A Post From Convalescence Camp

Hi Everybody. My name is Psyche and I'm a perfectionist workaholic.

["Hi Psyche!"]

I'm writing to you, dear readers, from a miniature mental institution for one that I have staged in my appartment. I am recovering from bona fide exhaustion. Looks like I am not Wonder Woman after all.

I've been at my job at the org for over 5 years now, most of that full time nights and evenings... I heard a lot of trauma in that time, but it took the end of my first year in grad skule to actually put me over the edge into full-blown burnout/compassion fatigue. Basically, I handed in my last assignment at 11:50 on June 5, after finishing a full time week at my professor's conference. I took a few days of vacay out of province (during which I didn't sleep much for some reason) and then returned immediately to full time + work at the org. Early mornings... 7:45am starts on the phones catching the beginnings of summer prank time with kids-at-home-instead-of-school-needing-help season. Two weeks into this I got a call from a girl who just found out 15 minutes earlier that her mom had breast cancer, had lost her best friend to suicide two months prior AND has had 5 other relatives dies in the past 12 calendar months... oh, did I mention that her father was also a convicted pedophile?

It was the breast cancer that put me over the edge. I started to cry on the phone (thank CHRIST for the mute button) while she told me about discovering her mom's diagnosis. Breast cancer freaks the fuck out of me. EVERY single woman on my mom's side has had breast cancer EXCEPT my mom and I. Aunts, grandmothers, great aunts... great grandmother... ALL OF THEM. I get pissed at my mom for not doing regular checks or wearing sunscreen (she is fair and lots of freckles) and Mummer just tells me that she's "decided" she's "not going to get cancer." Uh, Mummer? I don't think it works that way...

Anyhow... I needed to debrief, maybe even go home after that call. I asked for debriefing but couldn't get it because the supervisor was in supervision. Great. Talking about it with a colleague didn't do the trick. That was it for me. I stared at a computer monitor for the rest of the week, hoping no one would notice I wasn't really working. FUCK! It makes no SENSE to treat a counselling service like a fucking call centre!!! Do you know that I have an actual QUOTA to make with at least the web counselling that I do? Seriously! I am expected to answer a call to counselling on the Internet every 40 minutes. These motherfuckers are an average of 500 words long (sometimes they are 3000 words long!). When I told my journalist husband about this, he plotzed, or would have if he was Jewish. He works for a daily and says that 500 words for print take about 4 hours/half a working day. And, he pointed out, no one he writes for is in danger of committing suicide. Jebus...

I got lost there for a sec, what was my point? Right... I'm burned out. So I'm off this week. And yeah, even though I work for a mental health institution, I don't dare tell them that I am burned out, because they have a track record of acting inappropriately about this stuff. Our old CEO was actually heard saying something close to (sorry, not a direct quote), "So what if the counsellors burn out? We can always hire more counsellors." Nice eh? There was a woman at my workplace that was suffering from post partum depression with a note from her doctor requesting a change from nights to days for a few weeks while she recovered, and management refused to let her counsel period and tried to bully her into quitting. Yeah... I know...

Mental health organizations tend to attract the mentally ill. And yes, I have already thought about what that might say about me.

What was my point in all this?

Right. The point is that I'm taking a week off to recoup. I admit to being a silly dork for not thinking I needed any vacay after hell-year at dipshit campus. Clearly, I neeed a month. But a week is what I'm getting because my GP is on mat leave and the sub doesn't know enough about the hell I've endured at the org to truly get where I am coming from -- although I shouldn't sell her short, I don't know if she would support me in taking more time or not.

But you know... what gets me is how much I just panic when I'm not being perfect. Not being able to handle this... having something inside of me insist on a mental/emotional vito of my workaholic plans sends me into a state of panic. I think that grad school might be really an unhealthy place to be. You're expected to be on call, constantly availalble to professorial whims... doing a FUCKLOAD of work all the time, always expected to be brilliant, insightful, cutting edge... and if you're not... well, you're just an average schmo. Like that is going to get you a high-paying job at the end of this hell.

Okay okay okay... in my mental institution, there is rum... Heyyyyy... the doctor said I needed to take some time for myself and just relax for a bit... so this rum is doctor's orders.

I am patentedly BAD at taking time for myself.

I don't really know what else to say. I'm dreading my meeting with my supervisor to get my course schedule approved for next year. Fuck. Grad skule is supposed to be this mentoring experience and yet, nothing is formalized... there is no template for what you are supposed to do... for example, I have a course entiteled "practical research" that I have done absolutely NOTHING for (that's another post) and suddenly this "A" just appeared on my transcript... because I'm certain my advisor is just too busy to discuss it with me. Seriously... how did I get an A when I did NOTHING???? (And not for lack of trying, like I said, this is another whole post.) Isn't there someone somewhere that I should have to answer to?

Oh, and get this... my therapist (whom I also must conceal I am seeing because of a weird bias in my department... apparently on paper we are pro therpist but in practise it is a mark against you if you see one) says that he has 10 patients from my univerisity to every other patient he has! OMFG!!! Is that not incredible???

Okay, clearly I am too hopped up on rum to go on. Will update again shortly!