I Need to Learn to Speed Read!

I've just finished my second week at my new job and it is so fantastic. I can't believe I really have this job. I've spent so many years doing jobs that weren't what I REALLY wanted to do just to help us get to the next step. It's hard to believe I'm actually here. I'm a therapist. Ha!

I saw my first clients this week. So far, I've just been doing assessments with our staff psychologist. It's been a nice way to ease into talking with the folks, since the assessment instrument has a million questions (seriously, it's 13 pages!) that have to be asked, so it's really pretty structured. Even so, I'm blown away by how much goes on in the lives of so many people. The assessment thing is a bit hard because our agency can only work with clients who have a formal DSM diagnosis. I believe that anyone would benefit from therapy and I see all of these kids who would naturally benefit from having support services, but may not have a mental illness. It's tricky. I hate the idea of labeling kids at all, but if I don't, they don't get services. I saw a family earlier this week with 3 kids. The psychologist and I determined that two of them do meet criteria for services, but the youngest one is just a rambunctious, curious 6 year-old boy. Even though they can be a handful, there's nothing clinically significant about that. It was hard to make the call that one brother wouldn't get services while the other kids would. That's part of the work, though. Even with these dilemmas, I'm so glad to be here. This week, I met with the case worker who handles my therapy clients and got the back stories from her. I also got to meet one of my clients, who participates in our after school program. I have my first two therapy appointments next week and I'm very excited. I'm also very nervous! I've been trying to read everything I can get my hands on, but I'm not being terribly efficient about it. I keep finding something else that seems more relevant and move on to the next thing before I finish anything. I also received the test prep handbook for my licensing exam this week and I feel like I need to re-read every textbook I used in my grad program in order to pass that test. Yikes. I think I need to start investigating some speed reading classes!

Auntie Mae - again!

I'm an aunt again! Ian's brother, Mark, and his wife, Naomi, welcomed their beautiful little girl, Sophia Genevieve Villanueva, last Friday, Oct. 12. We are very excited about the first grandchild on the Villanueva side of the family! We're heading up to Chicago on Nov. 9 for her Baptism.
November is going to be an awesome month for Aunt Mae and Uncle Ian. We'll get to meet Sophia that weekend and then we'll be heading to Springfield, MO, for Thanksgiving and to meet our other niece, Emma Elizabeth Costello, who was born just about a month ago. It's a busy time in the Costello-Villanueva family!

We were in St. Louis last weekend for a job interview. It was such a nice weekend! While Ian was interviewing and putting on a good show for the folks there, I got a chance to spend some quality time with some St. Louis folks. It's really been a few years since we had the chance to be in St. Louis with time to visit many people. Lately, it's been quick, busy trips for weddings and such. It was very wonderful and nourishing to reconnect with old friends. We also were able to meet baby Ava Perez, who was born the day before Emma. She was a beautiful, precious little snuggle bug. It was hard to leave her! Ian's interviews seem to have gone well. We received very positive feedback from everyone. I'm beginning to appreciate how difficult it is going to be to make a decision about what to do at the end of this fellowship year. I guess I've always imagined that Ian would find a good job right where we want and we'll all live happily ever after. I'm learning that real life involves a lot of compromises. We're really going to have to weigh out a lot of variables (location, job security, income, a reasonable schedule for Ian, etc., etc.) to make a good decision. This grown up stuff is hard!

Following our trip to St. Louis, I started my new job and Ian had one of the busiest weeks he's had since he started his fellowship. I feel like I haven't seen him for a month. (That really makes the "reasonable schedule for Ian" variable seem quite important!) My week has been much better than his. I am very excited about my job. I'm exhausted, but it was a good week. I now have a much better idea of what I'm going to be doing... For now at least, I'm going to be doing therapy with clients two days per week, conducting assessments for new clients (or annual review assessments for those who have been in the program for a year already) one day per week, and helping review documentation and other QA-type stuff two days per week. Even though I don't love the QA stuff so much (I think I got my fill at Careerbuilder!), it is work I can do at the Charlotte office, so I'm able to work full-time and not make the hour+ drive 5 days a week. Three days is plenty! It's actually not that bad a drive. There's a country road way to get there that is supposedly faster than the interstate, which has a ton of lights. (Weird, I know.) I'm honestly not sure if it's faster, but it's certainly prettier and there's not much traffic. It's funny how very different driving for an hour to work through beautiful country is from driving in Chicago traffic. Well, of course it's different. When I was thinking before about the drive, I was imagining how I felt when I would drive to work in Chicago - cranky and stressed out by the time I walked in the door. I still wish it weren't so far, but I think I can make it work for me. It should be good reflection time! I also get a gas card from the agency. That makes a long commute on a counselor's salary much easier to take. :)

I really am so thankful to have landed in this job. I think I'm going to learn and grow so much this year. My background is pretty different from the rest of the employees at this agency and I was nervous about how I would fit in. I truly have been welcomed with open arms. My clients are going to be younger than I'd thought. The vast majority of clients are children, so I probably won't be seeing all that many adults. Right now, I have 4 kids on my caseload, ages 5-12. I am pumped about working with the younger kids. I took a class on counseling with children and adolescents in grad school and truly loved it. Working with kids has been in the back of my mind since then, but I really haven't been around kids much for a long time and just didn't know if it would work for me. I've gotten to meet some of the agency's clients (although not the ones I'll be doing therapy with) over the past week and they are absolutely amazing. I sat in on treatment team meetings and heard about all the things going on in their lives and then saw them later on running around, smiling and playing with the other kids. It's incredible how strong and resilient they are. It breaks my heart to think of what they're having to deal with, but I am so thankful to be here and finally to be in a position where I might be able to do some good for them.

Back to work!

I have a job! Hooray! I'm actually going to be a counselor. I was beginning to wonder whether or not that was going to work out for me. I'm going to be working at an agency that serves low-income families in some of the rural towns around Charlotte. I'll probably be seeing a mix of kids, adolescents and adults for individual and group therapy. I'm very excited... and nervous. I've been frantically reviewing a lot of my textbooks in the past week or so. :) I hope I remember something. I'm really excited just to get out there and start doing something rather than just studying theoretical things. I guess putting theory into practice starts on Monday. Yay!

Tomorrow, Ian and I are going to St. Louis. He's interviewing with a surgical group in Belleville, IL. We have some good friends who live in Belleville - and it's in the STL metro area - so it would be an exciting place for us to move. I'm actually not sure if I've ever been to Belleville before, so I'm going to spend some time exploring the town while we're there. It's hard to believe that a quarter of our time in Charlotte has already passed. I think this year will go very quickly. I really hope it works out for us to move to St. Louis. It would be so nice to have a move that is just exciting without the nervousness of moving to a city where we don't know anyone or anything. I think it would be such a different transition than the ones we've had before. Anyway, cart before the horse... So, Ian has an interview. :) It'll be a full weekend, but we're looking forward to squeezing in some time with St. Louis friends while we're there. It's been about 2 years since we were there for fun. (My mom had a surgery there last December and I came in for that, but it didn't really feel like a visit, since I spent most of that time in the hospital with her.) I'm not sure that we've even been by Wash U since our wedding. It'll be fun to see all the new things. It seems like there's always construction going on there.

Now, I have to get packing. I'll make sure to update you all on Ian's job search and my transition into the real world of counseling. Until then...

It's important to know that words don't move mountains. Work, exacting work moves mountains. - Danilo Dulci

Stubborn clay?

"Look, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are you in My hand." Jeremiah 18:6
Last weekend, Ian and I went on a mini-retreat for young adults at what I think will be our church here in Charlotte. (I think we've finally found a church with enough of all the things we've been looking for.) As a Jesuit parish, there is a focus on Ignatian spirituality and the retreat was a bit of an introduction to Ignatian contemplative prayer. Honestly, I was mostly interested in the retreat because I thought it would be a good way to get to know some people. I hadn't gone on a retreat since undergrad, but I also thought it would be a nice way to get out of the everyday life routine. The focus of the retreat was the passage from Jeremiah about going to the potter's house (Jer 18:1-6). The last verse is above. Sometimes I think that any scripture verse can seem very relevant to what is going on in our lives if we just think about it enough. This one hit home very quickly, though. My sister-in-law, Cortney, worked at a non-denominational Christian coffeehouse called The Potter's House that ministers to college students in Springfield, MO. (For those WU folks reading, it's a lot like the CSC, but with more coffee and less punch.) It's actually where she and my brother met. I'd read this passage at some point before (that's one of the beauties of a religious studies major... I've read it all at one point or another), but I didn't really remember it until I talked to Cortney about it. So, the idea of the potter's house stuck out to me right away. The priest leading the retreat actually is a potter, too. The room was decorated with some of his pottery (and it looks a lot like PoHo pottery, Cort!). So that was all a nice personal connection for me.

Beyond that, though, I've wondered so much about my life and my path and all that stuff since we moved here. During the retreat, we did a meditation on the scripture and imagined the pot the potter was working on. What kind of vessel is it? For what purpose is it being molded? The last four years have been so busy working and going to school and always moving forward towards the time that Ian would finish residency that there really was never much time for reflection. Now I think I have a little too much time for all that. :) In school, I felt very sure that I was meant to be a counselor. I've always been drawn to the idea of healing and easing suffering. This lead me to start college as a pre-med, but I quickly (maybe not quickly enough) realized that the sciences were not going to be my way to a healing profession. I thought about ministry for a while, but in the end, counseling felt like the best fit for me. But then I had a hard time finding an internship site and ended up doing career counseling... not really what I'd been looking for. (To be clear - I am thankful for that experience, though, and for the fabulous people I was able to meet and work with. It just wasn't the path I'd been seeking.) I did worry a lot last year about what kind of work I'd be able to do after I graduated, since I really wouldn't have any experience in mental health counseling. It hasn't helped that we then moved to a new state where I have no professional network and that has a particularly unfriendly environment for new counselors. It's a tricky stage of professional identity development (identity development is always important to we counselors) :) to have just begun thinking of myself as a counselor and then not be able to do the work. I've been reading my journals, reviewing my textbooks and doing things here and there to help myself still feel like a counselor, but it's hard to do. Like the tree falling in the forest, I've been wondering, if a counselor has no one to treat, is she still a counselor? I'm not sure. I think so, but I would like not to have to answer the question. :) The priest who led our retreat talked about the different types of clay and how it sometimes can be stubborn, too hard or too soft. I wondered what type of clay I have been. I'm sad about not finding a job, but Ian has pointed out to me that I've been offered every job I've interviewed for here so far. They just aren't really the jobs I've hoped to have (not in mental health) and there are only 2 so far. I just had a second interview at an agency yesterday and the receptionist thinks they're going to offer me a position. :) There are a lot of catches with this position... again, it's not really what I'd have preferred, but it is actually a mental health counseling job. The biggest problem is that the site is over an hour's drive away. I'd probably only work there 3 days a week, but yuck. One reason we moved to Charlotte was that I wanted to stop having to spend so much of my life commuting. Now, instead of taking an hour or so to get into the city, I'd be driving an hour or so to get away from it. The population has the potential to be a challenging one... It's not a group I'd ever felt particularly drawn to or imagined myself working with. And I'm a little scared of it. I think I'd probably feel a little scared of any job, so I'm trying to keep that in perspective. In many ways, I'm back to where my internship class was at this point last year when we were all anxiously anticipating our first sessions with our first clients. The possibility that I might be offered this job is somewhat amusing to me. I've had one phone interview and two personal interviews. When I heard about the drive, I thought that there's no way I can do that, but figured going to the interview would be good practice. I really liked the people I interviewed with and figured that if I can work with this population for the rest of this year, I think I would feel pretty confident about any work I may try to get into once we move on to wherever we're going next. Then I drove to the site and thought again that there's no way it makes sense to drive that far for a job. So, I went into the second interview - again - thinking that it would be good practice. Now I think that if they do offer me a position, I'll take it. It really is the only place I've found that's hiring new counselors and isn't solely focused on addictions work (which I'd really rather not do as a focus). Maybe this opportunity is coming up for a reason and I should go along with the molding rather than being stubborn clay.

Really, at this point, I think it might be best for my own mental health to take any (reasonable) opportunity and run with it. We had an exterminator come to our apartment a couple weeks ago and I found myself wondering what kind of training you need to do that. (He didn't need to have any direct contact with bugs, after all. He just sprayed stuff along the base boards. I could do that!) If I'm starting to imagine my next career as an exterminator, I think it's probably a sign that I should get to work soon... and maybe not stay inside and inhale the fumes from the bug spray. :) I have been working on some other good things to keep myself occupied. I'm hoping to get involved with a bereavement ministry at church, which I think will be a good chance to work on my counseling skills in a different environment. I've also found a great yoga studio and I'm excited to get to know some folks there. My golf lessons have finished up, but I'm still practicing and may end up taking the Golf 102 class that starts up in a few weeks. We'll see how the scheduling goes. After all, I may have a job I need to work around!