Fine, Truly Fine

You know it when you have one of those days. Before, you were languishing in the doldrums of "sorta okay" and "grand". Nothing too drastically out of place. Except for the persistent doubts about "do I truly know what I'm doing?" and "am I really helping anybody?"

One of the major perils of being a psychologist, I guess any similar health profession, is the self-questioning, the self-doubt. And the comparing. Even when you know the TV and the literary and the memoir psychologists don't reflect the reality of the day in, day out drudgery that can be your professional life, it's still hard to convince yourself a lot of the times that somebody else, anybody else, couldn't do a heck of a lot better.

And even though you know, after almost 15 years doing this, that this is just part of the rhythm of the ups and downs of what you do, you still get caught up in it.

People come to you in pain, expecting that you have all the answers, and get pissed or sad or hopeless when you don't spoon feed the miracle cure to them. You know this is how things work. You know it.

Then, when you least expect it, you have that day. When all the floundering you've been doing, trying to figure out what the heck your next step is, resolves into something resembling clarity and you remember that there actually is some substance to the facade you play out every day. The day that client walks in and you have that session where, even though you're only at the start of things, magic happens. You click. He or she connects. You're riding the flow of the emotional energy between you and you can almost see them lifted up. And it's a beautiful thing - enlightening, emotional, spiritual even.

That was today. It wasn't the first time and it won't be the last, but I needed it... to remind me why I do this and that it's okay to keep on doing this. Today was beautiful even in the midst of its flaws. A fine blessing indeed.