On my way to a much better week.

My client did not insult me today. YEAH!!! No really, this is cause for a real celebration! You see not only is she 12 and have quite the propensity for throwing insults (you'd think it was her job), but having the week start without an insult from her surely means that this week will be fantastic. It's gotta be better than last week, when the only day free of being insulted was Friday. Monday it was the above 12 year old. I didn't think much of it, after all she thinks it's her job. Tuesday my other outpatient kid's mother basically called me incompetent. That I remember quite clearly, you see because she didn't come right out and say it, she said that she thought someone a little older that me would be better equipped to help her daughter make progress. See the only progress this mother acknowledges is whether or not her daughter is talking to her. Not that I wouldn't normally see that as progress, but under the circumstances, I'm really thinking that maybe this kid is better off keeping her distance. The woman is rather - well, venomous. And I held that opinion long before the incident on Tuesday. Now I know that the kid is making progress: she hasn't been hospitalized, or cut herself, and her panic attacks have all but vanished since she's been seeing me. But still, I think it would have been easier if she just came out and insulted me instead of trying to make some sort of euphemism out of her degrading comments. Perhaps she thinks me younger than I am (I'm older than her boyfriend, after all), but it took me some time to figure out that she wasn't just noting my supposed youthful appearance. Anyways, Wednesday brought about more joy (said with sarcasm), for I had the pleasure of talking to a classic anti-social personality disordered client on the phone. Midway through the conversation he says to me, "you must be Black." No, normally, this wouldn't phase me, and I certainly wouldn't consider it an insult, but just the tone of his voice told me that it was supposed to be meant as a supreme insult. Now this is a situation where I am not going to either confirm or deny my supposed race to him. It just wouldn't help the situation. He went on to say that he'd never hear of a name like mine on a White woman, so that was his reasoning, and that he didn't have anything against Black people, but they all hated him and besides they all think they are better than him with all of their "Black Power b*llsh*t." That was just the beginning of it, but you get the gist. Now I did question him about his assumptions and blanket statements, but I still felt at ill ease about any effectiveness that I had. Thursday I had a client, who is normally a very sweet guy, do a 180 on me and suddenly start telling me that I was lying to him, that he hoped that I had a stressful life, and that it would be better if I just went away to die. Why the 180? No idea. All I was trying to do was fullfill his request. I told him I just had to verify everything with the supervisor, as I have to do with every client and in every situation, and he went from nice guy to Mr. Insults. Friday. Blessed Friday. No insults from anyone. One paranoid guy who'd gone off his meds, but he was grateful to be seen, even if suspicious of my questions. And then there was Saturday. The icing on the cake of insults. Drunk girl, hurling pejorative words at me. I won't even go into it. I'm glad that week is over. And I'm very glad that this week is going to be a much, much better one!

And then there are calls like this:

Not even 5 minutes after my last post a call came in and the woman, who sounded drunk, or otherwise impaired, said that she was out of her Ritalin for her Bipolar Disorder (impossible, you don't get prescribed Ritalin for Bipolar, probably med-seeking) and that she couldn't cope without it. I try to get her name and see if she'll come into be seen. She refuses. She tells me that she might as well just kill herself and be done with it. She says she's going to go and hang herself. She hangs up on me. I call the police. They try to trace the call, and think they may know who it is - but it was a cell phone, so she could be anywhere. They are sending a couple cars out. I call the supervisor. He says I did everything I can do.

Just another day at crisis I suppose. You never know what you're going to get.

It all seems to be going so fast these days. Just over a month to the wedding, and so much yet to do. In one sense time seems to be spinning out of control, and in another it isn't going fast enough.

Work keeps on ticking by. What does it say when other people's crises become run of the mill for you. When you no longer even raise an eyebrow when someone says they want to kill themselves, or someone else, because their children were taken, they were abused, their wife is cheating on them, they lost their, job, house, spouse, etc. In a sense it is good. I can get right down to the matter at hand (how can we help this person), rather than getting caught up in my own shock or dismay, but it also seems that perhaps I am not able to muster the same sense of empathy that I was when I began working here.

It's time for a change. But so many changes are happening now that to instigate any more would be foolish. Yet, wouldn't it be nice to be enlivened by my work, rather than worn down and jaded by it?