Tomorrow is the Winter Solstice. The shortest day of the year. After that we can start heading towards the light again.
The job I left last week was my work in a psychiatric hospital where I did activities with people with advanced dementia. I loved those patients and I will miss them. They deserve all the patience and kindness and support in the world.
Something strange and sad is that I'm not even able to tell them that I'm leaving because they wouldn't remember and actually most wouldn't even understand because the majority of the people I worked with no longer have any verbal language or understanding of words left. So we communicated in different ways and what I learned there has been an absolute priviledge. It's also been some of the hardest work I've ever done and it was certainly taking its toll on me. There are many elements to that, certainly there is a cumulative effect of seeing so much suffering, people in such painful condition day after day, year after year. I think the hardest thing was the working environment though.
I never ever felt stressed among the patients, it was so natural to me to have patience for them, never any expectation that we had goals to achieve or anything to fulfil other than just to be and to try to find something that could be meaningful to each person. The biggest challenge was the stress among some of other staff I worked with and the lack of resources in the service. I think this is a particular challenge in care of the elderly and in mental health and that it really needs to be addressed if people are to be treated as human beings.
I don't like to feel like I've given something up when I could have perhaps kept working to improve the situation but if we don't look after ourselves first then we are no use to anyone. I spoke about it to my teacher today and she was very helpful. I will take this experience on to the next challenge and it will help me.
The last person they employed to do this job on one of the other wards lasted three days before she left. When they employed me there were meant to be 6 of us for the whole service and I was the only one left for over a year until a new person came for a different ward last month. I was there for 2 and a half years so I think I gave it a shot but now it's someone else's turn and maybe they will be a bit stronger than me. I'm going to try to write something constructive for my managers, who very helpful but just have such limited time and power, to hopefully make things a bit better for the next person who arrives. Unfortunately there was very little management, support, training or integration for the work and doing it alone was really difficult.
Maybe in the future I can work towards something which might be able to give some support to this area. It was a hard decision to leave but it's for the best, I definitely need a change. When you are finding more problems than solutions, it's really hard to keep positive. Once you have lost your positivity, something needs to change. There is so much I could say about this but I feel like I said too much already. I'm not sure how appropriate it really is to talk about work on here but maybe it's a good way to release stuff. I feel like so many people around me have pent up emotions at the moment, I hope it can find it's way to the surface peacefully and we can all breathe a bit again.
One thing I feel I have to reconcile is that I feel that I am somehow less valid as a person if I am not doing work like that. I wonder how I can justify my existence if I'm not doing something for others, maybe also if I'm not doing something really difficult which makes me suffer but I think this is all a bit of an ego trip on my part. But there are many ways of helping people and as my teacher said to me today, we don't have to go looking for that because it comes our way anyway wether we like it or not.
Having said all that, I don't feel too pessimistic and I am doing my best to rest, swim and organise all the things in my life I had been neglecting due to exhaustion and too many shifts. I am really really grateful for the experiences I had in this job, so many things seem so manageable in comparison and hopefully I understand people, life, myself, even just a tiny bit more.
I still have another two jobs, one is teaching art classes and the other is working at the reception of my yoga school, they are both really positive places and will keep me going financially and hopefully restore my energy a bit and after that, who knows. Maybe I will work out why I never really put my skills forward and why I always go for such difficult, poorly paid jobs. If anyone has any great ideas for me, let me know!
This is the first time in ages that over written so much here. I really don't enjoy or feel much of a desire to write about myself in the away I used to. It doesn't seem to serve much of purpose to me anymore but I seem to have it in me day so may as well go with the flow.
Yesterday I got lost in the bookshop and found this at the start of a novel, it's by Raymond Carver. I don't know if it's what I want from life. I don't know what I want but it moved me when I read it.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to
feel myself
Beloved on the earth.
