Range Mental Health Services called me yesterday...wanted me to come back to work for them. I quit there a year and a half ago. They know I can't do ARMHS work anymore. (when you go into people's homes and counsel them.) They have an in-building counseling job they called to ask if I would take, if I would come back for...fuck.
Folks, I am the best counselor you'll ever meet. I am also woefully unequipped to draw any kind of a line or get any degree of separation of any kind, whatsoever. When I was a counselor, I started at 40 hour weeks, M-F, great benefits, very good money, nobody looking over my shoulder. I had about 15 clients. And then my days started sliding into 10 hours a day...clients needed more help than the 8 hour shifts would allow. Word slowly spread...new clients started asking for me by name. My client list went to 35...each client entitled to 5 hours of counseling a week. That is some severely fucked up math. I found myself working 16 hour days, seven days a week. Every cigarette I lit, my hands would shake. And it wasn't enough. I couldn't help enough, give enough, do enough, fix enough, listen enough, be enough... I would get home finally and then get up in the middle of the night to call and check on a client that was suicidal or on the verge of using.
Forget the hours, the endless technical reports for insurance companies and disability claims, the never ending phone calls, everyone needing me right now, right now, right now. No...it was the blackness. The blackness that they lived in that finally stomped me into nothing. To be steeped in human misery and know that you are the ferry man to help these people out of their treachery...to listen to the stories, one after the next...to see a mother of five stoned out of her fucking mind and her kids not yet fed and you're there to help...to be called a fucking cunt and then have them cry and say they love me, to never leave...all the stories of rape, abuse, neglect, prostitution, the extent someone will go to for their next fix, the abuse someone will put up with so they can pretend someone loves them...the blackness is what did it for me; the hands reaching out with the ever-present plea, "Help me..."
And then one day, I was driving my car and didn't know where the fuck I was anymore. I pulled over and couldn't move...and didn't even care. I sat on the couch for almost a year and stared at nothing, medicated goddamn near into unconsciousness.
And they called me yesterday to see if I would come back.
That would be a resounding "Fuck NO." I'll stick to my writing...but, thanks anyway.
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