In the web

It has been a while since I wrote anything. In the meantime another one of my very disturbed patients did some high lethality self damage, and I happened to be the lucky one who saw her last. I sank into a frightening depression in the midst of yet another blame game and could find motivation for hardly anything. But then, sertraline did some wonders (and I highly recommend) and I survived the misery of work without taking too many mental health days, and said no to some job offers, and planned an overseas wedding and honeymoon itinerary and booked all the hotels during this awful period of time.

So, maybe looking back, it wasn't so bad at all, but it took immense effort to maintain that level of psychosocial functioning, with daily doubts whether i will manage to pull through the home stretch of my training, or flee the shrinkage as a wreck, knowing I will never have the guts to return. Perhaps the fact that i worked in the same post for the last 6 months as when I did as a first year and remembering things to be much more under control back then made it all the more defeating, or maybe, the realisation that control of the uncontrollable is but a delusion but your fellow clinicians use such defence day in and day out so their narcissistic selves don't disintegrate and they can continue doing the good work of saving the world... further added a sense of helplessness.

Or maybe, just when I was at a more tender age and know less of the world. I could comfortably adopt a more black and white view and a clear line could be set between the normal and the pathological, that could keep my psyche at bay from the mad and the bad and the sad that I see everyday. Maybe paying some proper attention to the male psychotic patients and their long suffering, very supportive but invariably transgressive mothers just made everything not so simply neurochemical. Or maybe the gradual realisation that my own mother was prominently Cluster B who did not tick all the criteria boxes only because she was bound by her cultural norms, and contained by a dependent endorsing husband, made me feel as if walking on the edge of a cliff--a slip of the foot at any minute could send me tumbling down into some pervasive pathology of my own.

so, here i am, frightened of my near misses, intermittently losing sight of the various forces that steadied my wobbly gait all these years, divine or otherwise. maybe there is yet hope, that I can untangle some more deep seated anxiety and hysteria, before moving forward, hopefully less of a wreck than before.