Hello, Readers. I have been behind on my blog. The reasons are various, including being busy, busy with school and overwhelmed with housebreaking two puppies—what was I thinking? I was thinking about how fun it will be when they’re trained, and not about how much work is involved in training them AND going to graduate school at the same time.
Also, I have been avoiding writing because I have to put in words the sad truth that the Paterfamilias is no more. He died on December 29th, of old age and complications of COVID-19. I am grieving. Of course I am. The anger over how he died—alone in the hospital, very hard to reach by phone or Zoom, is with me. What can I say about a 95-year-old man who died other than he had a long life, a mostly good life, a life with some tragedy and much joy, and he was my father. I am now an orphan.
It’s not a tragedy that he died. We all must die, and he did not die before his time. That would be a tragedy. But how he died was tragic. Alone, isolated, frustrated, and afraid, as so many people have had to die this year. Even when loved ones were nearby and prepared, they couldn’t reach their hospitalized ones. They were trying, like me and my sister the psychoanalyst, to reach their parent by phone, by Zoom, and finding themselves baffled at every turn by difficulty communicating, even if we did manage to get through. That was tragic, to not be with the paterfamilias in the hospital to hold his hand and keep him company.
Nevertheless, there it is. He is not. Life is going on, and I have a new blog post up on Psychology Today that I am sharing with you here. It’s about finding my identity in a profession that is having an identity crisis. Ah, the irony. Please click the link below to finish reading it on the Psychology Today website. The more views the editors see my post get, the better for me. Please continue reading below and click on the highlighted text to finish to post.
Social Work's Identity Crisis--And Mine
I began writing this blog to help me figure how to define myself as a successful person when I had experienced very little of what the world considers success for an individual. And by world I mean my own part of the world, the world of educated professionals. I was not a professional, despite my education, and this ate at me most fiercely. I washed up on the shores of Regret and Should’ve, questioning my focus on writing novels and on being a mother. Worthy endeavors, but I couldn’t see them that way, because they didn’t amount to resumé entries. They were not professional success. I became something of a psychologist-manque, reading up on success and flourishing and goals, steeping in the tea of Positive Psychology and serving it up to you, entertaining myself and others with my forays.