Living in the In-Between

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.