Frustrated Writer

So, to blog

I’ve been a few things in my professional life. A potential Anglican priest, an R.E. teacher, a psychiatric nurse and a counsellor. In that order. Although each part fed into the other. I’ll talk more about them in due time. But I guess what unites them is a wish to explore. And to explore the inner world rather than the physical one. Much as I’m fascinated by David Attenborough I have no desire to hug a great ape nor seek out the creatures that live under the ice in the Arctic. I like my own bed at night and a fixed roof over my head.

My career reflects my own journeying and travels – in the inner world. Or more accurately, my various attempts at finding a definition of and for myself in my inner world. Am I a priest, representing God to His people and vice versa? At the time the church decided unequivocally that this was not going go be my future. It was the right decision although every now and again that small part of me pops up and says “You’d enjoy this part of a priest’s job.” And so I might. But not all day, every day! Nor would any congregation. I might have been able to preach a fair sermon, But the Mother’s Union tea was never going to be my favourite parish activity.

Teaching was, eventually, a good choice. Even if it took some 30 years to mature. Teaching was a fall back position from not being accepted for ordination. I did sundry other things between one and the other. And did quite a bit of exploring in my inner world along the way. Including three years in a fundamentalist’s fundamentalist Christian community. (But that’s in the future. You’ll just have to wait. I did and look what happened to me!)

And the end I found psychiatric nursing and I finally “came home”. I discovered psychiatry. The soul. The psyche. I was hooked. Fascinated. I wanted to know all about this strange new world of the mind. Which leads to psychoanalysis. An abiding passion. It also took me into university lecturing where, like psychotherapy, I discovered I was good at it. I enjoyed seeing student nurses grow and learn. Become today’s nurses. (Although it also made me into a very critical patient! But that was always likely to happen!)

I’m now effectively retired. Time to sit and write my memoirs. It’s a challenge I’m excited by – which has surprised me. I sat down to blog simply as a time filler whilst I can’t get to the gym or do the garden. (Temporary states I hope.) Tolkien called Lord of the Rings “a tale that grew in the telling.” And as someone else put it in a toast “If it’s half as good as the half we’ve known, here’s hail to the rest of the way.”

Cheers!!