I’ll admit it, I dropped the ball. My intention was to document the entirety of my grad school experience. Yet here I am, 6 weeks from graduating, just now realizing that’s it’s been damn near 2 years since my last entry. I started my practicum position in the summer of 2016, as a community-based clinician at the same agency I’ve been working with for several years. A wonderful supervisor and amazing clients made my journey so enjoyable that I extended my 1 year practicum contract for another 6 months. However, the fact that the work was fulfilling didn’t make it in any way easy. It was demanding work; DMH paperwork never seems to have an end, and working with the foster care population requires some seriously thick skin. It didn’t help that I had accepted the challenge of close to a full-time caseload of clients. Clinicians putting in full 40-hour weeks had an average of 15 clients – I maintained a steady 12 for the majority of my practicum, while trying to squeeze in school responsibilities wherever I could. I had NO spare time, and my self-care was the first thing to be thrown out the window. So I was extremely susceptible to the heart wrenching stories of each of my clients on a daily basis. I don’t think anyone can fully prepare for the toll that these narratives can take if you’re not taking care of yourself.
I ended my practicum in January of 2018. I put my whole heart into my client’s cases, doing everything I could to advocate for their needs. I went to homes, community clubs, and schools – following kids from city to city, one placement after the next. At times, I was the closest thing to stability and an attachment figure a child had. At times, I had to be the one to break devastating news to a child. Several times, I came home crying to my husband about how things shouldn’t be the way that they are. My experiences both inspired the heck out of me and broke parts of me. Month after month my inner light faded, until I was running on the last wisps of smoke from the burned out flame.
For a full month after practicum, I was so deflated that I could not muster the energy to do anything other than read. I got lost in book after book, following one fantasy to the next, desperately trying to escape the aversion to reality that I was suffering. Fortunately, my last few classes of the program have required little time or attention, so I’ve had the luxury of time to waste. After a while, I felt so sick of myself for lack of productive behavior that I threw myself back into my old, comforting love of yoga. I completed a full 30-day challenge and jumped right into another after that. Yoga, paired with meditation and some crafty house projects, have helped me out of the fog of burnout. I’m finally starting to feel more like myself, motivated to figure out my next steps. I figured now was as good a time as any to go back and reflect on the last couple of years. If I can learn from my previous challenges, perhaps I can make my next go at being a clinician a bit easier. Here’s to showing up for ourselves everyday, and continuously taking steps towards our dreams.
The fall semester has just begun, and somehow I feel more relaxed now that I did all summer. This is the semester I’ll be starting my practicum hours, so I decided to resign from my position at my agency to allow myself the freedom and mental capacity to focus on this learning opportunity. Fitting full-time responsibilities into a mere 25 hours a week on top of school and the whole purchasing a house & moving in process has made these last 6 months ridiculously tedious. More often than I’d like to admit, I didn’t handle it well. The stress triggered everything from OCD & anxiety to some major irritability. I did, however, manage to end things at work on a good note. I tried to do my best for my clients up until the very last day, simply because their education is important and I cared about them enough to do my due diligence. My supervisor had been under the impression that my last day was on a Thursday, and was prepared to let me go even though the start of the school year is the busiest time of the year for my position. I had to request to stay an additional day, because I wouldn’t have felt right about leaving unfinished work for my successor. With that extra day, I managed to wrap things up nicely. Somehow that makes me feel a little more proud of the entire experience; as if I found the strength to maintain a jogging pace all the way to the finish line despite the fatigue and unbearable cramps that begged me to quit. Now I can take stock of my lessons learned and hopefully make some changes to better handle the new bouts of stress heading my way.
Life has been difficult lately. On paper, the work and school schedule that I have is manageable. It leaves little room for a social life, but it works. What I didn’t anticipate when I committed to the schedule was a reemergence of OCD symptoms. When you throw a panic attack into the mix, and some everyday generalized anxiety while you’re at it, the workload becomes damn near impossible. For this reason, I’ve been struggling to maintain the light within me.
Mindful Studies 