Why I am "working for the weekend"

Today I was sitting at work after my last client left feeling so frustrated! It's a frustrating case in many ways (that I won't elaborate on here), and I had just gotten an annoying email from my supervisor. The client I had scheduled after that had cancelled, so I spent the next hour combing through job search engines (probably not what they pay me for).

Ever since I moved to the Chicago suburbs, I have worked at the same mental health agency. I took the job with the idea that it would just be a starting point, that I would work there for awhile and hopefully launch into something "better". So I have been job hunting with various degrees of causalness and seriousness over the past nearly two years. I have sent my resume via email to more places than I can count, and multiple other times through websites like Careerbuilder.com. So many places that have never called or emailed back. My credentials and experience seem to be floating around endlessly in cyberspace. I even started going old fashioned and mailing out hard copies of my resume, with the same results. Over the past two years, I have been lucky enough to have had five job interviews (six if you count a phone interview), only one of which lead to a follow up, which unfortunately, due to the economy, they could only offer part time employment.

I think of all the reasons I want to leave my current job: the hours, the on-call, my supervisor and her passive-aggressive micro-managing, the ever-changing and increasing demands of the state on how we document our work, the ever increasing paperwork and likewise increasing limits on services we can provide. Stress. Ugh!

Then I think of what I do like, mainly...the clients. Not all of them, but many of them, most of them, even the ones that tend to be "pains" (clinical term) I typically can find something about them to like. I think of the ones I have helped, the ones who have made progress, the ones who I feel have really let me into their lives and developed a good working therapeutic relationship, the ones I have felt privileged to help, the ones who are so young, going through so much, and pushing on.

I try to think that there's some bigger reason why I am still there, something in God's plan...maybe it's the clients I am still working with, or future ones I have yet to meet. It's the only way to keep myself hopeful and not get burned out.

Meanwhile though I just wait for Friday to come...