I will trust it's not the end, but a great beginning.

This is my very last weekend on-call with my job. YAAAY!!! It hasn't been so bad this weekend. I only had one face to face check, a few phone checks, and no crisis' s so far.  Then again, nothing seems as bad since I was on-call for Christmas this pas year. I worked all day Christmas Eve and all day the Monday after Christmas. The Monday after Christmas I actually was out on a crisis call until 4:30 am (those were dark days in my life). If you know anyone in the social work field and they have to be on call daily or on weekends, you need to be sure to give them a hug every time you see them. Trust me, they need it.

These next few weeks are going to be a blur. My best friend in the whole world is getting married next weekend, then I will attend another friend's wedding the next weekend, and then the last weekend in July I will be taking my happy/ unemployed butt to the beach with my WONDERFUL friends for a FULL WEEK! I cannot tell you how excited I am about this trip. It's going to be nothing but sand, sun, ocean, and fantastic company.

And yes, to those who caught on, I will be unemployed by the end of the month. I'm leaving my current job due to the amount of hours I have to work. I'll be starting school in the fall as a full time student in School Counseling at Lee University to hopefully speed up the graduating process. I started this past semester at Lee as a Mental Health Counseling student. After working in the mental health field for 1 year, I knew that mental health was not my calling. I'm pretty sure if I had stuck with mental health, I would have become a mental health patient myself. The mental health field is not easy. Sometimes dealing with people in general can be challenging, so imagine adding a mental health diagnoses on top of it. Trust me, it's quite challenging. But I learned so much by working this job this past year. As mentioned earlier, I had multiple dark days during this year. There were times when I felt so overwhelmed and stressed that I felt paralyzed in what I should do. I spent multiple nights crying myself to sleep because I could feel this weight that I was carrying for other people but the worst part was feeling alone in the process. Loneliness is one of the worse feelings and it can be a dangerous emotion. I know for me, it drove many of the decisions I made (which ended up not being good decisions). Now I know why people are terrified of being alone. But really the fear of loneliness can lead you down just as bad of a road as being lonely. 

This past year I have felt lonely and dealt with the struggles that come along with it. I can truly understand why someone would put themselves into a meaningless relationship just to prevent the feeling of being lonely. For me personally, I believe throwing myself into something meaningless would be worse than feeing lonely. I'll take loneliness over a meaningless/ superficial relationship any day. 

I'm currently trying to find a part time position somewhere. I'm not in a huge hurry to find something, I'm sure something eventually will come along.  July 30th will start a new chapter in my life. I'm curious on what will come along with the new changes I am making, but I'm opening them with open arms! I'm looking forward to the new challenges that are waiting for me :-)