This thread got started possibly as a response to something I may have said over on my Dow thread. I've never really seen things as either/or, as Dow or this, and my thanks go out to rtpoe for getting this rolling.
Especially now that, after nearly fourteen years' of an underpaying but otherwise damn lucky arrangement, I now find myself teetering dangerously close to quitting.
It's very easy to counsel "Don't quit," and nine times out of ten, I'm inclined to agree. Quitting is a viable option only for the very slick. Slick, I've never been. Yet I'm feeling cornered into it.
For nearly fourteen years I have worked with, as they put it, the developmentally disabled. It's interesting, the reflex somehow mixing shame and pity people have towards me when they learn what I do: personal shame, because of how rarefied and honorable and near-saintly they decide my work must be, but also pity, as if to convey to me "I'm so sad that you have resigned yourself to a living death."
But you know what? For the overwhelming most part, I have considered myself lucky. I've gotten some cool clients along the way. Even more amazing, I seem to make a difference. The man I have now, to this day people, including physicians, see his history and are reflexively terrified of him, yet with me he has been a pussycat. There are probably far bigger, greater things that I probably could have, should have, done, but this felt all right, making a difference, finding my little niche in the world.
So of course someone has to suddenly fuck all that up for no clear reason.
It begins with my client's colon and my client's father. Something goes wrong with his colon, so to the hospital he goes. The hospital recommends surgery. The father says, he'd like a second opinion. Then later, a third. And a fourth. Meanwhile, he's wrangling and shouting with all the doctors. He is not what I would call, shall we say, a sophisticated man. Not knowing particulars, I'd be furious with the father, wondering "Why doesn't someone sic a magistrate on him?" But you know what, perhaps the father has been vindicated. There's been no surgery, and our man is back, a bit groggier, more explosive with his **107** right now, but we're observing him -- and he may need to go back someday, but he continues to look like he's out of jeopardy, thank God.
At this point, jeopardy sloshes right over onto me. Time stretches, while the father is shouting and the agency is indecisive. I have to work another site for one week. It's not hell, exactly, in any overtly monstrous sense, but it's just relentless exhausting tedium. One guy barely ever gets up. Another guy is independent, thank God he's in this mix, surviving somehow. The remaining guy is endlessly contrary, distracting himself at every moment, clinging to this place or that with tremendous strength.
It's not hell. But there's no rapport kicking in, either. I barely get to see the sleeper-in, but the contrarian is just exhausting. Oh, and I'm not a dog person and there's a dog -- and the thing is, the sleeper-in's family got him the dog figuring "This will make a man of him," but he doesn't like the dog, plus the dog's a bit psycho. Oh, and two other men get stopped over, and they can wander around and cause havoc if I'm not careful.
I get through the week, with only one shining goal: to finally get my client and my site back. And for the week thereafter, I get that, and lo, it is good.
And then late Friday afternoon, the boss calls me saying We're switcherooing you. You know that place you were just at last week? You're ba-a-ack.
It feels like I'm getting "groomed." Why do they want me back? I was barely able to get though any of the basics the last time. They say they're trying me for a week. Well, this was the first day, and it sucked. The sleeper-in NEVER came out. The contrarian, same old story. And the nice guy, claims to have a sore throat -- but he may just be playing me. And the dog. And the two visitors.
With my rational mind (what there is of it), I do what I can with this. But my body is in red alert. I haven't felt dread and apprehension and panic this stifling and intense in years. It can't be healthy.
I went down to headquarters this morning and gave a report. I basically said "The experiment has failed." A woman talked to me, very thoroughly and reasonably, although she doesn't give a shit that my body is flipping out on me. I go back in tonight. I may get to talk with someone for extra advice. That's about it. But a miracle is going to have to happen pretty damn fast.
This is making precious little sense to me. So far as I can tell, to this day I'm the only person who can get my client up in two minutes, as opposed to two hours. He and I have some kind of rapport -- and it's enduring, it hasn't gone away after the long hospital stay. I could try to teach people how I earned it, but frankly no one is going to go through what I went through to work that out. Now I'm getting told "Never mind that, now go somewhere else and be sub-mediocre and panicked and miserable."
I've always had trouble with the work, but I never dreaded it, never feared it, never resented it, never caught myself hating it. Until now.
Towards the end the woman told me that it was not about individuals or any kind of experiment (I don't know, I think the dictionary really does apply here, miss). She called it a "programatic need." I felt ice in my heart when she said that. "Programatic need." Translation: I get to have it both ways -- I get to talk about something that someone must be embarrassed by and not wish to claim any credit for, and yet in such a way as to make it sound like the irrefutable golden tablets of Joseph Smith.
Maybe it can get better. Maybe this is temporary. Maybe. But I have never resigned myself to a daily, weekly, endless career of grinding heart-squeezing panic and impotent rage, and I'm not starting now. I will quit and go homeless and kill myself before I do that.
To all of you out there for whom that is indeed life, all I can tell you is, God bless you. We deserve more.
I cheat, because this is still speculative, the "-ed" hasn't kicked in, and it may still not. But I don't know where I go. A single month has gotten me to hate the field I've been in since the Eighties. I'd love something else now. I've tried. For a whole week I once got to help run a bookstore. I still think of that.
We think the Civil War ended slavery. Certainly, in its most absolute form, it is gone, but I'm not satisfied by any claim of victory. It was technology that ended slavery, the recognition that technology could finally make overt slavery no longer seem so viable. And believe me, a technical fix, I will take. But a moral victory? The moral lesson still goes unlearned. We could dial back 150 years in a heartbeat.
We joke about hating work. I loved this work. Once. But now ... now, I don't know.