liza bean

fight or flight

First of all, a BIG thanks to all who wished me well on my birthday! I really appreciate your warm smiles and "Happy Birthdays" even if we were all exhausted on that particularily tiring Thursday. It's so very tempting to turn an entry in an all out whining session. I'll do my best to resist! At the same time, I need to get this all out of my system...bare with me today. Back to the honesty project: I'm blue. Patterns of this moodiness tend to coincide with the amount of stress I'm experiencing. This program is hard, folks. So difficult that I'm about ready to throw in the towel. When I get stressed I panick and scan the horizan for any escape route possible. I'm not a fighter, I'm a "flighter". Well, I'm a semi-fighter. I'm still in this program, after all. I'm still cramming for the tests, still compiling artifacts to prove that I have learned something this year, still searching for more articles to help create a reasonably thorough paper on brain injury and its affects on swallowing... But recently, after trying to get a three year old to play copycat with me and failing horribly, I began to again doubt if I chose the right profession. Then getting scolded by my swallowing professor -listen lady, if we all failed the exam then what does that say about YOUR teaching- and being lectured on the whacked out policies involved in how hospitals work and then daydreaming about working in public school systems and having to deal with administration that is moving toward treating schools like a business as well... oh dear Lord, NO THANK YOU! But then there's the whole money thing and being slapped in the face with a $150 hospital bill for five minutes with a doctor -and that's with insurance all ready kicking in... No need to lecture me on the whole self-pitying thing. I am fully aware of people who are in much worse positions in life! But I can't deny the frustrations that I'm feeling.

Okay, so how do I turn all this into "the cup's half full"? Well, the truth is, what I love about this profession is it's interest in helping in the communication process. How frustrating it must be to be continually misunderstood or to have difficulty expressing your emotions and thoughts. A lot of people with communication impairments also have difficulties in reading. I've learned so much about this world by reading the diverse views of people other than myself! oh, and the joy of reading Harry Potter-yeah, I'm one of those people... And how could I get by without the soothing power of prayers and the uplifting words of spiritual scripts? So if I can remember the nobility in this profession, then perhaps I can keep my spirits up even with all the stress and long and tiring days ahead of me...