C is The Clinic

April 18, 2010 leslie A to Z Life Lessons

I sat in the parking lot, looking at my new job’s office. Before becoming a county mental health clinic, it had obviously once been something retail because the front had two display windows on either side of the glass front door, now covered with matching bland curtains hanging limply in the bright summer’s morning glare. This was it. My first real position out of graduate school where I had a title, my own office (albeit, without a window and ceiling water stain from a broken pipe), business cards and unmet co-workers and clients.

This was what I had left a previous career as a photojournalist to do. I had left a secure job in a postcard-pretty mountain resort town with four charming seasons, had buried myself in GRE books to scrounge up enough points to squeak into graduate school, and once in the graduate program, I had worked several day jobs in order to attend my master’s classes every night until 10. The past two years were a blur of semesters where I had attempted to stuff knowledge into my brain while pinging from the library, to my day photo lab job, to my home to study more, and then wake up in order to do it all over again. My sizable student loans payments were going to kick in that month and what I had envisioned for myself as a new career in helping others was unfolding right in front of me outside my windshield. Now all I needed to do was get up out of the car.

I rested my head against my knuckles that were gripping the steering wheel. Take deep breaths, I told myself. You can do this. They want you to succeed, I thought, a mental trick I had learned to repeat to myself as a way to ease into any situation I felt was pulling me away from known safety zones. Which oddly, was pinging from classrooms, libraries, troll-like photo darkrooms and back to my little track house stuck out in a Johnson grass patch surrounded by cornfields.

“Get a grip,” I told myself grimly, swinging the door open and letting in the 90-degree heat that was already radiating around me, all the while breathing in and out my mantra – they want me to succeed. I pushed open the heavy glass door and a rush of musty damp cool from the foyer met me and went in to talk with the director, now my new boss.

All the front offices had a dull, dark-brown paneling which tended to blend in with the greenish-gray carpet. The nap was so thin you could barely feel the cushion as you walked. A heavy-set secretary looked up from her window, an orchid of color and plumy perfume, and gave me a bright smile. She told me the director, Paul (all names have been changed), was waiting for me in his office. I wound my way down the hall, peering into the rooms as I went by. I remember thinking that when I had come for the interview I hadn’t noticed the stacks of manila folders containing client charts that poked out from filing rooms, covered desks and nestled on the floor near people’s chairs. Now I considered them anew, seeing that each folder represented one person’s life story and their willingness to come to this clinic in the hope for a bit of hope.

Turning the corner, I came to Paul’s office, and it was as though I had burrowed deep into an ant hill’s inner-sanctum and found the queen ant, startled,  churning out eggs, but in this case it was triplicate chaos. This was the mother-lode of charts; piles of papers hanging on to each other by the thinnest of paper clips, threatening to tremble to the floor like 8X11 fall leaves.

Paul stood up to greet me, almost knocking his coffee cup into the trash can.

“Hi! Glad you’re here! Have a seat and let’s talk about getting you started,” he said, gesturing to an old wooden chair that squeaked with protest when I sat down. At that point, I felt my fear unhitch in my chest by the tiniest of bands. My mantra began to migrate from, “They want me to succeed,” to, “They need for me to succeed.”

clinic, first job, mental health clinic