Interning and laughing

On Thursday, I had a meeting with two of the potential supervisors for the internship I will begin next fall. The clinical director, who I had interviewed with twice, either plucked two clinicians who seemed like a good fit, or they were simply the two who showed up.

Both of them seem to be gay. Or gay-ish (which is just a way of saying "non-heterosexual"). One of them is a man who looks to be in his early 40s. The other is a woman who looks to be in her late 20s, early 30s. When you toss in the clinical director, who at my last interview asked if I watched "The L Word," everyone in the room seemed to be a bit queer. Now, this could just be my imagination; it's hard to say. But the young woman mentioned several times that she "lives with a woman," and the guy has some funny man energy and a resume that includes a long stretch of working with HIV/AIDS issues with gay men, and he talked about gay issues.

The truth, though, is that my gaydar is broken. I was talking with S2 about the possibility my License to Be Lesbian is on the verge of being revoked because my gay energy is suffering from an OPEC-like embargo of some sort. Seems the least I can do is watch a few episodes of "The L Word" to refuel. I noticed that a disk is creeping to the top of my Netflix queue. When it arrives, it will mark a passage: I have never seen the show.

Anyway.

The clinical director has, mercifully, taken herself out of the running for the role of my supervisor. She noted she would be "the supervisor of your supervisors," which is just fine by me. I'd really like to work with her, but I think there are potential transference and counter-transference issues that would exceed what I want to deal with right out of the gate.

So after talking to her a little bit this afternoon, I've decided to work with the guy as my primary supervisor. This means sitting down with him one hour each week, reviewing cases, listening to tapes of my sessions with clients and talking about the nuances of counseling work.

The young woman will be my secondary supervisor, a back-up in case my dude is unavailable. But, ultimately, all of the clinicians on the staff are said to be available for the interns to question and seek advice. There is a pretty good range of approaches being practiced by the staff, too, which means I'll have access to several perspectives for any issues that arise. It sounds like a fabulous learning environment, and I'm excited to start doing that.

I only have to wait four months.....

In the meantime, I begin my practicum in a student counseling center at a local community college next week. I'll be seeing real clients with real issues, but it will be highly supervised and will only last for about three months (where my internship is nine or 10 months). In the practicum, there will be a video camera trained on me at all time with a live feed that's being recorded. This allows for supervision (someone can monitor me without actually being in the room) and for me to observe myself afterward.

So things are about to take a dramatic turn in my education. And thank the heavens.

For the past two years, I've been reading and reading and reading. I've been researching and discussing and proposing and theorizing. I've been practicing and role-playing. But I haven't been doing.

Something that makes me a little batty -- and heaven knows, it makes my *friends* crazy in my presence -- is that all the reading and whatnot has been taken by me as massive doses of internal upheaval and reconsideration. I thought I knew myself pretty damn well before this program started, but I have learned more than I ever expected. I have done this by seriously digesting what I've been reading and constantly assessing what it means in light of the psychological subject with whom I am most familiar: myself.

This was not unforeseen in theory, but the practice of it has been a considerably more intense and gut-wrenching experience than I anticipated. In the process, XGF and I broke up, and my life began writing itself anew in many respects.

I'm sure something else will come along and get my goat at some point -- perhaps when I start developing the project on grief and loss that I'm interested in doing next year. But I suspect that much of my personal upheaval is done.

Now, I'm moving into the realm of working with others. I am a person with a lot of compassion and some amount of empathy -- hopefully I'm learning to develop the latter more -- but I have never been someone who lets other people's problems consume me. In other words, I may have some empathy, but I certainly don't have too much of it. One thing in which I have faith is my ability to keep a good boundary between me and my clients.

What stands as a larger concern for me is my ability to connect. I've learned a good bit about myself recently in terms of connection, in terms of attachment. (THAT is what my shrink said, by the way, XGF. He said my situation is a good example of how same-sex relationships might have a complex attachment issue (deficiency) that is related to social stigma and considerably less common in heterosexual couples.)

Some of the changes I've been experiencing lately -- this coming out on The Other Side (The Far Side) of the transformation incited by graduate school -- give me a great deal of hope around the prospect of connecting with clients. Nevertheless, it is an uproven assumption that my personal reconstruction will make things better, so I'm both excited and nervous about testing it on real people with real problems.

...

Speaking of untested material, I saw comedian George Carlin perform tonight. He was one of my favoriter performers when I was a kid, and I listened to his LPs repeaedly as I grew up. So tonight, I went to see him with King Rex, and the evening was pretty special. Carlin was dishing out all-new material -- so new that he was still reading cues from the printout of his material at times, as he hasn't quite memorized the whole thing and is in the process of revising it.

The new material is fabulous, classic Carlin. Lots of keen observations on American culture, lots of wonderful discursive-sounding monlogue. I laughed my ass off at times. King Rex said it was "a religious experience" to see his childhood comedic hero performing live. I'm just hoping I'll remembr a few good jokes, especially those he told around death and the stupid things people say ("I think he's up there smiling down at us"). Really great stuff.

But now, I am exhausted. I have been up since 5:45 this morning, and I'm WIPED out. Nighty-night, friends.