Pulled from the archive.

I found something I wrote before I created a blog - something that made me want to write more. If I could go back, this would have been my first blog entry.

I walked towards the building with no expectations, no hope. I was a wrung-out dishcloth of sadness, an exhausted shell of apathy and, let’s face it, self-pity. Despite my Ativan haze, I suddenly saw my experience through someone else’s eyes – the eyes of my clients. I wondered if they entered my workplace with the same feeling, the same sadness, same exhaustion. Of course, the irony hadn’t escaped me. Earlier that day I had sent my sister an email asking her if she too saw anything inherently wrong about a youth mental health and addictions counsellor going to an assessment by an adult mental health and addictions counsellor, and then returning to work for the afternoon. I had been assured by the soft-spoken intake worker on the telephone that my identity would be kept hidden – that my file would hold a number and not a name. That there would be no different treatment despite the fact that our offices worked in tandem to treat all my fellow wrung-out dishcloths in our community – young and old.

There was a group of men standing outside the adjoining building. Withdrawal Management, or adult detox. Sucking back their last comfort before continuing on a path of detoxification of illicit substances and some not-so-illicit substances. I had just finished my cigarette in my car, a reliable tan sedan that I had recently inherited after my Grandpa’s death. Every time I lit up in his car I felt a sense of child-like shame, the same feeling one might get after stealing two dollars from her mother’s purse. My Grandpa, a gentle and supportive man, hadn’t known I was a smoker, and the guilt I felt continuing to smoke after my Nanny’s fatal bout of lung cancer 15 years earlier had never really escaped me. These days however, I was of the, “do what you have to do to get through” mentality, and because smoking got me through this appointment, this workday, this evening, I was buying my ultra milds in cartons.

I entered the building and smiled at the only other person in the waiting room, a well-adjusted looking woman in her thirties. I wondered, with the usual nosey judgement, what was “wrong” with her. At least she looked as though she had combed her hair that day. I felt suddenly shabby and poorly dressed. She caught me looking at her and I diverted my eyes as if to say, “yup. Not my business.”

“---?” I was approached by a young woman with kind eyes and a funky business-wear outfit.

I got up and followed her through what she described as the “maze”. The building, I was told (though I already knew the story) used to be the youth custody center, with an adjoining youth court. As a result, the building was your standard institutional brick, though paintings and wall mountings had been hung as if to say that yes, youth were locked up here, but now this is a place of healing and rehabilitation. I wasn’t quite convinced. The woman, who I was soon to learn would be my therapist for the duration, led me into a room where I was offered a comfortable chair and an introduction to my psychiatrist, an intellectually styled woman with salt and pepper hair. Perhaps I was feeling particularly vulnerable, but I instantly liked these women, and wondered if they would be the key to my wellness. Whatever that would look like. Once again I mentally zipped back to my own office, my own work space. I realized how important my first impression was on the youth who I was working with. Did they get that same supported feeling? Did they too, look at me and think, as naively as I had, that perhaps I was the key to their wellness? The thought scared the shit out of me, and I pulled myself back to my own present situation.

The two women looked at me intently, waiting for me start. I didn’t.

“This is Linda,” Salt and Pepper pointed at the therapist, “and I’m Dr. Stewart. Thank-you so much for joining us today. We’ve read your file, but really, we want to hear why you have come here today, and we want to know that the two of us are here to support you completely. It looks like you’ve been having a hard time.”

That was it, I was in. These women had achieved the heralded “therapeutic alliance” that I had spent years trying to achieve in my own office, my own work, with each youth. I felt slightly cheap as I realized that they had my respect and trust after two minutes – usually my youth put up more of a fight and I wondered where that fight in me had gone. They had spoken the words I had needed to hear throughout my life. The black hole of hopelessness I had been feeling had been acknowledged in those words, and I reacted with my dreaded default emotion. I burst into tears, and didn’t stop crying for the two hour duration of the assessment.

I felt like such a cliché.