Tag Archives: job

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The Job You Really Want

I have a theory that we all have an idea of a job we’d do if money wasn’t a thing. A fun job, a meaningless job, a flexible job, or even a non-job — we’d take the role if offered. When I was younger (much younger), that job for me was living in a log cabin in the country with a lot of land. I grew up in the country and our home was far out from the city and suburbs. Big open areas and starry skies with quiet nights were a frequent occurrence. Plus, and most importantly, I read ALL the books in the Little House on the Prairie series. I was just convinced at the tender age of 7 that the way to go was living off the grid. I was enthralled with the stories of homesteaders and settlers who went West looking for new opportunities. It seemed like fun and I loved animals so riding horses all day sounded amazing. 

I wanted to travel and get paid for it. Once upon a time I was stuck in a (literal) cubicle job and had some down time on my hands. I knew that I needed something different and that office life wasn’t something I wanted long term. I was (surprisingly) able to find a whole other career field where I combined my education with my desire to travel and I spent four years on the road. It was a good experience overall and I got to see a part of the country I never anticipated visiting. “Yay” for trying something different.

The today version of me would like to be a stocker at my favorite candle store. It would (hypothetically) be very low stress filled with good smells and bright colors. I wouldn’t have to stress about where to put things and I’d just follow the pattern I’d been given. I could carefully organize the candles ensuring that each label is facing forward. It would be nice. I’d learn more about fragrances and would appreciate the routine of creating the displays. Now, because this is a purely hypothetical scenario, I’d want to be able to work whenever I wanted. Two hours, four hours, eight hours, whatever I wanted to do. It would be chill and I could use my employee discount to really create my own extensive candle collection. Then, when I had enough candles, I’d quietly submit my resignation thanking the company for the opportunity. Actually, I’d probably start thinking about what else I wanted to stock up on in my house. Maybe a furniture store. 

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The book we can’t talk about

I’ve worked in the field of mental health for a long time. Or at least it feels like a long time. In reality, it’s been 13 years since I first started and ten years since I got my first independent clinical license. Through the years I’ve had at least 20 jobs (conservative guess). Some good, some not so good, and some that were off the chain. However, the job that was probably the wildest was working in the admissions department at a psychiatric hospital (technically a behavioral health hospital). It was my first job out of grad school and I wanted to do a good job. I was adjusting to what it was like to provide assistance to people who fit the diagnostic criteria for a mental health. Not just those who saw a video on social media and decided that they needed a cool new label.

eeded a cool new label.

The great thing about working in admissions (also known as intake) was that there was always something going on. People came in for mental health assessments and were also transferred to our hospital from some of the other hospitals in the state for mental health stabilization. We accepted adults and children as young as five. The nice thing was that the hospital never closed so there were constant opportunities to work. The tough thing was that the hospital never closed so things could get busy without any advanced warning. Kinda like a hospital emergency room. It was a job where you had to answer the phone, call insurance companies, admit patients, conduct assessments, and answer the emergency calls from the units.

Other than a discount on the cafeteria food, the job didn’t come with a lot of perks. One of the occasional downsides was getting physically assaulted by patients experiencing a mental health crisis or psychotic episode. When we would accept patients from other hospitals one of my tasks was to read the paperwork and determine if the individual was appropriate for an inpatient level of care. It usually didn’t take a long time to make a decision but the assessments were always eye opening to read. While we could never share the details of said assessments due to privacy, we created a scrapbook called “The Book that Doesn’t Exist.” In the book we would write down or share excerpts of the assessments we received that crossed the line on normal human behaviors and take out the identifiable details. 

One notable story that comes to mind was that of a poor soul who was having a rough time. He was struggling and made the decision that he wanted to experience the afterlife — or whatever came afterwards. However, he didn’t have the means or access to anything that would make his heart stop beating. So, this individual went into the woods of a state park known for black bears and covered himself from head to toe in deli meat in the hopes that a bear would see him as a source for food and his sacrifice would not be in vain. However, the implementation of his plan failed as no animals ventured near him as he sat in the woods covered in bologna. He was found by fellow hikers who became concerned and alerted local authorities who determined he was in need of mental health stabilization.

Stories like this were the ones that made it into the book. It was a reminder that the work we did was important and that everyone has a bad day sometimes. I don’t know if something like this exists in other hospitals but I am appreciative of those who still work in these settings providing care and intervening in times where someone just needs a reset and support. We don’t thank them enough. After all, who else has stories they can’t tell in a book that they can’t talk about?

CHECK OUT THIS SCRAPBOOK TO START YOUR OWN MEMORIES

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Avoiding toxicity at work

Lately, the majority of writing I do has been for articles and it’s been challenging at times to carve out specific time blocks to write. Nevertheless, here’s an article that any working adult may find helpful. Let me know your thoughts!

9 Signs of a Toxic Work Environment & How to Protect Your Mental Health

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Next steps

It’s interesting how an upcoming milestone birthday can make you question your life in great detail. There are these invisible benchmarks that people are judged from that indicates where they “should” be at a certain age. There are always choices to be made and sometimes these choices have to be made blindly because all the information isn’t available. I’m becoming a bit more comfortable with trusting my gut and evaluating my decisions based on my long term goals. I’m pretty much convinced that I want to retire. Not that I won’t work but it would be great to free spirit it. No expectations and true responsibilities. However, the path to getting there is not as clear as I would like it to be. But it’s a great time to take some inventory and really focus on what exactly is important.

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Providers or nah?

I ran across an article that was in response to a tweet that went viral. You can read the article here. Basically the author talks another the fact that most marital relationships aren’t truly 50-50. Women complete the bulk of household duties. This is absolutely true. I did a dissertation on it. However, women who want men who are providers or more specially black women who want men who are providers are labeled as gold diggers. The interesting thing that the author points out is that black women tend to out earn black men in many instances so then they also carry the financial responsibility of the household. From this aspect, a 50-50 split is an upgrade. I’ve met a lot of guys who aren’t comfortable with solely providing financially for a household while their wife works part time jobs or stays at home with the kids. Their mindset is if they have to go to work 40 hours a week, their wife should too. I’ll admit that I’m a bit old fashioned when it comes to this but I’m also trying to be realistic. I would love to have a husband who considers it his primary responsibility to provide for the household. But I also don’t want to be in a situation where he exerts all control over finances because he earns it. I just hate the idea of being in a relationship where I have to keep tabs on whose turn it is to pay. I don’t want to worry about that because there’s the understanding that he will. Not to say that I’ll never do it, but I want it to be an option instead of an obligatory split. Is this even possible these days? I’m doubtful.

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A wealth gap

I can across an interesting article that coincides with what I’ve been thinking hard about these past few days. It’s about black people and wealth disparities. You can read it here . As the product of two generations of a middle class family (grandparents and parents), I don’t have anything to show for all their hard work. No property, no trust fund, no assets. Just a crippling amount of student loan debt. And I know that I’m not the only one in this predicament. Growing up, my father worked and my mother stayed home to care for us. She decided that she wanted to raise her children and homeschool us so she did. As a result, we lived in a single income household. A phenomenon that I’m experiencing now with my household of one. There are so many things that I want to do now but I won’t be able to because of my financial obligations. Transitioning to teaching or a post-doctoral position would require a pay cut of about 20k to 40k per year and I can’t afford that. This year one of my goals is to become more financially literate and I’m working on it. However, I wish that I didn’t have to start from the bottom and if I ever make enough money to afford kids I want them to have a different experience. It’s like I’m starting off at a disadvantage and don’t have the opportunity to at least start at baseline. Definitely tough.

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Social work today

A few days ago I shared an article on social media about the ways the social work is failing. While it was very thought provoking, the author also talked about ways to remedy the problem. As someone who has worked in the field for almost 7 years, the looks on people’s faces when I tell them that I’m a social worker can be quite comical. Unfortunately there’s still a prevalent belief that all social workers do is take kids away from their parents. Social work is one of the only professions I know where you can have a masters degree, two years of supervised experience, a clinical license AND make $17 an hour. That number isn’t arbitrary. It’s actually what I made when I first relocated to my original state of residence. The fact is that we are often overworked and not fairly compensated for our services. Burnout rates are at an all time high because we can’t even afford to take time off and it’s sometimes a struggle to pay bills and make student loan payments out of the pittance we’re given. Don’t get me wrong, you can make a decent living as a social worker but it will probably entail working more than one job, working in an administrative capacity, or being an entrepreneur of sorts. With mental illness continuing to be a growing concern, I wish that the growing demand for mental health providers like social workers translated into an increase in compensation—like it has for nurses. Something definitely needs to change and maybe the change that is needed is that of a union. While I don’t have all the answers, I believe that this topic deserves more discussion and also subsequent advocacy.

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Moving often 

I hate moving but I love traveling. There’s always more to think about when you’re relocating and carrying your belongings with you. A little more than a year ago I gave up my apartment, put my stuff in storage, and moved across the country for an adventure. More recently I’ve moved back to my home state and into a new apartment. I love my own space. One thing that’s been helpful in all my moves through the years is that I have a great mother who always wants to help (take over). I’ve flown her in to help me out because I’m on a tight deadline. She’s amazing at being organized but bad at listening to instructions. She likes the moving in process and will inevitably bring in things she likes with the explanation that I don’t have to like them but she’ll use them when she visits. It’s a fair price to pay for the assistance. I don’t know where I’ll be next but maybe soon I’ll put down some roots.

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May changes

There’s something about the month of May that makes me reconsider my entire life. It’s like an internal check-in to evaluate how the year has gone up to this point. It’s also my half-birthday month–which is another reminder that I only have 6 months to go until I’m a year older. Last year around this time I was living in Atlanta and working in a job I didn’t really love. Needless to say, a lot has changed since then and I’m happy to say that I’ve had the chance to travel a bit more because that was one of the things I resolved to do last May. Since then I’ve traveled to Las Vegas, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Spain, England, France, Italy, Monaco, and Malta. In addition to that I quit my job and moved across the country to California. It’s been eventful to say the least but I’ve learned a lot and have also acquired a new skill set. Working in a busy hospital and coordinating care will definitely have you learning a lot of new medical terminology that you didn’t learn in graduate school. I also decided to try my hand at teaching and am now facilitating a class of 16 graduate students in a weekly online class. It’s been challenging but fun so far.  A lot of decisions were made last May and we’ll see what happens this year.

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Already

I honestly can’t believe that the month of May is here. It seems like January was just yesterday. There’s so many things that I want to accomplish this year and none of them seem quite feasible with a normal 9-5 job. So we’ll see what happens. I think it may be time to move back across the country and do something different. I’m definitely greeting this next half of the year with a greater sense of purpose and desire to travel more–or at least spend less time working. Just gotta keep pushing.