veil_le_pantera

I must say that I am shocked and feel kinda dirty.

I have been listening to Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole". And I like it.

Oh the shame.

It is difficult to ascertain how strong to appear to others when we need help, or how much help to ask from others when we should learn to be strong.

Sometimes it is important in a social situation to model what weakness looks like and how to deal with that. For example, The Cub should see me be weak sometimes, and she should see me deal with that and become strong. This is important for her to acknowledge when she too is week and needs to recovery, and how to do so.

Yet if I am weak too often, I take from her experience of life, or risk giving her the impression that life is too hard and there is no way to navigate through to happiness.

I work with people learning or re-learning how to interface with society in a meaningful way. Part of this is to work out when to seem strong when your not, and when to seek help when you need it. Partly I can model this, but mostly I can't. I am supposed to be the model of recovery, of being able, rather than the model of what it looks like to fail. I am unsure sometimes how to make this balance out.

Part of the dilemma is contained in the paradox of strength never learning solutions vs weakness perpetuating problems. If there is too much strength, you have no need to learn, or you block out the lessons you could learn by acknowledging weakness. If you have too much weakness, you learn to be weak and are stuck in problem space rather than looking in solutions space.

As an individual who is fairly in tune with himself, I generally see the weaknesses and strengths within myself. I constantly measure how well I am coping and hoping that I have the strength to help others also cope. I aim for thriving, but don't always achieve it. Often I don't.

Yet can I thrive if I do not fail? My friend, Mr T, would say you can. I wonder what thriving means if everyone thrives. Is it just normal and average then? Now thriving seems like nirvana. A white ball in a white land is insignificant, a white ball in a black land is a glowing beacon of brightness. Yet Mr T believes that is a false system - there is no reason why you must suffer to learn, to fail to thrive or to only experience happiness on the coat tails of sadness. The white ball is a white ball regardless of what land it is in.

I would like to think him right. He certainly seems to have been happy for many months. How many years of misery did he experience to have that? Or did he just give away pointless comparisons?

How much weakness do I show? How much strength? Should I show anything?

Yesterday I feared going to work. So I went.

Today I don't fear it. So I am taking the day off.

I believe that I am healing.

I need to be patient and not over tax myself.

So far, I can manage a few hours of being around people before the feeling of responsibility and my own doubts erode my ability to do.

This is affecting my social life, my personal life and my work life.

This week is going to be interesting.

11 years and 1 day ago my father died.

Happy aniversary dad.

How is it that life goes on for some while life doesn't for others? How do live while you feel dead? Howdoes living work?

We are supposed to accept who we are as a loving, valuable person. We are who we are supposed to be as the universe wouldn't allow us to be any way otherwise. Or another way of looking at it, we live because we are the perfect vessel at this point in time for the consciousness we have at this place in the universe. The first version is easier to say, but may offend some.

Once we accept that we are valuable and lovable, the paradox now requires us to accept that this is supposed to change.

All things change. Nothing stays the same. There is no unchanging, ultimate something that is exempt from this.

As such, are we changing to something more lovable, more worthwhile? Or less? Or different? Can there be a different?

At this point in time, I am questioning my self worth and where I should be. It seems clear to me that I shouldn't be where I am, even though this somewhat contradicts what was said earlier. Perhaps I should say, I should soon be somewhere else.

Yet no matter where I go, if the principle of universe nature is true, I will come up against the same problems as my nature seems to have repeated these problems since I was young.

Young.

Is that the source? My brother certainly didn't see value in who I was and sought to change/delete me. I have had run ins with full time work before, each with me no longer fitting or being able to do the job I thought I should do.

Clearly I am no leader of people or ways.

I tried to find a path that felt like me. It was a path called "Recovery" and I became as passionate and fanatical about it as the next shmuck may do with religions like Christianity and/or Science.

I still believe in the basics of this. I am now questioning the worth of my teachers. To go back to the Christianity example, the teachers may be a corrupt institution, but that does not necessarily invalidate the worth that can be found in the lessons. How many sub religions have been created because of a difference in interpretation, a falling out with the management and disillusionment of the institution?

It irks me that I may no longer be able to work where I am because of a minority of dissent. Unless, of course, they are right and I have missed some major fuck ups in my entity. I hope they are wrong.

So, based on the acceptance/change paradox, I must accept who I am now as a valuable, lovable and worthwhile entity. And then move on to a change such that who I am will work better with where I am. Or accept that I need to change what I do to match where I am.

I think I have tried the latter to death. So, time to try the former. Time to move on and hope I don't end up in the same situation.

Anyone know of any good Social Work positions going?

It seems that gone are the days where I could just walk into a job.

Greetings one and all.

I am having a day off work today. I don't want to go and the thought of being there makes me fairly emotional. As such, I don't think I would work well with clients today. So, a sick day it is.

Things have changed a little since my last emo spam. At the end of this week, I will no longer be a team leader. I have opted to step down and stop trying to run a team that mostly doesn't want my direction, advice, leadership or even participation. I have the opportunity to do this without losing pay. Mostly though, I lose respect for myself, who I am and what I believe I can do.

I have been told I will be transferred to another team. So I will not only lose my title and my authority, but also my clients. It feels like a lot of loss.

I suspect my main problem is losing my sense of self. And that is going to take more time to blog out.( Read more... )

I gave my last staff supervision today. Next week will be my last week as team leader. Then back to my old job.

Now to get my mojo back!

I dream of a place I can work in peace and harmony. I dream of a place that works to help those who come to the place. I dream of a place where people aren't turned away because we aren't paid to help them. I dream of a place that not only has caring workers, but caring admin, caring policy, caring funders and caring board of directors.

I dream of a place who has a policy that reads something like "if a policy is in the way of helping a consumer, or can be improved to improve the service to a consumer, that policy must be addressed such that it no longer harms the services to the client".

I dream of a place that has a reputation, or can build a reputation, where people will come and know they will be better for having come.

I dream of a good future.

Thinks of Dhroz...

Darlek Bread

For a while I have felt that the Captain of my work Ship is f*d in the head, and possibly out for my blood. Who knows why.

There was a fiasco a while ago where I may be transmoted, or demoted with the same pay, and put in a situation set up for failure.

I dodged that by ignoring it and forcing the captain to prove me faulty. He stated to me that his investigation showed that I was a competent worker and team leader but he still considered me a bad team leader. He attributed this to my communication and said that it was not good. He even put a written complaint about me, from him, into my record. I mostly ignored the threat of this since he needs 3 to do something against me.

The latest chapter in the saga goes thusly.

There is going to be a restructure of my department. Currently there is one program manager (acting), two team leaders (one actual and one acting) (one for each site) and 11 staff. This is going to be changed so that there will be one actual program manager, one actual team leader and probably 12-14 staff.

The two positions - program manager and team leader - are up for tender. We need to write selection criteria and cv to apply for the positions. All staff within my workplace are able to apply.

Now one would think that I should be a shoe in, right? Except that there is this written complaint about me, from the CEO. Who in their right mind would hire someone to a position of authority that the CEO has complained about?

The last time I got the director of corporate services to intervene in the unfair judgment of me. Now he is no longer there and we have a new one. Is it worth going to him?

Either way, if I have to write CV and SC, then I am going to look further out. Anyone know of any good Social Worker positions in the metro region?

I spent the weekend with an interesting group of people. Some of them were young (teenagers).

They seemed to think that getting drunk was a smashing idea and then becoming quite rowdy, loose in moral standards, and the usual shenanigans that young people get up to when drunk.

I found this interesting as I have never really gone in for that stuff.

The following day, they thought what they had done was great. I am glad that it seems no one did anything they would regret later.

What strikes me as interesting is that I have never gone that way. I don't see the point of wasting money on alcohol, of damaging my brain cells, of loosing my perspective of good and bad, of loosening my moral standards and of doing silly things and saying "but I was drunk at the time". If I want to do silly things, then I'll do it without the booze.

Of course I am not them, and at this point in my life far from being a teenager.

Yet when I was a teenager, I wasn't drawn to drinking alcohol. It was in my early twenties that I began to explore alcohol, got close to drunk once and figured that was enough for me.

As such, I really don't understand why people do that whole drunk and lusty thing.

This is not about me moralising, or casting aspersions on those who do drink or have loose definitions of commitment. This is me not understanding that perspective, recognising that and wondering if I am missing something.

There is a view that we each have 1 of three life paths. The warrior, the priest or the scholar. To journey the right path for you is the road to happiness, while the wrong path can lead to great frustration and unease.

The warrioir is one who tries to actvely right the wrongs in the world. This can be done in a peaceful or forceful way.

The priest tries to find the balance an harmony in life, focusing on the flows of energy and being.

Th scholar seeks knowledge and understanding. By findind such knowledge, the scholar understands self, the world and increases others knowledge.

I can see myself on all three paths. Each path works well at different phases of my life. What path is next for me?

Is there a path not covered by these? What path are you on, and is it right for you?

I have been looking at portable devices - specifically a note or net book.

Purpose: I use to use a work laptop. This was handy and portable, however had the problem that I was then, by inference, expected to work from home. That sucked. And they put restrictions on the laptop that invaded my ability to use it for reasonable use at home, which I was supposed to have. Thus I got rid of it in exchange for a desktop which stays at work. This was fine when I had less clients, but now I think it needs to change. So I need a note or net book to do notes in-between clients.

This will be done on a word 2003 compatible document, making it easy to copy and paste from a thunbdrive when I get back to work.

Solutions:

1) Resurrect one of my old laptops - HP Pav with 256 MB RAM, 120 GB HD, car charger.
Problem: I have no OS for it, and don't want to dick around with less than legal versions of Windoze. If I were to put linux on it, which one is likely to work well without being a pain in the back to use, which I don't have to be an expert in, but will have full USB technology capability?

2) Purchase (through salary sacrificing) a net book. How good are these? Which one is worth getting? Should I just buy a laptop instead? Do any come with a decent version of Windoze that means I don't have to futs around learning a new OS? And don't give me Mac advice - I don't want to know.

Thoughts?

Ignoarance leads to uncertainty. Uncertainty leads to fear. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to aggression. Aggression leads to ripping transperth signs down. Public destruction leads to a trip to the police station.

Mmmm. The force is strong with this one.

The staff at pmh were fantastic. The facilities were great. The system sucks.

There is only one theatre available for all ops, over weekends. This shared between ED, plastic surgery etc. This means that even hough staff were on who could have fixed The Cubs torn ear on Sat night, we were asked to come back the following day for am op scheduled at 1200. The Cub couldn't eat past 0600, or drink past 1000.

Her operation didn't occur until 2230. No food, no drnk till post op, 2300.

Not good Jan.

And they told. Few people to go home too.

Last night, The Cub used here ear as a breaking device. Apparently this is not highly rcommended. The doctors will be stitching it back together today.

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BIG *HUGS*

I am looking at myself and wondering. Recently I went through several levels of he'll at work. I feel that my emotional reaction, and my actions in response to what I peceivd were correct and accurate.

What if my perceptions were wrong? What if my understanding was floored? What if this is me subconsciously justifying me staying where I am, such that I stay in q cycle of violence?

Many years ago, my brother was a twat. He hurt me a lot over many years ago. Two years ago I bgan to wonder if I had misperceived him. I journeyed to his city and saw him. I stayed for ten days at his house. In this time, we mostly existed in the same space, but interacted only in a minor way. We played a dew games of chess. During one of these games, he systematically destroyed my pieces after several time where he could have beaten me.

I interpreted this to mean that at heart he was cruel and mean. This justified my world view, yet contradicted his obvious love for his children and devotion to his wife. If he were cruel and mean, that couldn't be, could it?

So, what if he was a changed man and I remind him of who he was? Who he is trying not to be. After all, I changed. Can't he?

When I am threatened, I react defensively, aggressively depowering my apponent until I can defeat them. This has always been my defence when I fear for my safety. I wriggle u til I find a position of strength, the. I push back. This has remained with me through my rebirth.

What if the bit that stays with my brother is his reaponce to me? Thus I conclude I should stay away from him.

Of course, this is all speculation. It is hard to have an honest, open, real and deep conversation with him.

What if my work situation is a repeat of my life. Perhaps CEO is trying to do the right thing and I react in fear. Or what I peceivd is true and correct, yet I have to stay to be hurt again in a classic cycle of violenc.

What lesson is real and what am I to learn from this? How can I find out?