Unemployment --- the unexpected, the learned, the gift.
I haven't updated this in a while, because I have been busy working. That came to an end five weeks ago, when I was unexpectedly laid off. I have never been fired from a job, especially one where I was performing quite well. However, given the recent changes in the mental health care system in North Carolina along with some of the organizational challenges my last job was facing, it was not out of the realm of the possible. Still, working one minute and the next being told you are no longer an employee is quite jarring. It shakes your identity and leaves you in an existential vacuum as you renegotiate a part of your identity. In a lot of ways, this is a follow up from my post almost two years ago. Working in the social science field as a clinician is quite draining. Therapy is a profession which taxes not only the analytical prefrontal regions of our brains, but the midbrain and base brain as well. Our emotions, our reflections of our emotions, mirroring the mental states of ot