Documenting my journey through the mental health system

My top coping skills – music, writing, movies and film…and most of all, work.

I’m at Sacred Heart again tonight, with a trainee. I haven’t been here that long, but I am already orienting new people to the floor. In fact, it was only my 4th night back when I was new that I trained someone.

New people are really new, too. For some, this is not only their first nurse assistant job, but also their first job. They are so green. It’s rather difficult to train someone new. You realize just how much the job entails. There is so much to learn and remember.

I’ve been at it 15 years. I have seen it all. I didn’t mean to get into this, it was kind of accident and fate at the same time. I knew I wanted to work in healthcare, but beyond that, I still have no idea what to do with myself, what I should be when I grow up. I’ve always felt this sense of non-belonging, like there’s nowhere for me to really fit in, that nothing was quite right for me.

After the army a hard recession hit. I spent two months looking for a job and finally found one at Goodwill cleaning toilets. I quit after a year and a half to finish school and after that, was only able to find a job doing in home care. That is where it started – CNA work is recession proof. I later worked a job looking after sex offenders – they themselves were disabled and needed 24/7 supervision for life. That was a very weird job, and I did it for a year, my senior year of college. Later I worked a psych residential facility, passing out meds. It was like an assisted living facility. But I left for the VA by 2015, not long after I’d gotten out of Sacred Heart’s psychiatric unit.

And now I have two CNA jobs, one here at Sacred Heart, part time, and the VA, full time. And people are just getting fatter and sicker and more anxious every day.