I’m grateful for my job – for what working gives me, for the people I am lucky enough to work amongst, and for the people whom I am lucky enough to serve. I’ve been at DCMH for 16 years this week. Working is one of the best things I can do for my health. It gives me routine, and purpose, and shows me how fortunate I am. Linking individuals with serious mental illness to services in the public mental health system is a difficult and rewarding proposition – you see the gaps way more than you see the supports we are trying to provide people. I am lucky enough to have a network of providers who consistently do more with less, appreciate their jobs more than their jobs are appreciated by the public, and are willing to work for a smile. Because that’s, hopefully, what we’re aiming for anyway. This is social work, folks, lord knows we aren’t in it for a paycheck.
I am lucky enough to have an amazing office full of co-workers whom I love. I’m able to walk through the doors every morning with a smile on my face because I know who is on the other side. We laugh and we yell (to each other, not at each other) and we understand each other, for the most part. As for the other parts, we’re willing to work on it. My co-workers have watched me grow up. They’ve seen me get engaged, lose everything in a fire, get married, get my masters, buy a house, move upward through the ranks, have two children, traverse a bitter divorce, fall in love for what turns out to be the first time in my life, lose my mind and find it again (frequently). I am grateful for them.
I am grateful for the individuals I serve. I get cursed at and cried on and God-blessed on a daily basis. I am lucky enough to have seen people rebuild lives from less than scratch, without a sideways glance through the struggle, doing what they have to do. More often, what I see is an individual in crisis, with a makeshift village around him, from the bodega owner who gives out a free sandwich to the treatment provider who overlooks missed appointments to keep a client on her caseload. I see people who are thankful and thankless and blank, and I try my best to understand them all. Who would I be if I were in that place? I am grateful that I see life in all of its guts and glory, and I try to appreciate all of it.
Crowded Hours 