Today, I still feel extremely confused. This morning, I was discussing Goldstein training - a form of social skills training catered to people with mild intellectual or psychiatric impairments - with Annemarie (the internship student). She has to do a paper on that, but could hardly find any info. Neither could I - I know at a basic level what Goldstein training is and what it’s supposed to do and how, but that’s about all I could find online -, and I’m quite good at using the Internet as a source. Then, Annemarie went up to her teacher saying that she could hardly find any info and even one of her clients, who is in college, couldn’t. (She would initially also have had to do a paper on some method called Liberman, but talked her teacher out of it cause neither of us could find any info and the other staff here didn’t know anything about it either.) This whole thing feels kind of strange: of course, the simple fact that I’m in college, doesn’t say anything about my ability to find information on social pedagogical work methods, but since my current programme leads up to, among other things, the social pedagogical care programme and since I have quite an extensive psychology book (the students were told to look in psych books for info on these methods), it’s kind of understandable (though not correct) that my being in college poses some authority. I didn’t learn about Goldstein in college - I learnt about it in one of my so many searches for information on how people with behavioural disorders are treated.
And maybe I should admit to this paradoxical situation: I may be in a college-level psychology programme, but I’m also troubled myself. That’s not an actual contradictio in terminis - there are so many people out there going to study psychology even at the university level solely cause they want to understand their own psychological problems -, but it is a contradictio in terminis for me, cause really, for me, they’re completely incompatible and, for the most part, completely separate, with one major exception: sometimes, the “intellectual applied psychology college freshman” remembers the “behaviourally disturbed client”. Hell, how could I not have remembered my major temper tantrum - in a lot of ways, comparable to that of August 17 - yesterday? How can I feel that I can go on living life as if I’m not the confused, behaviourally troubled girl? How can I go to college on Monday and pretend I’m all fine, when really, I’m not? I’ve not been fine in all these weeks, but I thought I could make myself fine and I wanted to be fine cause, hell, I’m intelligent. And I did realize, in early October, how there’d been some things I’d done fundamentally wrong for all of these previous months, namely, thinking I could define what I was able of (ie. “realism”) without having the slightest idea of where I wanted to be. But, does it also work the other way round? In other words, if I define where I want to be, can I achieve it regardless? I’m not sure, cause I know I want to be in college, yet I still can’t always cope and I wonder which is first: the inability to cope or the confusion about my situation? In one sense, it doesn’t matter, cause I have no idea how to settle either, but in another sense, it matters, in that, if the confusion was first, that means it can go away - and there’s a good chance that it’ll go away if I make a commitment to whatever I want. Still, of course, that means I would have details filled in that I haven’t yet filled in (cause, of course, “college” is a very broad term), but at least for now I can’t be confused - what I want for this year has already been defined.
And here I am, cheering at my current education and the exciting projects in job field orientation (even though they’re really difficult) and the good thing about writing a paper for psych class (cause I love writing papers) and the exciting parts about different aspects of other classes like communication skills or orientation to Saxion’s programmes, and yet I feel I really cannot cope and I should be coping cause this is far too easy for me cause it’s not even university. And I feel confused and lonely and scared and bad for not being high-achieving enough and I can’t deal with the situation and I freak out and I feel that really I can’t be an intelligent college student cause I can’t even behave. Hmmm, if it feels like a circular argument and sounds like a circular argument and works like a circular argument, I guess it must be a circular argument. Bad thing I really don’t know how to change it.
