Grad school

It really feels like the closer I get to grad school, the less I know what I want out of it. I recently turned in my field placement questionnaire, which asked my interests so that my advisor could assist me in finding an internship for my first year. Pinning down one agency for an entire year . . . and the only thing I know for sure is that I want to work with women, and I'm ready to experience something besides domestic violence.

I'm stressed out. Part of me wants my advisor to say "Here. This is it. This is the place you will work," but then I hear myself piping up, "but what about the addictions field? What about working with adolescent girls? What about the LGBT community?"

I've been corresponding with a second-year student in the past few months who is a month away from graduation and feels similarly adrift looking for an area to pursue post-graduation. He told me he discussed this with a professor who said, "the paradox of social work grad school is that by leaving more confused/unsure of what direction to go now, you can be assured that you are being educated in social work."

I'm not sure how I feel about that, but I'll keep reminding myself of it as I try to grasp firmly for a concrete idea of my future.

Lately, I've been thinking more about therapy. I have always thought that's the direction I'd end up, but I have been doing so well with case management that I considered seeking out more opportunities for that. It keeps me busy. It sooths my problem solving brain. I like hearing someone state a problem and being able to figure out how to "fix" it. The idea of wading through a nebulous conversation about feelings terrifies me slightly. Check that. A lot.

I don't know why. I'm no stranger to therapy myself. I suppose the idea that I wouldn't be able to offer neat, tidy answers to people's questions (Unemployed? Have children? Apply for Public Assistance!) sets me on edge.

But lately, I've also been paying closer attention to the kinds of interactions I enjoy more with my clients. Some breeze into my office and say "yes, no, maybe" when I ask what they've accomplished in the past week, and I give them assignments for our next meeting. Others spend time going over issues or paperwork I can assist with. And still others sit down to just talk about emotions and feelings they have.

And it's the talky ones I enjoy the most. I feel more connected to them, involved in their situations, and less bored with my job. I think I should explore therapy more.

Talking about work

So I know I'm not really supposed to talk about work. (You can't, after all, review confidentiality policies with clients a million times over without absorbing a bit of the seriousness of it.)

And I get that. It would take some serious dense-ness to reveal client info like names, etc.

But I wonder, too, if even talking in vague terms breaks the code of ethics I am professionally obligated to abide by. It makes me wonder, in extreme instances, about coping.

My coping mechanism is this: I talk to Tim. Sometimes I don't even need him to listen. I just need his physical presence beside me as I open my mouth and release all the (couched in vague, unspecific terms, of course!) pent-up stress of the day. (Because keeping it inside will kill me, and that would make me pretty ineffective at my job, right?) Then sometimes I need him to coach me. This typically occurs when something happens at work--whether it be with a client, co-worker, or supervisor--that I am unsure how to deal with. At my previous job, it was usually coaching about how to stand up for myself, because I am generally shit at doing that.

I always feel so much better, so much more confident after those talks. How could that be wrong, or unethical, when it helps me be a better person/better social worker?

But my gut will usually tell me if I've crossed a line, and I think I may have with an earlier post, venting my annoyance about a caller. I was wondering it a bit when I wrote it, but ignored that and hit "publish" anyway. It was confirmated later, though, when I suspected a classmate of mine, one whom I respect to a bothersomely worshipful degree, had found my blog. Immediately I panicked. "I don't want her to read that post!" I thought, and then the following thought was, "then I shouldn't have posted it."

So I guess I should be more circumspect.

Now all I'll say is, hypothetically, there may exist a genetically timid person who is scared of confrontation, who may have broken up an argument last night, and while not resolving the bad feelings between the arguers completely, at least may feel proud that she assertively addressed things so issues are out in the open now, instead of pretending like she did not hear the yelling.

I need a backbone

I am not assertive at all; I have to work up my courage to be. I never know when is the right time to do it, the right battles to pick. And I have a way of fantasizing about each potential situation in which I must confront something, until I am completely sure that no matter how I handle things, I am going to end up screwing things up.

For instance: this lab bill that I recently got, for tests that shouldn’t have been done. I’ve been talking to the billing liaison, so she only knows parts of what happened. She said it wasn’t a lab mistake—the doctor really ordered the tests. And I told her I never gave permission for the tests to be ran, so she’s going to talk to the doctor about it, see if maybe we can foist the bills off on insurance. And I said, “if they don’t pay for it, I still don’t feel like I should be responsible for it.” Not aggressively, just stating my rather timid opinion of being stuck with a $200 bill for unnecessary tests I wasn’t warned I might have to pay for.

And I’ve had such horrible experiences with doctors, that I fully believe soon his office will have my name written on a list near the receptionist’s phone stating, “Crazy woman. Don’t help her. Hang up as soon as you can.” (Paranoid? Totally. But I’ve had experiences like that with another doctor.) Just the idea of going to see the doctor makes me nervous. Walking into the office, interacting with the office staff, I have trouble breathing normally. I get so nervous that I’m going to fuck things up and they’re going to hate me. I started worrying about that from my first visit, where I didn’t have my insurance card, and the office had to scramble to track my info down.

I’m scared of asking people to work hard for me, because then they’ll resent me and refuse to help me further.

And I never know when to make a fuss. I spoke to the doctor who comes weekly to see my clients, and she said the tests never should have been done, and I shouldn’t have to pay for the bill. So I feel like I should take a stand should they try to pass the buck to me. But honestly, despite now starting to feel a little bit violated by these tests that were done without my foreknowledge, I really, really, really liked my doctor. I felt so comfortable with him, and my appointment was filled with lots of discussion and communication. We talked about social issues, and he said his wife runs the rape crisis center here. He even said he never offers to do pelvic exams on women, but instead refers them to his wife because he wants his patients to be comfortable, and a lot prefer women doctors to do those (but I needed a new birth control prescription immediately, didn’t want to pay another co-pay to see a gynecologist, and was comfortable with him). I was excited to have found him. I don’t want to fuck things up with him so I’ll have to start going to someone else. I want him to say, “oh, my mistake, I’ll take care of that bill,” so I can stop worrying and feel comfortable next time I’m sick and need to see someone.

Camp

I listened to This American Life today; it was a rerun from 1998 about camp stories. It reminded me so much about my own camp experiences, and my heart ached a little at missing it so much. Things ended really badly for me--no perfect final summer to round out my memories--so for the longest time, I pushed thoughts to the back of my mind and when I thought about it at all, it was while sleeping, in nightmares.

But the truth is, mostly camp was a little crystalline bubble of perfection, an escape from the normal angst of teenage years, a wooded oasis of peace for six summers. I'd give anything to be able to return in some capacity. Like maybe there's a summer camp out there in the wilds of Wisconsin or Michigan who needs a social worker on staff?

I felt like I was a completely different person there. Still me, I suppose, but electrified. (The things I would do to make a kid laugh . . .) Maybe I remembered being a camper--of course I did--and as a counselor I wanted to make sure the kids took away wonderful memories like I had.

Two things stick out in my mind as important and special. The second year I counseled, during a junior high week, we had Invitational during vespers. The invitational was the one night during the week where we took communion and invited everyone in camp to accept Jesus into their heart. For campers who had been coming back summer after summer, this was a meaningful tradition, and the cabin chosen lead vespers tried its hardest to make the service a tearjerker. The counselors stayed behind to talk to any kid who needed it. Technically, this was for discussing spiritual issues, but inevitably kids who had gone through rough patches, like losing a friend or having parents get divorced, would stay to cry on someone's shoulder. I don't remember what happened at the service, or after, I just remember going back to the cabin and putting the girls to bed and laying down myself. A few minutes after I turned out the lights, one of my girls got me, and said another camper was crying. I crawled up to the girl's top bunk, and said, "sweetie, what's wrong?"

I wasn't the type who called people "sweetie" or "honey," but the girl was crying so hard that it slipped out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying.

"Sweetie, what's wrong?" and I gathered her in my arms.

She said, with difficulty through her sobs, that she didn't know whether or not she had Jesus in her heart. How do you know if you do?

That was a conundrum for me as well. I was supposed to be some sort of spiritual advisor for these girls, yet I wasn't even sure how I felt about things myself. At that very moment, I didn't know if I had Jesus in my heart. Was he supposed to wave and say hi once he got there or what? And since he hadn't, did that mean he hadn't shown up? I was only 18 or 19, fairly new to Christianity myself, and not 100% sold on it. Honestly, I think I was a camp counselor more for the kids and less because I was an avid Christian.

But you don't say that to an 11-year-old kid in spiritual crisis. You don't admit that you have no answers when she's sobbing and looking to you to ease her pain somehow.

So I asked her things about her belief, and I talked about how you never know anything for sure--you just have to believe. And believing makes things real. She stopped crying, and thanked me, and we both went back to sleep.

I don't know why this ranks up at the top of my experiences, but it seems so special to me.

The second thing happened my final year of counseling, for the most part, a pretty miserable time because of my co-counselors, not because of the kids. Senior high week towards the end, we had a closing ceremony for the graduating seniors--yet another opportunity to wring the most possible tears out of an evening. This particular class was special to me. They had been freshman when I was a senior, so I had been both camper with and counselor to them. After the ceremony, one boy said he had something important to talk to me about, and could we go for a walk. We ended up sitting by the lake under the stars. I was slightly nervous, because I knew I had to be careful about anything with the slightest hint of inappropriateness, and a counselor and camper of opposite sexes off somewhere alone could fall into that category. But he and I had been friends since we'd met, at a youth rally four years before.

He talked about meeting me then. As a senior, Kurt Cobain and grunge had finally hit Marion, and I embraced the combat boots, flannel shirts, and what Hannah called my "elephant" pants. I ran around the youth rally, according to him, this really cool person, unlike any Christian he had ever met. Like him, he thought, and he decided he maybe could find a place for himself in religion. (It didn't hurt that he was a hot little skater punk. I have a weak spot for them.) He said he considered me his spiritual mentor. I didn't know how to respond, how to let him know that no one had ever said anything more wonderful or meaningful to me in my life. How to thank him in a way that conveyed how honored I was. I don't remember what I said.

I'm not the person I was back then. But I suppose I don't have access to the same environment, and the world seems like a harder place now--no place for the same blissful summers where you're closed off from the real world, existing in a special dream place like camp.

The first summer counseling, I felt alive and hypersensitive every single moment, drinking in the experience. I made friendships with my co-counselors that I thought would be rock solid for the rest of our lives, but the intensity that camp fosters rarely translates successfully to the mundane world. I thought I'd fallen in love, too, and remember like it was yesterday a walk we took, on the way to the chapel, revealing our feelings and the tragedy that we could not be together (for myriad reasons).

Oh, everything was so dramatic and important back then. (Maybe it came from being 18, too.)

My last summer counseling was night and day different than the first. I felt I was on one side of a canyon, my co-workers on the other, and I couldn't figure out how to build a bridge across to them. It didn't seem like they were trying to connect with me, either. I felt so isolated, and threw myself into the work, ignoring the importance of connecting with them. The tone was different, too. I always looked forward to immersing myself in a deeply spiritual summer and making new friendships, but suddenly the space was no longer safe. I was no model Christian during my college years, but the woods were sacred to me. The other counselors were profane, disrespectful, pretty much assholes, really.

The hardest week was senior high. I was 20, so not much older than some of them, but a few of the counselors were where I was two years previous--just a summer out of their own camping experience, and good friends with some of the very people they'd have to take charge of. S, the boys' counselor I shared a cabin and responsibilities with, he was my age, with a year or two of counseling experience, thus theoretically more capable than some of the younger counselors. Yet he was one of the worst. It was more important to him to be liked, and he took inappropriateness to an extreme.

In the middle of the week, he supervised the kids who wanted to drag their mattresses out to the communal porch to sleep. I stayed in my bunk on the girls' side with a few of the campers who didn't want to brave the mosquitos. The porch crowd didn't get much sleep, and I didn't close my eyes all night. I don't know what reality S was experiencing that made him think that sex, sexist, and race jokes were somehow appropriate in that setting, but nonetheless, that's what he was telling. Then he started talking shit about the other counselors. I could hear everything clearly through my open window in the quiet woods that night, and I felt like I was being kicked in the stomach over and over and over. Today, though, I don't remember if he said anything bad about me. Everything about the night was so horrible, him talking cruelly about me would not have made things noticeably worse. I don't know if it was an idea that has only come to me over the years, or if I thought it but couldn't execute it: I should have gotten up, gone out to the porch, and asked S if we could take a walk. The kids, of course, would have known as soon as we were out of earshot, that he would be in deep trouble--or so he would have told them later. I was so meek and passive that I probably couldn't have said how I really felt. Or maybe I would have just started crying.

I am slightly proud to believe if this happened today, I have grown enough that I would have addressed it. Back in 1995, though, I stayed in my bunk, crying and praying all night.

And then I think of the "Footsteps" poem, and I felt God with me that night, but what I would have given not to be there, listening to hatefulness where there should have been love.

I wanted to leave the next day. I was leaving early anyway, to study in Ireland, skipping the last week of the summer. I only had a week left before then, and I didn't think I could make it after that night. The only person I felt close to was the camp director, and she asked me not to go.

So I stayed, and got through the end of senior high week, and the next week. I don't know how, or what happened. That night was burned so deeply on my consciousness that, more than ten years later, it's really the only thing I remember from that hellish summer.

I relived it in dreams for years after. My photos are stuffed far out of sight; last time I checked, it even hurt to look at them. My whole love affair with camp was obscured by that last summer. It seemed so unfair that I couldn't even locate my good memories of it; my sleep self only recalled the bad.

But ten years have passed. I'm a different person now, which is good. Maybe someday, back in Kansas, visiting for the summer, I could go back and make peace with the woods again.