The Shock of Getting What You Wanted…

Not quite two years ago, I decided I was going to go for my Masters in Psych. I found a school, and I went.  I got up in the morning and did my readings and papers and discussion topics or whatever, and I took my exams.  This was post-aneurysm, so there was a certain amount of insecurity about all this.  But I did it.  Just put one foot in front of the other, and, lo, a year later–just as I’d said, I finished my coursework.  And took my exams and passed them and now I’ve got [another] MA.  

The whole time, whenever I was asked what kind of therapy I wanted to practice, I would say, “I don’t want a private practice.  I don’t want to treat middle-class neurotics like myself.  I want to work in an agency and I want to work with kids.”

And all of a sudden, I find that–that’s what I’m about to do.  Is this really me living in my life?????

Maybe it seems so strange, so alien even, because it is happening after the ten plus years I spent pursuing an MA and a PhD in lit so that I could teach.  Every piece of that process, particularly the PhD years, was calculated for effect.  So I could be attractive to programs, so I could get assistantships and fellowships and decent-enough money.  From Day One of that PhD program, we were coached in constructing a vita.  That was the goal, not the degree itself.  So I took courses and wrote papers that I gave at conferences and served on committees because “it looked good on a vita.”  And then in the end, the whole thing disintegrated, and I never finished.  I never got the payoff, the job at the end of the vita.