Getting my wild back.

If you have followed my career since I graduated with my Masters a whopping four and a half years ago, from the outside it looks erratic, chaotic, and restless, and you wouldn’t be completely wrong. I’ve worked community mental health, private practice, outdoor ed, equine therapy, hung out for a year and half at a fire department then became an EMT (then a wilderness EMT), almost joined the military, left an organization I never thought I would, worked mobile crisis in a police station, started a non-profit and I am currently a MFLC at an Airforce base. I’ve questioned and doubted myself more times than I can count. If you look at that, you probably see someone who can’t make up their mind or makes emotional choices. But please let me tell you what has really been happening. I envisioned getting my Master’s, starting my career and my happily ever after would fall in place after that. Now, looking back, I had to realize and accept key pieces of my personality. Looking back, I was trying to make myself fit into boxes that I was never made to fit into. I think I started to realize it 2-3 years in, but kept telling myself “this is what it’s supposed to look like, you finished school, you got the job, you should be happy,” but there was always some kind of inner nagging. What I’ve realized after a few years of doing this? The hardest part was realizing that I lost “my wild,” I feel in a way I became soft, I lost some of my edge, my sense of adventure, there was intensity that was missing in my life. There is a lot more I realized, but that’s another post. I am not the kind of girl to sit in an office all day behind a desk, and as incredible as therapy can be ( I still plan on doing it in my own way), I know in the future, it’s time to reclaim those pieces of me. So, I’m stepping out of the box, not as soon as I want, but soon enough. There is one piece of therapy that I loved doing and plan to continue in the future, and that is short term therapy following critical incidents. Everything else is taking a lot of what I’ve learned and experienced and bringing it all together, so this last move will hopefully be my last one for a long time, creating the flexibility, creativeness, longevity and ingenuity that I need for myself. I’m taking my wild back.