Shit, meet fan.

Here is the part where my fuckup meets a fucked up system and all is fucked.

So it's maybe January and I'm losing it. I have two clients out of 25 with whom I'm doing what I thought of, coming in, as therapy. I'm actually supposed to see 25 or maybe it was 30 people a week, but it's another impossible clinic situation: you'd have to be double-booked at times to compensate for the fact that low-functioning clients don't come in when it's raining or when they're tired or when it's Tuesday, sometimes. On top of which I'm not getting assigned that many new clients.

I continue to live badly there. I feel nothing for the majority of my clients. I resent the fact that my coworkers (as mentioned, I think) are so terrified of cities that they make, and I mean they won't take no for an answer, they make me spend my own money to take LIRR home when I'm there after dark because the subway goes through Bed-Stuy and that is just terrifying. I'm too shell-shocked to do much but go to work and come home, certainly not in much of a state to make positive changes like bringing lunch to work, so I'm also spending my punchline of a salary on unhealthy food every day from one of the two places by work.

(One day I walked to the beach and picked up a bunch of sea rocks I still have. It took up more than my lunch hour, because the beach isn't right by work, but as an analog to my one friendly conversation with a coworker, it was the only time my surroundings in the place I worked felt anything but hostile.)

I continue to see Jake and a few similar kids and not now what to do with them and not see anything change for them. There was another kid named oh let's say Pierrot who is different, not nearly so hyper, but not very verbal, not sure why he's there in a way I'm never able to help with, and clearly pretty miserable. I play games with him because 1) this is considered a form of therapy in a way I guess is valid if you know way more what you're doing than I did. I was just playing games. 2) it passes the time and does not require me to pelt a kid with questions I am having trouble coming up with anyway and watch him look at me like (possible projection alert) "is this doing anything for either of us?" He's another one where the whole family is in treatment, by the way.

One day I get miserable enough that I talk to Murgatroid about it. If Murgatroid wrote treatment notes for supervision session, I guess she could write that I "ventilated affect" in this session, which is vaguely billable, I think. I don't remember feeling all that much better but I did one thing that got a result. I remembered hearing Slappy speak of other clinics as "Medicaid mills" and instinctively, in my session with Murgatroid, I use this phrase. "I don't feel like I'm doing anything here," I say. "I see these kids, we play a few games. I see the SPMI people for fifteen minutes because that's all they can tolerate and I bill a session. Sometimes it feels like I'm working in a Medicaid mill."

Affect ventilated, I guess.

That is the shit. Next: the fan.