Liminal Space in Das Book

It’s morning, grey today, and I’m drinking really wonderful coffee with cream. I’m sitting in our living room. We did laundry yesterday so there are two rickety folding racks full of clothes taking up most of the room and all the clothes that wouldn’t fit upon the rack are strewn over the backs of our two chairs, the stone hearth, the windowsills. Drying time.

I am officially finished with my internship, as of Thursday. I completed 706.5 hours of free labor for a wilderness therapy company - 386.25 of those hours were spent meeting with clients. And now it is Saturday and I found a morel mushroom last time I was in the field so the plan for today is to go to an area of the forest that we saw burn last year and hopefully we will find a bunch of morels! I am a bit frustrated because I was hoping to gather a lot this spring and freeze or dry them so we could have a stash for the year but we are taking off for Colorado next Wednesday for graduation, just as the morels are starting to pop here in Oregon.

Alas, who could honestly complain about having to go graduate from grad school!?

I’m in such a liminal space. I did three interviews with the company I interned for. Initially I told them I only wanted to work for them if they could create a “part-time” position. This felt important because when I look around at all of the clinicians who are working there they are all, without exception, burnt out and running around like mad people all the time. Complaining about all they have to do and having no time to do it. They seemed willing to work with me on this and talked about hiring me as a “support therapist” to aid with the adolescent girls group in order to shoulder some of the burden the primary therapist in that group is carrying. All well and good, but when it came to putting clarity to this role and writing it down on paper it really just looked like a full-time position, albeit with a cap on the number of clients I was willing to take. So I made mention of this and we re-evaluated. Now, and I hope I made this clear enough in the interview (I think I did), I am applying for a full-time “field therapist” position with the possibility of moving rapidly into a clinical director role for a brand new program they are unrolling at this moment.

That feels really exciting! And a little scary because for the past few months I have been looking so forward to not having an obligation to show up for work at this organization any more. But, you know, doing a lot of hard work for free is a lot less motivating than doing it for pay, and I sure could use a paycheck right now. Particularly because Cody’s plan is to set up a private practice for himself. The plan being that I would then be folded into the private practice in a few years. The benefit to working for this organization right out of school is that I will have a much easier time gaining direct client contact hours (I need 3000 in order to get licensed) and my supervision time for those hours will be provided for free by the company, rather than me having to pay ~$100/session of supervision per 20 client contact hours I perform.

But I’m afraid that I expressed too much hesitancy around working full time for them to truly consider me a candidate. On one hand, they would be insane not to take me because they have essentially spent the last nine months training me to be one of their therapists, so I’m way ahead of anyone who would be coming in new. Also, I’ve done really incredible clinical work during my time here (I can say that without feeling too chuffed with myself because I’ve been working on my confidence and I really am a great therapist. After living in Japan it almost felt illegal for me to acknowledge my strengths and now, finally, five years later I am finally learning to be an American again and part of that is finding words to express what I consider myself to be good at, especially if I want people to take me seriously/hire me/come to do therapy with me!)

I’m just very anxious about it all. They are going to tell me in “one to two” weeks whether they want to offer me the job, which, as I know about this company, probably means two to three weeks. There are other candidates.

Somehow I just need to stop worrying about this, because there’s nothing I can do. If I don’t get the job, I can just go all-in and help Cody develop the private practice and we can just devote all of our time and energy into making that work. Or I can look around for another opportunity here. I find myself feeling really, really picky about what kind of therapy organization I want to work for. One of the main reasons I am so excited to work for the wilderness company I’ve been interning for is that they so explicitly focus on trauma-informed treatment. Instead of telling clients, “Oh, you are an addict and that is wrong and you have to stop ready-set-go!” they tell them, “Oh, wow, it looks like there are a lot of really hard things that have happened in your life and those things are driving some really unhelpful behaviors right now. Let’s see if we can’t heal some of that trauma and we’ll see where the behaviors go from there?”

In a nutshell.

For my last time in the field as an intern I hiked up a butte with a rocky caldera in it’s center. Looking out I could see miles and miles of ponderosa pine trees punctuated by buttes, ridges, rocky outcrops.

I’m glad I live here.