is "Look, do you want this or not?" But no, it feels as if there is an endless stream of people and situations I'm required to convince that I have the skills, knowledge, training , talent, personality etc. they are looking for. I must precariously balance the fine line between humility and narcissism. I feel I never find the balance. I'm either saying "I guess I'm ok but I'm sure you could do better (in my best Eeyore voice)." or "I'm so awesome you're a fool if you bother considering anyone else! Revere me!"
I long for the good old days when all chick-fila wanted to know is if I was 14 and knew how to mop floors.
It feels like I've been thrust into a world I'm not ready for. Although growing is something we do within the company of others, it is also a very solitary journey. The challenge for me is to accept that perhaps it is not that I can't do these things, it's that I don't want to do them because the doing feels like a message to the world that I feel old enough to be all I'm needed to be. But I don't feel that way at all.
I feel very young.
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