A long, long time ago, I can still remember.

Some of the finest therapists around way back in '08: Michelle, Chelsea, Cassandra, Rosemary, Jessie, Jess,
Julie, Kira, Tony, Liz, Lindsay, Pete, and Vijay. 

With the big job switcheroo turning my world upside-down these days, I've found myself digging through archives of meticulously organized and labeled three-ring binders (thank you again, former Chelsea, for your attention to detail) to find notes on the MMPI-2 validity scales and the Mini Mental State exam and evidence-based play therapy exercises and assigning GAF scores and differential diagnoses and... so on and so forth. And I've stumbled upon some of the most detailed and descriptive notes I've ever read from when my cohort did Yalom group therapy on ourselves (a practice with questionable ethics indeed). And frantic scribbled notes from comps time. And doodles and notes between myself and others in the cohort about what color tie our stats prof would wear that day, and when would this lecture ever end, and ceilings on IQ tests.

It's funny how life goes sometimes. I was so in it during the three years it took to get the degree in clinical psych. We all were. My cohort was really big, and we had our issues, and in the end it wasn't all rainbows and unicorns but we were all wiser and ready for what was next. For some of us, it was psychotherapy (in the therapist role), for some of us it was more school and then on to various things.

I pretty much went straight from graduation to moving across the country, and didn't really stop doing and going and rushing to the next thing. School, Evelyn, school, internship, Gideon, internship, job, dissertation, graduation, job, stop for a minute and breathe and... here I am.

Slower.

Not so frantic.

Here I am, still loving assessment. Here I am, connecting with kids in therapy. Here I am, remembering diagnostic criteria that I didn't even know I'd encoded in the ocean of information I somehow ingested over the past 8 years.

I know it'll be hard, and the sparkle of something new will wear off. But it feels so good, and so right, and I'm just enjoying that right now.

"Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. " - Theodore Roosevelt