During a chat yesterday with a good friend I mentioned three things that have helped keep my life together and have been helping me move forward: Spanish, art, and writing this goddamn blog every day. Even when I was unwell, suffering from symptoms of complex PTSD made all the more complex by my experience of homelessness during the late nineties, Spanish, art and writing served a dual purpose: by keeping me from spiralling any further downward and by helping me actually to move forward. There was this constant and subtle meshing of learning, of being creative and of crafting and practicing that must have been doing wonders for my neuroplasticity as well as healing and reversing some of the toxic effects that trauma has had on my brain. I think this helps explain my rapid and full recovery, without meds, from complex PTSD. It has also been a constant implementation of these three disciplines that have helped propel me forward and have also stabilized my mental and emotional health.
My friend mentioned a fourth item: my occupation as a support worker and caregiver. This has always had a key place in my life, ever since I began work as a home support worker at the tender age of twenty-four, launching me into quite a series of adventures of caring for some of the most vulnerable people I had ever encountered as well as palliative care where I helped a number of terminally ill adults prepare for their final journey. Following a lengthy hiatus and a stint as a home cleaner I resumed caregiving, first as a frontline worker in a homeless shelter for about a year then in my current occupation where I have worked for twelve years as a mental health peer support worker.
My choice of occupation is multi-pronged:
1. I decided at an early age that I was not going to work at a soul destroying occupation where the only value was keeping my sorry ass alive another day. This meant ditching anything and everything that I had been taught about work ethic. It also placed me at a particular disadvantage because I could neither afford university nor occupational training, given that I was living always half a paycheque from the street. So I took what I could get, always low paying work, with poor and unsafe working conditions and no hope of advancement.
2. As an outgrowth of my Christian faith I felt a strong call into the helping professions, regardless of the aforementioned obstacles.
3. As a single man living alone, working in caregiving is a great way to hold in check the inevitable self-centredness that afflicts people like me.
4. This kind of work is the most humanizing I have ever done. It integrates beautifully with my other life disciplines making my life full and complete.
There is of course fifth pillar to my life. It involves my Christian faith, but especially the quality of this faith. This is not simply something auxiliary to my life, it is the hub, the axis, the working centre of who I am. This has actually less to do with reading the Bible twice a day and much more to do with my lengthy experience of the nearness and intimacy of God's presence.
So I am blessed with these five pillars: art, writing, Spanish language, caregiving, but most of all, the living presence of God through Jesus Christ in my life. These practices daily integrate in fresh and new ways to help form me into the person that God has destined me to be.
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