"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the
life you have imagined." That quote, said by Henry David Thoreau, is the
reason why I have started this blog. A year ago, as I was meticulously planning
every detail of my dissertation, I had a plan. Unlike the majority of my
university friends, I knew exactly what field of work I wanted to travel into,
and had done for a while. Ever since I was fourteen I had been fascinated by
the inner workings of criminal minds, trying to work out why they do what they
do. However, having volunteered for many years for teenagers with speech and
language impairments, my interest soon spread to offenders with learning
disabilities, and what it meant when they were incarcerated for their
crimes.
So here I am, five months after my graduation, and I've luckily
managed to dodge the statistic and become employed straight out of university,
not only into a job, but one in my field of interest. I am a 22 year old
psychology graduate working in a hospital for offenders with a primary
diagnosis of language difficulties.
Nevertheless, six months into my first job and I'm already asking
myself some pretty big questions. I've heard that these quarter-life crisis'
are quite "in" at the moment, and, whilst talking to my friends about
this a few of them feel the same about their jobs. However, many of them are
saying mainly "I can't believe this is it for the rest of my life". I
believe they are referring to the fact that this adult lifestyle isn't all it's
cracked up to be, getting up and going to the same job every day, day in and
day out, no matter how passionate you are about it.
To understand my self-prescribed ‘quarter-life crisis’, I should
first explain my new job. My official role at this hospital is a “support worker”,
which really means, a lot of long hours doing a lot of paperwork and making a
lot of tea. Occasionally, something else might happen that will spice the day
up a bit… I might even be able to take a patient out shopping or play a game of
Jenga. However, most of the time, the most stressful part of the day is trying
to cook three different meals for eleven people, at the same time. Believe me,
after coming straight out of university, I don’t think anyone on my ward was
expecting a meal like mine..!
You may be reading this thinking that this is the perfect job,
especially for a recent graduate, however, I have been here for six months now
and for someone who has a lot of ambitions in life, I have found this job to be
one that draws you in and keeps you there. Many there have been doing the same
job as me for over a decade, some only now receiving a promotion. But, for many
there, that is their perfect job, with the long shifts and long holidays the
perfect format for their lives.
However, going back to the quote at the beginning, and my reason
for going into this profession in the first place, I believe my “crisis” is
stemming from the fact that all decisions in this place are made pain-stakingly
slowly. This in turn causes different parts of the company to lose faith in
each other, which in turn causes more problems. The entire company is
incredibly cliquey, with each part of the hospital sticking up for each other
when another comes calling (not surprisingly), however, the only people to
really lose out from all of this tiddle taddling are the patients themselves,
whose rehabilitation is put back even further when something like this happens.
My “dream”, was to become a psychologist and help in the
rehabilitation of offenders with learning difficulties. However, after seeing
first hand just how slow the psychology process is to helping those get to
rehabilitation, maybe my dream will have to change…
