We are at the waning of the year. Nights grow nippy. Dawn's ascent sends shivers up the spine. Shivering in one's bed, wrapped in quilts, makes a psychologist mighty contemplative as she lies awake, listening to what things go bump in the night.
And yet, what hath 2019 wrought?
No matter where a psychologist turns, she is confronted by the deterioration in this field. I could already speak of flatlined wages. Of everyone who believes they know my job better than I do, despite lacking license, supervision, training, or degrees. They have, however, watched "In Therapy."
The field will never come back. We have become hired hands. One cannot trust the validity of impairment questionaires completed by professionals. Extremes are circled as existing. Patients in need of benefits must be padded like Bolger's Scarecrow, lest the clinic lose their census. Regardless of how treatment is diluted, therapist are told there is "value" in what is doled out. Regardless of how little they believe what they are sold. No matter how high their standards were as they left the groves of academe, hoisting high their diplomas.
It is all corrupted. Those interested in treatment can't receive it. In NY, $150 is considered a "scholarship" fee. Few psychologists wish to treat one for that amount.
Who can afford therapy? I am weary of being asked first thing off, "What's your insurance?" I am wearier of asking what their fee is and then trying to bargain for a reduced fee. Do not ask why I called, of my incontinent reminiscences of my uncle and father, who started to die seven years ago. What is a yahrzeit to them. How these memories plague me as the sunsets. How my dybbuk dad wakes me hours before I need. What does it matter that I strive to communicate the grief that cannot be sheared like a sheep's wool. There is no amount of money I can ante to make their hole whole. Do not tell me of your student loans, for I have spent the first 10 years of my professional life paying them off. And I enter the midpoint of my life, with insufficient funds to retire. Retirement is not a concept I will ever be able to entertain. I will have to work to my end, in a field that was my dream, and has turned into a dystopic nightmare, replete with dysfunctional psychologists demanding what they believe is their due, despite all reality. Oh the devil is entrenched herein and made a hell out of heaven. And only I cannot join in the party. Always the outsider, always a Jew. Always an Ancient Mariner at the wedding.
Where am I to go? Always a marginal, never a mastermind.
Maybe I can no longer be a psychologist. Maybe I can no longer be a college professor. I have garnered no grants, published no first-rate papers in first-rate journals. Colleges that actually have standards will not glance my way. I am nothing. I do not rank among the great and there are no gradations of descent.
My first entry of 2019 was of my evening, split between the soup kitchen and the sumptuous soiree.
The coming new year will not see me swishing around, retelling all of my tale of two cities. I will be in Tel Aviv this New Year's. Perhaps I shall just remain there. There is always something I can do, since I will never be comfortable enough in Hebrew to work as a professional. There is always simple, repetitive, routine work to be had. Perhaps I should just liquidate my assets and clean other's houses. There is honor in that. One sees corruption and rot, one sprays bleach and wipes.