More about work

 

    Hi, everyone!!! 

   I hope you everyone is doing well! I decided to write a post sharing a little bit more about my work because I haven't really talked about work very much on here. It's one of the bigger reasons I moved here to so I figured it's time to include it! 

   I work as an art therapist for a counseling center affiliated with the local hospital here in town. It's essentially a community mental health setting which is very different than what I was doing before (residential and PHP care for eating disorders). The clinic I work for also does outpatient substance use and IOP substance use care, although I don't work on the substance use team. I have dreams of starting an art therapy group for the substance use IOP once all the groups are back in person though! I think that would be really fun!

   So my job title is "Itinerant Therapist" and I got to do the "itinerant" part of that last week when I traveled out to one of the villages in our service area via bush plane. Our service area is about the size of the state of Illinois and includes 12 villages that are only accessible by bush plane. When a village has a tough week or crisis/tragedy strikes some of the therapists will travel out to the village to provide support and psychological first aid to the community. So that's what I did last week for the first time. I didn't say too much about during that post but it was an awesome experience. After the trip I was having all of these feelings that all of that schooling and hard work I did was totally worth it for moments like talking with the community members. It was an awesome feeling.  It just brought me back to why I wanted to be a therapist to begin with. And, I got to be traveling on my dad's birthday which if you know me you know is something I always try to do to honor his memory and our relationship. 

  On Friday I moved into a new office! There are multiple good things about my new space, one is that I have a closet which is perfect for storing all my art supplies. The second thing, and probably my favorite, drumroll please, is that I have a window with a view of the sea! Yay! 

       On the really clear days (not what we've been having lately) you can see the mountains across the sea. You can kind of see them in the pic above but on the clear days you can really see them, like this: (The quality of this pic isn't great but you get the idea) 

   Anyways, life in Alaska is pretty good. The homesickness has subsided, I'm learning to live with the midnight sun (helped tremendously by black out curtains lol), and now my focus is just on my building a life here and making new friends. Not easy during a pandemic but my coworkers are great. 

Until next time! 

  Veronica