{"id":2868,"date":"2017-07-28T18:56:09","date_gmt":"2017-07-28T17:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/?p=2868"},"modified":"2017-07-28T18:56:09","modified_gmt":"2017-07-28T17:56:09","slug":"one-year-on-and-where-am-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/one-year-on-and-where-am-i\/","title":{"rendered":"One year on and where am I?!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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What’s that awful ‘photo got to do with anything?\u00a0 Well, yesterday was my first non-clinical birthday. That’s to say, on the 27th of July a year ago in 2016 I was in that building scrambling to finish my final work in the NHS and my final work as a clinician.\u00a0 I didn’t quite get everything done and had to offload making sure a couple of letters went off to a kindly trainee psychiatrist but, looking back on it, rather remarkably, everything else was done and I crossed the road from that small psychotherapy unit in which I had been working to the pub directly opposite for my leaving do.<\/p>\n

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That’s the rather lovely Adam & Eve pub, a picture I took a year before during the pub’s 100th birthday year.\u00a0 Look at this for an glorious piece of decorative glazed brickwork.\u00a0 I wonder how being in the first or second year of “the great war” affected building something like that?<\/p>\n

\"\"Enough of that, well, not quite.\u00a0 It was a lovely pub and had the unusual distinction of having an L-shaped pool table.\u00a0 I was a bit overfaced by the evening which was had a mixed sample of my fellow staff from the Trust: a good number of psychiatrists in training and a good number of older colleagues, mostly but not all from that little building across the road.\u00a0 I think I’ve always found myself two not completely miscible groups of friends, acquaintances, peers, colleagues throughout my life.\u00a0 Hm, topic for a post there some time thinking on how true that has been.<\/p>\n

Anyway, where has the year gone?\u00a0 Where has it got me?\u00a0 Where have I got myself?\u00a0 Do I miss clinical work?\u00a0 What have I achieved?<\/p>\n

Aye, there’s the rub! But interesting questions.\u00a0 Well of course, the year seems to have raced by.\u00a0 It started with the cycle ride, my pilgrimage, that created this blog\/site and it’s been hard for anything to compete with the pleasures, and the challenges, of that.\u00a0 However, I’ve seen some fantastic theatre and exhibitions.\u00a0 I’ve had great work trips to Portugal, Albania, Italy and Spain.\u00a0 I’ve had great family holiday trips to Glasgow, the French Alps and to Lefkada (Greece). I’ve done some teaching of various sorts in Roehampton to some great students, and some of that went satisfyingly well and some of it was OK but good in helping see things to improve.\u00a0 I have done a lot of number crunching and I’m a lot more familiar with R (https:\/\/www.r-project.org\/<\/a>) and a few of my methodological ideas have developed a bit.\u00a0 However, I’ve got very few papers out, only one so far in fact (Psychometric Properties of the Finnish Version of the Young Person\u2019s Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (YP-CORE) Questionnaire<\/a>). Last year wasn’t great for paper output either and I’m aware of feeling quite unproductive and frustrated with that.<\/p>\n

My intention was to make more time for pleasure: art, theatre and reading and for exercise and I’m probably about halfway to the increased hours in the week that I was hoping to have for those things and I know that can be changed.\u00a0 I wanted to be able to cycle pretty much everywhere I needed to within London and I really have done that.\u00a0 I guess I’m not quite where I wanted to be but it’s not bad really.\u00a0 So why do I feel so unproductive and dissatisfied with that?<\/p>\n

The last few weeks as I became aware that the year was nearly up I have wondered more about missing clinical work and I had a short run of nightmares or horrible dreams all of which were about me being in some sort of clinical situation or other and failing to do all things that were necessary and getting sickly scared of what would happen.\u00a0 Some were definitely psychiatric in setting but the focus was on physical health things I should have been doing and some had me back in pure physical health settings I hadn’t been in for 32 years.\u00a0 I’ve thought a little bit more about ex-colleagues (not the ones I keep in touch with, they’re always floating around my mind!).\u00a0 I’ve wondered about getting back in touch with some people but so far it’s felt wrong, I’m not sure why.\u00a0 I’ve thought a bit more about ex-clients and that’s surprisingly often about the same really very small percentage of them and almost entirely either about poeple I saw very early in my career or ones I saw in my last job (behind that inauspicious gate onto Homerton High Street).\u00a0 I remain completely convinced that I made the right decision to stop and also intrigued by how little I’ve overtly missed the r\u00f4le and the work.\u00a0 However, I think some of the dissatisfaction with my productivity is because it’s so hard to replace that you were really pretty important to people: to colleagues as well as to clients.\u00a0 That’s a funny one to digest.\u00a0 I think I was careful not to let that get out of hand or be too important to me but it undoubtedly patches thin bits and frank holes in your confidence to find that you matter.\u00a0 One year on I can feel that I do miss that, that it has given me some work to do on those exposed holes and fraying threads in my ego.\u00a0 The challenge is to work on them by things other than just working hard and trying to output a lot.\u00a0 Work in progress!\u00a0 Starting next week, on the 2nd, the anniversary of that grey, damp morning that I pointed a well laden Toto off towards Compostella, I intend to review each of those days and to see if I can upload more things here and blog each day, mostly reliving the pleasures and challenges, but also using it to help the movement on.<\/p>\n

Fun ahead I hope!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What’s that awful ‘photo got to do with anything?\u00a0 Well, yesterday was my first non-clinical birthday. That’s to say, on the 27th of July a year ago in 2016 I was in that building scrambling to finish my final work in the NHS and my final work as a clinician.\u00a0 I didn’t quite get everything … Continue reading One year on and where am I?!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2868"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2874,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868\/revisions\/2874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psyctc.org\/pelerinage2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}