What I’ve Learned…

I’ve completed nearly two months of my job now. It’s hard having a borderline personality, a disorder built of its fluctuating emotions, a harsh inner critic, and difficulty managing relationships in a job that’s full of stress and talking to people! Here’s what I’ve learned about life in this position so far.

It’s hard. Like really fucking hard. I knew it was going to be, because I’m new to the position, but I was not prepared for how really intensely difficult this job was going to be. There are a lot of different things I’m expected to manage. Case management. Testing. Social lunch groups. Consultation with teachers. Phone calls to parents. Documentation of everything: reports, phone logs, progress monitoring, education programs.

It doesn’t matter how on top of things I feel at the end of one day. The unexpected is coming, whether it be a concern about a student or a new referral. I’ve learned I need to get used to the fact that it’s never all going to get done in a day, my to-do list is just going to be a revolving door.

Closing my door is a boundary. It lets people know that I’m busy. Boundaries are important. You don’t always have to answer the phone when it rings. You don’t have to answer an email right away. You can wait a few hours, regroup, and call back.

I’ve learned that you can ask a question four different times and get four different answers, depending on who you ask. Administration isn’t always cohesive, and everyone has a different agenda. You need to be careful of what you say to who, and avoid throwing someone under the bus.

The nature of my job and the nature of my age puts me on my own little island. Sometimes what I need to do for a student goes in line with what a teacher wants or perceives the student needs. Our values do not always align. I’m not there to make friends, I’m there to do a job.

I’ve learned that the rumor is true: high school never ends. Especially when you work in a school. There are cliques, there are loners, there are politics to navigate. It’s confusing as hell.

I’m really bad at this, by the way. Put me in my office writing reports all day and I’m fine. Put me in classrooms and offices asking for missing surveys or making a suggestion for a kid and I’d like a hole to appear in the ground and swallow me up.

The minions constantly want me to believe that other people think badly of me. For example, I’ll stop in during a teacher’s lunch to ask for something and walk away feeling insecure and anxious. They’re talking about me. They’re annoyed at me.  They hate me for asking for that. I might be right and I might not be, but it doesn’t really matter.

When I’m there during the day, it’s about everyone else. It’s about my students. It’s not about me. My problems get put on a shelf and will be returned to later. However, it does need to be about me during lunch. I need to eat, need to drink water, need to take bathroom breaks. Otherwise I’m of no use to my students. This is not always easy to remember, and days have gone by where I have forgotten to eat lunch and then wonder why I’m cranky come 2:00.

I’ve learned you can go down to the cafeteria and ask for pizza at 1:00 on a Friday and they’ll give you leftovers. And if you bribe the technology guys with candy, they install programs on your laptop when you can’t figure it out yourself.

It’s really easy to compare myself to the girl who came before me, the one others thought highly of. She had five years experience on her way out the door and I have two months experience. I want to be as good as her, and I find myself inserting myself into situations and trying to make comments just to show that I know things, to try to justify why I was hired.

It’s okay not to know everything. It’s okay to sit back and watch, to examine the dynamics and absorb more information. These things do not make me worthless in the position, they show that I’m interested in learning.

I don’t always believe this, but other people say it, so it’s probably true.

I’ve learned that work follows me home each day, even if I don’t take any physical reports to write or try to update my calendar. The kids come to me in my dreams. I find myself thinking about them in the shower. I’m so obsessed with the notion of being effective and making a difference that their needs bleed into my world and overshadow my needs to get a break.

For this reason, I’m working on setting timers to limit work outside the walls of my office. I’m working on affirmations to share with myself when I feel like thoughts of my students crowd my brain.

I’ve learned that 6:00 is really early, but that I can survive being among the conscious world at that time.

And, as it turns out, 9:00 feels quite later than it ever used to.

I’ve learned that when all eyes are on me, I panic. When we are sitting in a referral meeting, my brain refuses to concoct questions or make connections between what’s being spoken and the things I’ve learned. I may as well be useless.

I try to make lists to compensate, so I have something to refer to and can develop enough information to make a decision. This helps in some ways, but doesn’t in others.

Without a doubt, I love my students. I am 100% positive of that part. They have their unique challenges, but I am learning them. Their histories, their mannerisms, their needs. I want so desperately to help them grow. I celebrate them as often as I can.

Most importantly, I’ve learned to adopt the mantra of one day at a time. When I want to stress about everything coming my way, the multitudes of spring evaluations on top of referrals, and our program’s growing number of needs, I immediately feel panic rising.

But then I remember, that’s not today. Today, I have X number of things on my list to tackle. The rest is coming, but it’s not here yet. I’ll focus on what’s in front of me.

I’ve learned that this job is stressful. Not just hard, but stressful. I was afraid from the beginning that it would tear me apart. Sometimes I still fear that, like the nights where I break down crying because there’s so much to do or because I’m so tired.

When people ask how my job is going, especially my friends working  the same job, it’s easier to just say “It’s fine” or “It’s a lot, but I’m getting through.” Sometimes I just call it a challenge. No one knows the true extent of it, except my one friend C, who I told just the other night in the middle of a panic episode.

The truth is, I wish I loved my job with the same passion that my friends do.

I’ve learned that I don’t know if I want to do this forever, but it’s what I’m going to have to do right now. It’s a job and it’s a salary, and that’s what I’ve worked for. Acceptance is still iffy on this front, but I get up and go in each day.

One day at a time.

Fearing Inferiority

Approximately 58 times today (or any day), I had a moment where I questioned my life choices.

Whether it was while I was sitting and working on a report, trying to read an article, or consulting with colleagues, I had a moment where I just had to stop and breathe. Because it is just so damn overwhelming sometimes. It flags the question: How long will it take until I feel reasonably comfortable doing this independently?

Perhaps more importantly: Will I ever feel that way? 

The question is very commonly triggered when a number of things crop up where I don’t know what to do or how to handle it. For example, when I was reading an article on a particular method of service delivery in school. A number of things became apparent to me as I read: how much there is to know about this topic alone, that the article just raised a handful of new unanswered questions, and that I wasn’t even entirely confident in my own opinions about the validity of the article.

All of that bombarded me in a matter of a few seconds, mind you. Ever been on a computer and mistakenly go to some spam page that unleashes 10 different pop-ups? You don’t know which one to try to get rid of first, with your attention split so many ways.

Sometimes the surge of pop-ups causes the system to freeze. That is (unfortunately) a very common reaction for me. Too many thoughts at once causes my mind to get cloudy. Everything blurs out and I need to disassociate before I just shut down. Think about something else entirely to get away from the negative feelings that the bombarding of thoughts caused.

I think I’m getting better at the observation. The acknowledgement of “This is uncomfortable. I would like this to stop.” Compassion for myself, because for anyone else I could be empathetic to the fact that this externship has been a very overwhelming experience (how can there be so many things I need to know!). No shaming myself for the feeling.

I am also getting better at taking a moment to re-center myself before the whole system shutdown thing becomes my reality. Today while reading I took more than one moment for deep breathing. Eyes closed, count to five, hope that the world feels a little more tolerable when my eyes open again.

Those fears are so real right now for me though. Even with the kinder voice, even with the grounding exercises. It’s strong. I fear what is going to happen if I am not good enough. I fear that I can’t acquire the skills I need to be successful. It’s okay to be learning right now under the layer of supervision, but the thought of doing this alone is beyond my capability to imagine. I fear so deeply that I don’t have what it takes and no amount of work or studying will fix that.

On some level, I know that my ragged, patchwork piece of armor somewhat resembling a self-esteem is to blame. Instead of being a impenetrable shield of protection from the fears of inferiority, the cracks in my self-esteem let the fears slip right through. If I believed in myself a little more, if I valued my own input to situations and had confidence in my skills, the fear might not seem so debilitating at times.

My self-esteem is still a work in progress. I’m slowly piecing together these broken pieces of my self-esteem armor (or maybe reconstructive it entirely?). Boy is it a slow process, but that is the nature of the work.

So fear will probably continue to live inside me for some time. Fear of not being enough. Of being inferior to those around me. Externship is a process and I hope that I’ll grow to shed some of that fear as I prove to myself I can do it. I’m pushing hard against these thoughts, but they push back with a resilience that knows no bounds.

I’m clinging to the part of me that knows how fiercely I will work to be better. To improve my skills and mental health in tandem. I’ve done it before, I know how to play the game.

I just have to keep playing the game.