unsleep

I have never been completely unable to go to sleep before. I think I came close last night, but nothing I did tipped me over the edge into actual sleep. I called my boss this morning to ask if I could call in sick because I am clearly not thinking straight. Needless to say she is pissed, and I don't blame her. It puts her and others in a pretty bad situation. I think I'm about to get fired anyway. Or "put on relief." I really feel bad about that, actually, because now the night shift person may have to stay later. I even started to offer to come in for the morning, but she hung up. I really don't feel like I can do the job right now, but still...
I'm also a little pissed, to be honest. She always talks about how we need to have conversations with the clients, but it isn't that often that we get the benefit of a conversation with her. Which kind of makes sense, since she is doing way more work than one job and my patience would be short too. But we don't get the benefit of having a short temper or not interacting with clients. It bothers me that when she tells me something it is in the form of a lecture.
Yesterday she was telling me about time sheets and how I needed to manage my time better so that I wasn't working overtime, and that if I did need to go over I needed to verify that with her first. Which is pretty clearly meant as a disincentive. The entire time it was this "I can't believe I have to go over this with you, this is such a waste of my time," kind of discussion. And that hurts me so much. Yeah, I'm really just over-sensitive, but after everything I give to that place to turn around and feel like such a burden to the most important person there is just so hard for me.
I don't know, maybe she's right. Maybe I'm just not ready for this job. Sometimes I do feel like I am doing a good job, but so often I just feel overwhelmed. I thought I could work through that, but I don't know.
Holy crap this has become a whiny blog post. This is the kind of blog post junior high kids write when they get in trouble at school. I'm going to stop now before I start crying and listening to emo music. Damn you Death Cab.

today at work

It's interesting how I can look back at my previous post about work, last week, and think, "holy crap that was a long time ago." It feels like months. I feel a lot more comfortable at my job, and a lot more competent. Each day is an insane jumble of puzzles to be worked through, some difficult, some not. It was an awesome day, though.

Today I managed to talk a mildly psychotic person through some of their troubles and even got them to make a list of what was bothering them so that they could be addressed one by one. Two people had crises with their medicine that I worked through with them (one was out, another had some missing). I contracted with my client (one of the ones I am primarily responsible for) a plan for his depression, and am helping him with some of his other issues. The other client I have, the one who hated me, has made so much progress he is practically unrecognizable from when he first came in. Besides that he told me today that he thought I was one of the best counselors there (OK, that has to come with a grain of salt, but dammit, it still felt good. And this was after a tough conversation with him earlier). My newest coworker, whom I respect immensely, told me that she thought I had handled a tough situation yesterday amazingly well. Also, I accidentally saw one client kiss another one on the cheek (some of the counselors had been suspecting a mild romance all week). And the two treatment groups I led went really well.

Okay, that probably sucked to read through. I am proud, though, and happy, and it was still a fucking hard day. I am helping to train the new person (I never got any training like that, dammit), and I ended up having to do two hours overtime, but it was still also an amazing day. It felt like a lot of my hard work paid off. At least a little. There are ups as well as downs.

The crown of today, though, was during a discussion group. I was talking about reactions to stress, and I mentioned how counselors in the field sometimes either make the mistake of being a sponge or being a hard-ass. One of the clients spoke up and said, "yeah, that reminds me of this one counselor over at Parker Place who was so bitchy all the time. Everything was someone else's fault, she was never wrong, nobody else was ever right."

Me: That sounds difficult. That sounds like Eve. That's funny, Eve used to work at Parker. ... ... ... -click!-