Continuous questions in the absence of distraction
I’ve been on a social media hiatus from the antiworktherapist Instagram page for about a week now, and have taken the page at a great distance since the beginning of November. Part of what I’ve noticed is a bit more clarity—but also, oddly, other areas of confusion and obscurity—about how I feel about myself as a mental health professional, and how I feel about the mental health profession in whole, since I’ve put some loving boundaries between myself and the hyperconnected social sphere.
What I’ve noticed is that I have a lot of questions. A lot of wondering. A lot of, “what would that have been like?” and “I wonder what could have been?” when it comes to my experience in mental health. Those questions have come up in my reflections on being a newer professional in the age of COVID—thinking a lot about how I entered the world of full-time employment in mental health just a mere 9 months before the world ground to a screeching halt and then flipped upside down, and none of us—neither the new providers or the seasoned professionals—had a single flying fuck of clue how to comprehend what our world had become.
Of course there’s little use in wondering too hard what life as a new therapist would have been like had COVID never happened, or had it been controlled. But it does make me wonder a little. And it does bring up a process of grieving what I wanted but never really had. There’s some anger—maybe lots of it, when I’m being honest—about how the vision I had in mind for my career never really materialized. There’s grief around how I, and how all of us, were thrust so quickly into an internal and external chaos, and how all the Think Pieces about “let’s slow down and build a new world” ended up being utopian ideals with no basis in reality—that we have, in fact, not built that better world, and that more and more of us are feeling extended beyond our own capacities, in more ways than one.
Often, I’ve felt disappointed, a little apathetic, tired, and let down about the mental health world, and parts of the world at large. It seems to me that through Instagram, and even on here, I channeled a lot of indignant feelings, frustration, anger, “fuck it” mode, and irritated energy pushing for change. After a rush of mental activity and, subsequently, social media activity, I’d go into an energetic lull. The anger and frustration would sometimes lead to a withdrawal. Stepping away from that space has reduced much of the “hot” energy I feel, but what remains is a bigger question with a more empty-feeling space in my body. It is, at times, a dull weight. At other times, it’s more of a question. More than anything, it’s a continuing sense of, “well, what now?”
I will say that I do sometimes get a jolt of that creativity energy I love, that serves me well—I feel jazzed and excited about what I get to do with my work, and I have fun planning projects, creative endeavors, and more. Consistently, the time with my clients is the highlight of my time spent at work. Even when my energy stores are drained from long days, it never escapes me how the work with clients—the time with them in sessions, the things we talk about—is a piece of that original pre-COVID career vision that remains intact and realized.
So it’s been interesting, really, to be more of an observer to my own process and my own emotional experience of being a mental health worker in the mental health world—at this time in the world, with these things happening in the world—and to process how I feel about it much more internally than I have over the past year. Without the visual and literal noise clouding my view, there have been some pieces of this puzzle that have come into focus more clearly. Even still, there are some questions unanswered (which often lead to more questions) and puzzle pieces without a match.
Even writing this, there is a sense of something just on the top of my mind that wants to make itself known—a truth I’ve come to learn about doing this work, a thought about the state of our industry, a feeling about where it’s all headed—but it’s not quite there, not quite ready to come out. So I’m here with my keyboard and my screen, sitting in my office at 8pm on a Wednesday night, exploring without saying much of anything at all, wondering where this is all going in the end.
I am, you might say, in a continual state of shifting in and out of liminal space with my work. There is a near-constant flux that I’ve come to know, love, and hate all the same. Cutting out some of the social media clutter has laid bare some of those impulses and feelings for what they are. It’s also made it quite difficult for me to escape the internal struggle I’m having with a lot of these bigger, longer-term questions about work, career, vocation, and what it means to be a therapist in this fucked up place we call earth.
Anyway, I need to close the computer and eat some food. It’s been a long day. I’ll catch you all later.