Buyer's Remorse

On August 9, 2019, I celebrated my 9th anniversary of recovery from active alcohol addiction. My recovery is probably one of the most important things in my life because, honestly, without it, nothing else in my life really exists. For so many years, I lived only half alive, wandering through life hoping it would end versus being curious about my next big adventure.

With my recovery, there are a few things I try to be very mindful of especially my thinking patterns and my mood. I can tell when certain things are off and I need to pay attention. Black and white thinking it a huge cue for me that things are not going particularly well. When I start to approach life with the perspective that only two ways are possible, the world becomes limited very quickly. There are things in life to me that are black and white. I cannot drink and live. That is the fact of my situation. There is no wiggle room there. I am not capable of using alcohol in any controlled way. Black and white = no drinking, I get to live; drinking, I would be working on dying.

Where I am struggling the most right now is unhelpful black and white thinking regarding my career. In the world of nursing, I struggled at times with my perceptions of my work. If a situation didn’t go well, I would often apply this one situation to my entire nursing career. When  an upset family member would ream me out, I started to think immediately (and for several weeks afterwards), I am a terrible nurse. I should just quit. Over the years, though, my nursing career has now become my part-time career. When I do the work with the transplant team, I have a reasonable sense of confidence about my abilities. I still have that shudder when things don’t go well or I missed something. I have my initial “God, I should just quit” moment for a few hours, decide that the world will move on, make a note about what to change the next time and pick up my next shift 2 weeks later. In general, I am able to rebound quickly from the immediate insecurities about not being perfect at ever aspect of my job.

In the world of counseling, I haven’t been able to get to the point where I have that reasonable sense of confidence in my abilities to do this kind of work. In general, I think I am good at what I do. I talk well with my clients and communicate well with my coworkers. I have let my temper flair at times out of passion or frustration. I advocate. I do my best to understand. I work to pull rabbits out of a hat when I am stuck trying to make things work in a very broken system. I know I have made a difference in people’s lives. I have provided education to those about what addiction is and what recovery can offer. I get good feedback at times. Yet, here I am at 12:15am on Saturday morning, wondering if being in this field is a good thing for me. Can I really be successful here?

I ran into a situation this week that got me emotionally shaken up. The distress I felt on Wednesday, Thursday and through the end of my work day Friday felt eerily like my first year in nursing when I questioned every move, every decision and wondered if I even had the capacity to do what was being requested of me. I am now five years into my career as an addictions counselor. I had noble intentions seven years ago when I decided to apply for graduate school. I had hopes and dreams about what I potentially could be able to accomplish. When I made the decision 17 years ago to return to school for nursing, I also had this naïve dream of being “super nurse” who saves the lives of others. I had a slightly more realistic perspective joining the counseling field knowing that there is only so much that I can really do. And I really felt like I could make a difference in people’s lives like I had in my nursing years with the added bonus of having some perspective going in.

Anyway, this situation caused me to lose sleep for two nights. The emotions are taking days to wind down versus hours. I wonder about continuing to stay in the field. I have had these thoughts for the past year or two about leaving the field, feeling that I had made a grave error in allowing my early recovery optimism to guide a huge educational and financial investment to move in this direction. My black and white thinking says, “be done.” My grey mind says this whole situation is much more complex than one bad day and to cautiously approach decisions about future career options. My black and white mind is really loud right now because I am still in distress and I want that feeling to go away. If I give the career a big “I am outta here”, I will have the immediate relief of doing something to change quickly to get myself feeling better fast.

What I am struggling to identify at the moment is the exact nature of my career dissatisfaction. Like any work environment, there are challenges. In general, though, the one thing that keeps me from running out the door with my hair on fire is my co-workers and the position that I work. We are a family, a pretty decently dysfunctional family, but a family nonetheless who really care about each other. I think my position is pretty unique and I won’t find anything like this again. I have even said to myself, if I leave where I currently work, I will be leaving the field. When I applied for the position, it was my dream job that I didn’t think I even had a chance at a job offer. There have been some major struggles in my time there. In the end, though, my coworkers have been there for me. I have been able to experience things over the past five years that I only would have dreamed of when I started.

Tonight, I feel unhappy with my career, not the job. I have been going back and forth between this love/hate relationship with work for a while now. I actively pursued other employment opportunities earlier this year only to stay where I am because nothing that was offered to me could touch what I have in terms of benefits, pay or atmosphere of where I am at right now. I was able to see that changing jobs wasn’t the answer. That is leaving me with whether or not leaving the career is the better answer. What I am most unhappy with is the lack of energy I have for my private life. If work went well, I can stay on top of my laundry and cleaning my home. If I have a bad few days, the rest of the week will be poor for me and my exhaustion level is so high, I will minimally put forth efforts to keep myself organized. This is no longer an issue of just self-care. Believe me when I say, I have tried to be good to myself. I go scrapbooking, I spend time with friends, I hang out with my family, I go shopping, I get my hair cut, I get a tattoo, I work on my house, I snuggle with my cats, etc. etc. I just noticed on my last scrapbooking weekend, I was only half there. I had fun and laughed a lot and I felt listless and exhausted. I found myself being excessively irritated by nothing. I found myself being more stressed out by something I truly love doing because I could not get out of grips of stress generated the week prior.

One year and 8 months into recovery, I made a decision. I made recovery my career. I cannot say with 100% certainty that I made a poor decision. I think I made a reasonable choice for where I was in my recovery and what made sense in terms of my goals at that time. What I can say today is that I have buyer’s remorse. There are things about this career that I never would have anticipated. Dealing with active addiction on a daily basis is stressful, at times sad and I see only a small portion of my encounters result in clients being able to make the changes they needed to. Addiction has cost my clients a lot in these five years. I have watched person after person go to prison. Clients have died from overdoses. They lose their children and I stand by them while their parental rights are severed because they couldn’t get sober fast enough or long enough to prove the courts they were on the right path. I have seen clients who have now succumb to permanent brain damage because of their use and the odds of recovery fall into the single digits as they live their lives on the streets or in jail. The acuity of what I see on a daily basis only seems to get worse. The future of people’s lives are dependent on getting connected to services and resources, often which are scarce. And, I can only offer, I cannot make a person change even if I am literally watching them die visit after visit.

So, I guess that is where I am at today. One big “I don’t know”. There are a lot of things to consider and I will have a lot to think about after the beginning of the year. I told myself that I will make no career based moves until after the beginning of the year. I have the next three months to write out a huge pros and cons list to make the correct move for myself. In the meanwhile, I will keep trying to stay afloat and try not to let this career consume me whole.