12/10/08
I am so very tired and avoiding sleep. Self-destructive habits are hard to break.
Things are okay in general. No major life crises. Just plugging away until this week is over. Next Tuesday is my last day of classes. I am so looking forward to it. Winter break will be filled with preperatory research for papers and projects next semester, taking care of logistical stuff my my two month stint in Ghana, seeing my boyfriend and my best friends as often as possible, and maybe a little R&R.
Like I said in the beginning of the semester…there is a lot of recording daily events and reflective work involved in a social work Masters program. So there isn’t so much left over to write in here that I don’t feel I haven’t beaten to a pulp.
However, most of my entries this semester have culminated in a reflection to my mentor and supervisor for my internship both this semester and next as well as for my independent study next semester. Ever since I decided I didn’t want to visit the detention center she has been pushing me to explore my resistance to it. When she completed my internship evaluation she circled 1 (the lowest rating) on my ability to cope with the strong emotions of myself and others.
What I realized is actually quite interesting…
MK,
I have been doing a lot of thinking since the beginning of the semester. Ever since I decided not to be a visitor at the detention center you have been encouraging me to explore why it bothers me so much and why I am so resistant. I have given you several answers before, but I think I finally found the correct one. I have been doing a lot of self reflection in the past several months as I try to figure out what makes me happy and where I want my life to go after graduation. Some of the things I have found were rather disturbing. It’s a long story. I’ll try to sum it up.
My dad died two weeks after my fifteenth birthday. He was sick in some form or another for most of my life, but his death began a long downward spiral in my life that I am only recently starting to recover from. Six years of my life were a blur of self-hatred, depression, cutting, borderline eating disorders, sleeping around, drugs, unhealthy relationships, therapy, anti-depressants…the list goes on. And somehow, over the past two and a half years I managed to regain some semblance of a healthy lifestyle. It started with taking myself off anti-depressants and learning to live a lifestyle in which I could control my depression naturally. It is a daily struggle to make healthy decisions. Several events this semester and my self-reflection have lead me to realize that the lifestyle and my methods of maintaining it may not be ideal. It all boils down to control. I have to fix things and I have to take action. That is how I maintain control of my world. And if I maintain control, then bad things can’t happen. It’s intuitively logical in my head though obviously not reasonable or logical outside of it. I thought, for a while, when all the self-hatred, the cutting, the sleeping around, the majority of the borderline bulimia subsided and I regained some semblance of control over my life that I was healing. But in the place of all that, I clung to that control and the warped logic that it protected me and those I loved. I don’t need to be in control of events around me. I prefer to be, but I think I can be fairly flexible. The control I cling to so tightly is over myself.
The cutting and bulimia were all attempts at control. I already knew that. But all I have managed to do is replace them with other forms of control. The internship evaluation made it very clear. I do not handle strong emotion well in myself or others. I don’t even like to watch emotion-evoking (sad or happy) movies. I spent so many years being so hopelessly, achingly sad and numb and trying desperately not to be. This modicum of a healthy and relatively happy lifestyle that I have managed to create for myself is based on my ability to be in control of my emotions. I am okay with that. The alternative is much worse. I need to be aware of this coping mechanism and check in with myself to make sure it is not controlling me. However, if the worst side effect of this coping mechanism as I work on formulating and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, is a difficulty expressing my strong emotions to others or being uncomfortable with the expressed strong emotions of others, then I am okay with that.
So the real answer to why I do not want to be a visitor at the detention center is that I maintain a very delicate balance in trying to live a healthy, happy life. My inability to cope well with strong emotions in myself or others is a coping mechanism. One of my weaknesses as a professional social worker is my inability to separate my personal from my professional life. I become very emotionally attached to the people I work with. In addition, I am incredibly passionate about human rights issues and refugee issues. Thus, working at a micro level is too emotionally overwhelming and unhealthy for me. The stories I read from various immigration and refugee news sources, as well as from Sally and Rachel, are more than enough to keep the fire of the necessity of this work burning.