Work

I finally have a job, and it's not at Starbucks. Lo and behold, after many years circling the airport of promise, I have finally touched down on the glorious runway of stability, and am now disembarking the aircraft of anticipation bleary-eyed through the customs line of confusion into the baggage collection area of some other metaphor and into the lobby of social work.

After 8 long months of unemployment facing multiple barriers as an immigrant with no local knowledge and unrelated overseas qualifications, I was beginning to think nothing would turn up and that I would have to take a lousy rent-paying job by pretending to be Italian and selling hand treatment lotions at the mall.

I must say that unemployment certainly gave me a lot to think about. Similarly to Kristy's experience with unemployment in the UK, I lost self-definition. It was difficult to have conversations with people without a work-based point of reference. Think about it when you next meet somebody new and see how long you can carry off a conversation without saying what you do or talking about your work. It really became easier not to meet people and not to talk.
I also gained a lot empathy for people who do not work. As a culture, we assign so much value to employment, which is fine, but we also treat people who do not work as valueless, which is wrong. But even in understanding this, it is difficult to redefine your own sense of self-worth and value aside from work, which makes me think we have somewhat lost our identity as people and replaced it with things we do. Who am I aside from my work? It's a difficult question to answer.

Fortunately, it is a question I will have much opportunity to think about thanks to the field of social work in which I have landed. I am working for the Mental Health Association with people who have mostly been diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizo-affective conditions at an institution. Most of them do not work, and most are now both externally and self-defined by their illness. In the past few weeks since I began working there, however, I have been very privileged to get to know these people as people, not as schizophrenics or mentally ill people as I had previously stigmatized them. I will be working with them to support them in their relationships with the professionals who are serving them, and also in overcoming stigma and the effects of symptoms in achieving goals they have for their own lives.

It is incredibly challenging and humbling, but very exciting. I love working with people to help them to make their lives better, especially when those people are from groups on the margins of society, so it is a perfect place for me to be. I think we will be giving a lot to each other in our work together.

Also, like everybody does at the Oscars, I want to thank God - he keeps pushing the message that he is sorting things out in the big picture and that I just need to work hard in the places he prepares for me. It is interesting looking back to see how it has constantly happened in my work - in Japan I ended up getting my first taste of social work when I was offered a counseling role that I didn't even know existed (supplementary to the role I was hired for) in the taxi after I arrived at the airport. It wasn't something I anticipated or could have organized. Then when I went to the UK I did a huge amount of work sending out resumes and job hunting, but ended up in another counseling role completely by chance after dropping into a random job fair Kristy and I happened to walk past one day. And now again, completely without regard to all of the research, applications, interviewing and everything I did to look for work here, I was offered the position out of the blue by somebody I met at another job fair without having formally applied for it. It's like, no matter how much work I do in trying to build a career path, it's all just closed doors except for the one that God opens in a direction in which I wasn't even looking. Perhaps he just has a sense of humor about it. I am grateful regardless.

Anyway, this is the first time I will be working with a view to a long-term commitment, so it's going to be great to really see what I can achieve as every time I have begun to see results in the past I've had to move on. Also, I'm applying to do a Masters in Social Work later this year at Fordham University, which I'm hoping will give me the local qualifications and knowledge to propel me further forward in this career. It will be interesting to see if God has the same plans.