Nobody's Therapist

Getting tired of waiting.

I can’t start my new job until the woman at the board processes my temporary license. (Temporary license = a $300 document that confirms you have a Masters degree. Not to be confused with your diploma, which has already cost you thousands of dollars to do the same thing).

I call to check up on the status of this license so much that I have a very real fear that they may turn me down simply because I’m obnoxious.

“Can you please just give me an estimate of when it will be processed?” I ask Elaine at the board. “I’ve been out of work a long time."

“I’ll get to it when I get to it,” she says.

Gotta love bureaucrats.

I have only been living here for three months now, which doesn’t sound like a long time. I’ve had longer-lasting leg rashes, afterall. But time moves differently when you’re new to a city and looking for work. Time slows down. Like a crippled turtle walking the perimeter of the moon.

I turned on MTV the other day and watched True Life: I’m Relocating for Love. It followed three long-distance couples, in which one partner moved to another state for the other. I hoped to draw strength from people who had been through struggles similar to my own and had successfully made it through to the other side of adjustment. Instead, I watched as these three people each got frustrated, lonely, and went crazy. They all ended up moving back home less than a month after relocating.

I’ve been working part-time at a crisis center for the past five weeks, where my job is supposed to be to answer the crisis/suicide hotline. But I’m not allowed to answer the phone until I’ve been fully trained, and my supervisors are too busy to train me. So I sit there for four hours a day and literally do nothing. Sometimes I listen in on crisis calls, and it makes me so eager. Because I know that I'm fully qualified to handle these phone calls, and I’m so ready to be someone who helps others find strength again. I remember coming out of my very last therapy session at the Family Center last May (a session that had been spent eating chocolate cupcakes with my clients), and declaring to anyone in the pod who would listen, “I’m nobody’s therapist!” (After a stressful two years, it was mostly a good feeling despite being bittersweet).

But now I would give anything to get to be a therapist again. I would give anything to do anything again.

I’ve been doing some cooking, which is a big deal for me. (The first night I cooked I had to call Noemi to ask how to boil water and ask Doug how to make meat “not raw anymore”). It’s been going mostly pretty well, with the exception of one night a couple weeks ago when I attempted to imitate my favorite meal from Panera: the steak and blue cheese salad. I somehow managed to ruin every element of it, and Doug later admitted that the reason he loudly hummed “Stars and Stripes Forever” as he scraped his leftovers into the trash was so I wouldn’t hear how much of it he was actually throwing away.

Life After my Stint with the Drug Dealer

I walked into my first training class yesterday, took one look at the other new hires, and prayed that I was in the wrong place. But I was not. These were my fellow trainees: a teenaged girl with the largest ear gages I have ever seen, three African men who I would soon learn spoke basically no English, and a woman with whom I have a very awkward (and recent) history.

I got a new job as a therapist working in elementary schools. And since my new employer is not Iowa City’s most well-known pot dealer, I now get to do official things like attend training classes.

This training is required for everyone in this very large organization, which includes three separate divisions. Two of those divisions provide shelter care to the mentally and physically disabled. My division is mostly unrelated, and provides therapy to non-handicapped people in the community.

I was the only therapist at the training . The others were hired as caretakers for the handicapped. (A job that I learned, during this class, has an annual employee turnover rate of 75%--likely explaining what I felt to be quite an unusual pick of employees).

Our presenter introduced herself by saying she’d had no interest in working with handicapped people when she started this job four years ago, but that she’d applied because she needed the money. She then asked us to all state why we had applied, and everyone else also listed money as the only reason.

The presenter then admitted that she knew absolutely nothing about the therapy division for which I’d be working. So we spent the next five hours talking exclusively about how to care for the handicapped and how to restrain them when necessary. Not a single relevant thing for my job was mentioned.

Imagine the driest PowerPoint presentation you have ever suffered through, and now please try to understand that whatever you are imagining might as well have been an uncontainable fit of passion compared to this PowerPoint presentation I endured.

I think that at some point in our presenter’s career, she must have been encouraged to garner audience participation. But that no one ever told her how.

One of her PowerPoint slides said “Mission Statement,” followed by the organization’s mission statement. She paused the presentation here and asked, “Does anyone know what mission statement means?” Dead silence. I thought about answering but refused to out of principle—I mean, even if you hadn’t heard the term before you could certainly use the context clues in this situation. She rolled her eyes as the silence continued. “This morning is going to go on a long time if no one participates,” she scolded.

Her next attempt at getting us to participate was at a slide that described the organization as innovative. “Does anyone know what the word innovative means?” she asked. Silence, and more eye rolling on her part, until I eventually answered.

The only time that anyone perked up was to ask questions about taking time off and missing shifts. Everyone had a situation that they wondered if it would count against them as a tardy or unexcused absence. Including the three African men, who each had to repeat themselves about seven times before anyone could understand what they were asking.

We seriously spent about ten minutes trying to understand one of the men as he asked his question, which at it’s most decipherable, was phrased something like this: “But… chronic disease… what if… have disease… chronic symptoms… happen unpredictable… miss work… chronic disease?” We eventually just had to move on.

After the training portion, we had to take a 60-question quiz as a group. The presenter read each question out loud and we had to call out the answer. Even though none of the questions had anything at all to do with my own job, I answered the first ten questions in a row because no one else would. At the 11^th question I decided not to answer, because I didn’t want to keep being that girl. There was dead silence for a solid sixty seconds.

The grand finale of the training was the presenter saying that she would not let us leave until everyone asked one question, which was long and painful and made me wonder if I would just eventually starve to death and die in that very room.

Luckily, I live on.

Top 14 Signs it’s Time to Quit a Therapy Start-up (And Reasons You Should Look up Your Boss’s Public Records Before Accepting a Job)

1. You are hired without a background check or references called to go into children’s homes to provide therapeutic services.

2. Your boss asks you to drive your clients long distances to dance classes and gymnastics classes. Without reimbursement.

3. You are required to ask your client her size in leotard and tights, when body image is one of her trigger issues.

4. Your boss’s mom repeatedly asks you, in front of your clients and their parents, when you will be available to voluntarily host weekly arts and crafts and checkers club for your clients (something you’ve never heard of, let alone volunteered for).

5. Your boss encourages (insists) that you conduct confidential sessions in public settings.

6. Your clients’ parents have your cell phone number, and they call at night to ask for rides to Walmart.

7. When you drive to your clients’ homes for your scheduled appointments, they are not there.

8. Your boss plans the one and only staff meeting for 6:30 pm on a Friday night.

9. Your boss says he will bring your paycheck to Friday night meeting, and then fails to show up for said meeting.

10. Your other boss says he cannot afford the gas to drive in for meeting because he has not yet been paid. As he puts it, “You just can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.”

11. You make plans to meet up with your boss the next week so he can give you aforementioned paycheck, and he doesn’t show up there either. When you call, he asks if you can pick him up and give him a ride to his house, where he left your paycheck.

12. As you are driving your boss to his house to pick up aforementioned paycheck, you notice his street address mysteriously matches the address of the “office” the organization is rumored to be building.

13. As you pull away from boss’s house, you open your paycheck to realize that all the hassle of the past two months has made you a grand total of forty dollars.

14. When it finally occurs to you to look up your boss's public records, you discover his extensive (and recent) history of drug busts, getting his driver's license revoked multiple times on account of drug busts, and driving with revoked license (maybe that's why you had to drive him home last week..?) Probably doesn't bode well for an agency designed to keep kids off drugs and out of legal trouble. Just sayin’.

None of my 3 jobs have given me any work, so I’m basically still unemployed. The real world is confusing.

The downtime is giving me ideas I never would have thought of before, like wanting to take our kitten for a walk. I went to Walmart to buy him a harness and leash, and was faced with quite a conundrum. The smallest size (for dogs, because they don’t make them for cats) only came in two patterns: pink with polka dots or black with skulls. Pink polka dots felt wrong for a boy cat, but skulls? Really? A bit too intense for my cuddly little babypantspie. So I went with polka dots. I took him outside when I got home and he just collapsed onto the sidewalk, paralyzed with fear.

Another uncharacteristic thing I did yesterday: went to the library. I avoid libraries because I never got the hang of the card catalogue (surely outdated now) or call numbers (even though my mom insists this system was designed to be understood even by the mentally retarded). So to avoid embarrassment I just buy all my books on Amazon.

Let me illustration how wholly unfamiliar I am with libraries. I’ve been wanting to read the new book in the Traveling Pants series, but because it’s fairly new and isn’t in paperback yet, it costs more than $10 used on Amazon (and I refuse to pay more than $10 for a book or anything else in my life). So these were my thoughts about the topic, verbatim: Ugh! It’s way too expensive! I’m going to have to wait until it comes out in paperback, but that could be months away and I really have my heart set on reading it now! This sucks! If only there were a way to read books for free!

The concept of the library literally did not occur to me until I was walking through town yesterday and found myself standing in front of one. So I went in. Unfortunately, the Traveling Pants book was all checked out. And, equally unfortunately, I stumbled across a book with the same name as the book I just wrote, written about the topic I wrote about! What the hell?

A couple weeks ago I began querying agents for my book. To those of you who did not spend the past few months researching the publication process after having spent the past few years stowed away in your room alone but for the sound of your own typing, a query letter is what you send to agents describing your book so that they can take one quick look and then reject you through a generic form e-mail, without having actually read a single word of your manuscript. You need an agent before you can get a publisher, and the chances of landing any given agent are about as good as any given sperm being the one to fertilize the egg.

I thought this would be a good time to welcome more rejection into my life, having not gotten nearly my fill after the demoralizing past few months that have been my job search. I’ve gotten about a dozen agent rejections so far, ranging from “You have an interesting idea for a book, and there's a lot to like about your approach. But in the end I'm afraid that I didn't come away quite fully convinced it was something I'd be able to represent successfully. I'm grateful for the chance to review it nonetheless, and best of luck to you in finding it the right home” all the way to “No, thanks.”

I leave you with a picture of Ketos, courtesy of Christina Nord.

I think I just made it easier to comment... so... you should comment.

Had a lovely time in Montreal with Noemi and her mom this weekend, an opportunity that presented itself quite randomly.

A few weeks ago I was listening to a Voicemail Noemi left while I was working. “My mom is offering to fly us to Montreal to visit her the weekend of October 6^th,” she’d said.

“That’s totally awesome,” I said when I called her back during my lunch break, while eating chili cheese burritos. “I’m supposed to work at the store that weekend, but if I can’t get the time off I’ll just quit.”

That didn’t turn out to be an issue, as I ended up quitting a week later after being totally degraded by my manager. She pulled me into the back room and recited a long list of everything I was doing wrong, which was strange because I only worked with her for three hours of the three weeks I was there, and because I’ve just been doing my job (tagging hats, using registers, straightening shirts, etc, it’s not hard).

According to her, these were my offenses:

Chatting with co-workers

(All of our customers come in rowdy and drunk. Pretty sure the occasional small talk, which really was infrequent, never hurt our sales.)

Having my back to customers while straightening merchandise

(Impossible to not have back to some customers while doing this, due to store layout.)

Drinking out of my water bottle

(We were allowed to have drinks if they were closed beverages, and I often poured my water into the lid of my water bottle which doubles as a cup, at which point it evidently became an open beverage.)

Tying my much-too-large-T-shirt behind my back

(Which she claims I was doing just to “spite” her, despite my insistence that I was doing it solely and exclusively because my T-shirt was too large. Also, this is a place where our required uniform includes black pajama pants).

Standing behind the counter

(Evidently we are supposed to do this ONLY when ringing a customer up.)

Crossing my arms

(Just my default!)

Leaving work early

(Just following orders! The assistant manager sent three of us home early that day because the store was so dead that there was nothing to do.)

Using computers for personal use

(Never, EVER did this.)

It was truly a confusing and upsetting moment, though I’m sure it was a result of her own psychological circumstances that I will never get to understand. And no big deal, this was not my career, it was only a temporary thing to keep me occupied while I looked for real work. But still. As I sat there and got yelled at while glancing at a very official-looking form she had filled out regarding my offenses (she even filled the margins), I kept having this recurrent thought: This is not my life.

I have had several this-is-not-my-life moments over the past several months. It has been a strange road.

Moments over the past five months when all I could think was this is not my life:

-Pretty much any moment I was in India (except those that were deeply rewarding in a life-changing kind of way)

-That unfortunate week-long period in which doctors were poking, prodding, and draining the extremely painful abscess on my butt

-Having my mom have to drive to Illinois to pick me up due to said abscess

-Sitting on inflatable butt pillow on airplane due to said abscess

-Going on my first interview only to find out the place doesn’t exist

To be fair, I have had many I’m-glad-this-is-my-life moments as well: watching my sister get married, moving in with Doug, raising a kitten, having friends travel far to visit us, going to Montreal.

And one that I haven’t announced yet: getting a job.

It finally happened. I went to an interview two days after I quit the store, not really expecting much. (All the good things in my life, without fail, turn up where I’m not expecting much). But everything just felt right. There are some things about the job that are scary to me—the fact that it’s just starting up, the fact that I don’t have a guaranteed number of hours per week, the fact that my hours might not count toward my license. But there was something bigger than all of those worries when I listened to my interviewer just speak candidly about his passion for this beautiful thing he is trying to do. And the thought I kept having was this: This is my job.

And I guess I was right, because it was offered to me on the spot. I’ll be working with kids, teenagers, and families, and I start this week.

Comment time!

If Unemployment Weren’t so Depressing, Mine Would be a Sitcom

Iowa is a marriage and family therapist’s wasteland. Or, in the words of a local therapist, “the state had a marriage and family therapy program once, but it just kind of… died.”

Or, in the words of another therapist, “I once knew a girl who got her MFT degree in California, then moved back to Iowa, never found a job, got frustrated, and gave up. Poor thing. I wonder what ever happened to her...”

Like I mentioned before, my first glimmer of hope was when I met with a therapist who I thought was interviewing me for a position at his clinic, which I’d read about online and seemed pretty impressive. Only to find out, once I arrived, that this clinic did not exist. But he said I could join his private practice if I found all my own clients and paid him 70% of my earnings. He told me to think about it really hard and e-mail him in about two weeks.

I spent the next three weeks trying desperately to find an actual job. What I found was a woman (through Craigslist) who was interested in hiring me as a therapist to work in schools. Then she called the day before my interview to say that she’d just found out that she needed to hire someone with a full license (can’t get fully licensed until I have two more years of experience—can’t get two years of experience until I get someone to hire me).

So I closed my eyes, breathed in deep, and e-mailed the original man to let him know that I’d thought hard, and was interested in his offer. So we set up another meeting and had literally the exact same conversation we had the first time, and ended it the same way (“I want you think really hard about this and e-mail me again in two weeks.”) Not sure exactly what game we’re playing with each other. Maybe we will continue to get together to do this every two weeks until the end of time?

Meanwhile I’m sending out applications constantly, but the only response I ever get is from the Army National Guard.

One day I started an online application to be a mental health specialist for the army—though I couldn’t bring myself to continue after reading that this position “could one day qualify you to be a psychiatrist’s assistant, a nurse’s assistant, or even go on to college!” (Also when I learned that I would have to go to boot camp and firearms training. Because, really? Me with firearms?)

But one day, out of a sheer inability to spend one more second watching Glee or clipping my kitten’s nails, I took the army’s word knowledge and math tests (the next step in the application process). I did really well and the army has been calling me several times a day ever since, like a needy ex-lover. But, like I said, me with firearms?

Meanwhile, I occasionally call Iowa’s licensing bureau to ask questions about how to get my temporary license. Exactly one person works there, let’s call her Elaine, and I’m pretty sure she has Alzheimer’s. A typical conversation will go something like this:

Me: Hi Elaine, it’s Julia again. You know… just finished graduate school, moved to Iowa, and am trying to get my temporary license in marriage and family therapy. My question for today is this. These forms that I have to get my old supervisors to fill out… I see they are written in the future tense, but they are referring to my past supervision, correct?

Elaine: In Iowa you must have two years of experience before you get your full license. You can get your temporary license before that. You must already have a degree in marriage and family therapy.

Me: Um.. yeah. I know. I’m wondering about the tense of these forms.

Elaine: Your temporary license will expire in three years, unless you apply for renewal. You must get 3,000 hours of experience and 200 hours of supervision. Apply for renewal thirty days before it expires.

Me: Yeah, well, first I’m wondering about these forms, because I can’t get my temporary license until I send in these forms, so that’s kind of my first step.

Elaine: Did you attend an accredited program?

Me: Yes.

Elaine: Let’s look up your program and see if it’s accredited.

Me: Well I already know that it is.

Elaine: What was your school? Let’s just look it up.

Me: Northern Illinois. I know for a fact it’s accredited. We checked it last time we were on the phone, and I knew it even before that, too.

Elaine: And what was your major?

Me: Well, I didn’t have a major, because it was a Masters degree. With a specialization in marriage and family therapy.

Elaine: Oh! MFT!

Me: *#$@^&#@$(#@$

Incidentally, I would like to mention that none of the jobs I’m applying for require a Masters degree (except the ones that require a full license) and I’m pretty close to taking graduate school off my resume altogether because I think it’s making me overqualified. (Remember, in college, when everyone insisted that you had to go to graduate school to be a therapist…?)

Anyway. It’s probably not as bleak as I make it all sound. I actually had a real interview earlier this week that went fairly well, except that I accidentally giggled when the interviewer asked if I’d be comfortable talking with my clients about things like bowel movements and vaginas. Oops.

And anyway, I’m not technically unemployed. I sell very overpriced merchandise for a sports team I didn’t know existed a few weeks ago. Although today I did get scolded by my boss, because one of our “secret shoppers” last week caught me chatting with another co-worker behind the counter, which is apparently a pretty serious offense. And that, in a nutshell, is my life.

Doug: "We've gotta stop feeding this cat. I'll tell you what he does with his food: half of it he turns into energy which he uses to terrorize us, and the other half he turns into the most foul-smelling turds."

The universe delivered us a kitten this summer. It wandered onto Doug's land, accompanied by a deer. It was tiny, probably the runt of its litter. The deer brought it up to Doug and then stepped back, watched Doug play with it for a while, and then walked away. We were joking that the deer had probably been scouting out a good home for the kitten in Doug's town. Peered into the window of his neighbors who were drinking moonshine and firing their illegal fully automatic rifle, and then moved on to Doug's window, where he was strumming his guitar and reading poetry.

So now Ketos lives with us in Iowa City, and boy is he adorable, but also a terror. He is usually attacking us, so we really savor the moments when he is tired enough to allow affection. This only happens when we get home after having been out a while, when he has gotten bored and fallen asleep. So we rush over to him whenever we walk in the door and shower him with strokes and kisses until he becomes alert enough to start biting and clawing again.

And yet, I find myself amazed at how much I love him. Even when he is knocking over soda cans or running around our apartment drenched in his own runny diarrhea, my heart is so full that it aches. It reminds me of something I once read by David Sedaris. He was talking about how he didn't think he could have children because he couldn't handle all that love. Because he already loved his dogs, just his dogs, so much that it nearly killed him. I can relate.

Anyway. Turns out there are many therapy agencies in the area that do not wish to hire me. So I responded to an ad on Craigslist for a University of Iowa merchandise store that was looking for part-time employees, and stated "Stay-at-home-moms encouraged to apply." I figure I am basically a stay-at-home-mom to Ketos, so I applied. They had me come in and take an aptitude test. Questions included: What percentage of people do you think smoke marijuana socially? What percentage of judges do you think can be bribed? What percentage of people do you like? Do you ever have thoughts you wouldn't want other people to know about? How often do you enjoy hearing gossip?

After the fact I regretted that I had admitted to "occasionally" enjoying gossip and hoped that this wouldn't ruin my chances, but turned out it didn't and I start work tomorrow.