Living in the In-Between
The
summer semester of grad school is hard.
I had not forgotten and I had prepared for the accelerated schedule and
the papers seemingly due back-to-back and the impossibility of getting to all
the reading. This is the third summer of
four I will do before I complete my degree.
What I had not been prepared for was the added pressure of my internship
being thrown into the mix.
The
internship adds a fresh layer of burden to my already packed schedule and taxes
my organizational skills. It is like
juggling another job and one I don’t get paid for, yet is equally important to the one that
pays my mortgage because it paves my future.
Then
there is the scope of the internship itself.
I am honored to be interning at a rehabilitation facility for substance
abuse that has a specialized unit for first responders. I am getting a master’s degree in clinical and counseling
psychology with concentrations in co-occurring disorders and trauma. This internship is quite literally right up
my alley. That being said, I leave there
some evenings and weekends with my shoulders up by my ears after hearing some of
the trauma the patients have been through and some of the pain they are
learning to share. I lately have had
this over-riding feeling that the world is maybe not such a good place.
I
have a class at college called Practicum Review where we meet to discuss our
internships with a supervising professor and fellow students. It is essentially a weekly peer supervision
where we can bring issues we are struggling with and put it up for general
discussion. I asked them the other week
how they cope with the weight of the topics we deal with. How do they bring their shoulders back down
from their ears when they are driving home?
They had some good suggestions for me about self-care but I had been
doing most of them and some of them did not resonate and I knew I had to find
my own way back to base camp as it were because I have been struggling for a
while to feel normal.
Before
recovery and before doing the steps and meeting myself for the first time, I
lived in states of either self-aggrandizement or self-loathing. I seldom visited the pleasant middle ground I
tend to occupy now. The middle ground is
a place I heard myself refer to the other day as the “in-between”.
The in-between is a quieter, more resonant place, where I hear more of
what other people say, I catch more nuances, I sit longer in silences, tune in
to the world around me and understand beyond things. The in-between is where I see the face of God
in the face of the people I love and hear His message in the words of other
people when they share at meetings or in books I read or songs I listen to. The in-between is the frequency where I am
not selfish, but giving. The in-between
is where I am not angry, but forgiving.
The in-between is where I am not stressed out about the little things,
but capable of moving mountains without a second thought. The in-between is home. The in-between is where I am the most Fiona I
can be.
I
was driving Wren home on Friday night from her music lesson and we were laughing
and listening to “Memory” from Cats in the car and belting it out at the top of our
lungs. We turned the corner and Wren
gasped and pointed, saying, “Mom, look! A rainbow!” There was the most
gorgeous rainbow peeking out of the cloud just after the rain. She took a picture through the car window. The whole car ride had been so in-between.
I’m going to be fine. I just have to fine-tune my frequency a
little to get myself back to where I need to be and stay there so I can hear
and see the messages that are always coming at me.
