Stress, Life, and Burn out

Do you ever wonder if you were meant to do what you think you were meant to do? Or does this even make sense? When I was in elementary school I met a friend named Sara. Sara was an animal lover. We used to play veterinarian and cut open our stuffed animals and restitch them together. We planned to have our clinic when we grew up and call it "S & R Veterinarian Services." We used to gallop around Sara's back yard, jumping over benches, and along with our veterinarian service planned to run a boarding and breeding facility for a variety of horse breeds. I see now that we would have been very busy people, but probably pretty happy with our horsey lives. I remember visiting the CSU Veterinarian School with my mom and Sara when I was in 5th grade and I knew at that moment I wanted to be a vet. So, here I am today, a pediatric occupational therapist (OT). That makes sense... right?

Somewhere along the line I went off track. In undergraduate school at CSU, I started out as an Equine Science major on track for vet school and somewhere along the way I got scared. What if I didn't make it? I could barely pass Basic Chemistry and I am not really science minded... how the heck would I make it through a DVM program? So, I abruptly switched to psychology and started volunteering in therapeutic horseback riding programs where I was introduced to OT.

I became an OT thinking that I would go into hippotherapy (basically this is OT done with people on horseback). Yet, since I left school I have worked in a hospital, a school, lectured about therapeutic horseback riding, worked home health, and worked in a clinic. I like my current jobs but they are not my passion and with each new job, after different amounts of time, I get burnt out. Now, I am burnt out.

I think our household is burnt out right now. My husband has been working his butt off at school, barely sleeping or doing anything but school work, school and work. In fact I am not sure I would recognize him without a computer in front of him these days. He works so hard and I can see him getting burnt out. Luckily, he has summer session coming up, and I am hopeful he will have a little more time to relax and decompress.

I, on the other hand, am SO burnt out. I seem to be in a place in my career where either I don't have anything to do all week or I am working until 8pm every night and waking up exhausted in the morning. The problem is those weeks where I have nothing to do equal weeks with no pay.

I spent today reading an article about OT and Burn Out. It is true that as a health care provider of any kind you have to have the skills to be separate from your job and leave work behind. But how do you leave children and families behind when you know they are struggling? The article also said to carve out time for yourself. Sure, I do that, on days I am sick I catch up on my sleep. Or at 9:00 pm when I have returned home from work at the clinic, make dinner, clean up, and am crawling into bed, I take 5 minutes for myself. I close my eyes and think "damn, I am tired." I think overall I am just tired of working 9 hour days or zero hour days. I am ready for consistency. But, each time this happens I wonder if I am doing the right thing, am I in the right career, maybe I should have been a vet after all, or maybe I need to pursue something I am more interested in.

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of opportunities out there waiting for everyone, even me. But how do we pick the right choice, the right path? It is much the same in taking care of our health as it is in our daily lives. The path you chose will eventually have a fork in the road, and if it doesn't, then sometimes you have to pick up a shovel and start making your own road. And sometimes we build a road, up a very steep hill, simply to find we meant to stay on the road we left 10 years ago. It may take a while to get back on track, but in the end, roads and paths are what life is all about.