Halfway through Year Two

Hello to my faithful few,

It's been extremely challenging to write anything on this blog for the last few months. Every time I try to tell my story, it was either nothing new was happening or nothing exciting. I know several of my blogs have been "life has been so challenging" or "I get weighed down by it all" so I didn't really find the need to repeat these over and over.

It occurred to me that if I keep wanting to write these mopey blog posts every week for the last few months, I may have a consistent issue that I need to cope with.

After reflecting, meeting with my work supervisor and meeting with Annie, we all decided that I'm simply going through burnout. It surprised me; it is one of those things they warn you about but one always feels you'll be the exception.

To give you a sense of what it felt like, I'll give you a brief description:

Everyday at work, I sit at my desk doing the work I didn't finish yesterday. Every three minutes or so, the doorbell rings and a client asks something of me. Every 15 minutes or so, my phone rings. Every hour or so, a clinician comes in with a request. The work load is not particularly overwhelming, but any doorbell or phone call could lead to a crisis. I never knew whether a client would bring a simple problem or a complex problem. I was always on edge and usually overwhelmed by the problems facing my clients. In this line of work, all you do is give. Give, give, give, give, give. People just take from you all day long. Anytime someone walked into my office, it meant work. For some reason, it never bothered me before.

It began to bother me because I lacked a major component of my work: self-care. I watched a webinar at work on vicarious trauma (therapists and doctors who are around people with PTSD can actually develop PTSD themselves if they aren't careful). One of the best parts about the webinar was it reminded us in the torture treatment field that it isn't normal to see the effects of torture every day. While torture does happen everyday, it sure isn't normal to be reminded of that.

So anyways, I realized it was a component of my life that I was lacking. I began to address it and things are already better. If all you do is give, give, give and you aren't replenishing your source (through self-care) you begin to resent. You resent that you help others but you never help yourself. Addressing this has already helped. Even a mindset change can go a long way.

One of my self-tactics is to find a little bit of humor in my work and we had a great one yesterday.

Part of my job is to coordinate dental appointments. Typically, our clients are on the run for a few years so they lack dental care. They often have cavities or gum disease so it's complicated to schedule. An average referral involves sending them to a dentist where we find Medicaid won't cover the root canal they need so I need to find another dentist.

Our client came back from the dentist, and as usual, Medicaid wouldn't cover the procedure or the medicine (Clinipro 5000 dexaflorupanz or something like that) to treat it. Tracking down the dentist to find out exactly the procedure and medicine was tricky. It took Corrie and me about 2 hours. What was the procedure? A cleaning and Clinipro 5000 dexaflorupanz is none other than toothpaste. We enjoyed that one. That must be what immigrants go through daily.

Since the year is already half over, second years have a lot of things upcoming. We have a second year retreat this weekend (Annie, my director told me we have nothing really planned--just some time to read and pray and Ryan is going to cook for us (an Amate volunteer that gets a weekend to read and has meals prepared for them is more or less Amate heaven)). Afterwards, we're going to meet with prospective second year volunteers on Wednesday. After that comes winter retreat and my last few months at Kovler.

I'm about ready to move on. I've decided I'd like to see what being a lawyer would be like so I'm beginning to look at paralegal positions for next year. I'm already excited about having my Wednesday nights back (no mandatory events) and being able to use my computer without guilt!