Intermittent life update
Mar. 2nd, 2018 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
erratioI just went back to my last life update post to see when it was, and a lot of things have changed since then! Given that it was over three years ago, that's really a good thing.
In very rough chronological order:
So obviously the thing I'm most excited about in there is enrolling to become an official counsellor person. Classes just started a couple of weeks ago and so far everyone and everything is lovely. (Except for their admin. My friend commented that I have Siderea-like powers of getting into weird administrative situations, and this definitely qualified.) Also, everyone here seems to dislike CBT, which I find kind of hilarious given its position as the gold standard everywhere else. I'm a little nervous about things like 'eye contact' and 'making legible expressions' as so much of my social experience has involved either the Internet or interaction with people who were just as socially anxious/awkward as I was, but I think that'll pass as I get more into the program. I'm also nervous about my placements, since some of the students are counsellors who've already been practicing for years and how can I compete with them for placements? But I suspect that will be fine too, since those other people probably don't want to do their placements at the kind of places that I do.
In very rough chronological order:
- I started a relationship with the Canadian guy I met online, and we visited each other several times
- I exited the PhD Linguistics program with a Masters, because academia is a terrible place for me
- I started volunteering for an online peer counselling service
- I moved to Canada to be with Canadian Guy
- After a couple of years of that, things weren't going so hot, and so when he got a job offer in Hungary I took that as my cue to initiate a break up and move back to Sydney. (the breakup didn't entirely take, but we get along so much better now that the relationship expectations aren't hovering)
- I started dating a boy in Melbourne. Still long distance, but at least it's only a relatively cheap 1.5 hour flight to see each other
- I enrolled in a Masters of Counselling and Psychotherapy
- A friend of mine who owns a company in the UK has hired me to do technical writing stuff, and the income from that is good enough to keep me afloat without eating into study time
So obviously the thing I'm most excited about in there is enrolling to become an official counsellor person. Classes just started a couple of weeks ago and so far everyone and everything is lovely. (Except for their admin. My friend commented that I have Siderea-like powers of getting into weird administrative situations, and this definitely qualified.) Also, everyone here seems to dislike CBT, which I find kind of hilarious given its position as the gold standard everywhere else. I'm a little nervous about things like 'eye contact' and 'making legible expressions' as so much of my social experience has involved either the Internet or interaction with people who were just as socially anxious/awkward as I was, but I think that'll pass as I get more into the program. I'm also nervous about my placements, since some of the students are counsellors who've already been practicing for years and how can I compete with them for placements? But I suspect that will be fine too, since those other people probably don't want to do their placements at the kind of places that I do.
