Cziltang's Ratlands

Spinning my wheels
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I was looking over my list of essays I'm working on and articles I'm planning to write and it occurred to me that I've wasted a lot of time this summer and fall and all of them could have been finished by now. On further reflection, its probably just as well. Almost invariably, every one of the items on my back burner is something I've gotten some recent insight on, or have expanded into something bigger. In a preface to "Of Human Bondage," W. Somerset Maugham tells the tale of how he had originally written the story that became "Of Human Bondage" when he was a young man. If I remember correctly (I can't find my copy of the book at the moment) his publisher rejected it. His point was, writing much later in his life, that with a bit of maturity and distance, the story became something much different, and considerably more complex than what he had originally written. Although I am not in any way comparing myself to Maugham, I hope that something akin to that process is occurring with my back-burner essays. Of course, it could be just that I'm intellectually lazy and don't want to expend the effort... by Cziltang
Posted: Friday, October 24 2003 09:57:46 PM

Belated tidings from the Ratlands or: Time to Bail
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As I sat down to write tonight, I noticed that it has been two weeks since I last wrote anything. That is, perhaps a measure of how unsettled things have become here in the Ratlands. It is also a measure of a creeping depression that has begun to set in. I've been through some bad times at work, but I always said that if I wake up in the morning and just can't bear the thought of going to work, I have a problem. I also said that if it got to the point of me feeling that way 3 out of 5 days in a week, I would resign and look for something else to do. I've managed to plug along for nearly two decades because below all the extraneous noise on the surface I really believe that what I do for a living is a good thing. We do make a difference. We do make things better. If we weren't in operation, things would be worse than they are. So I've kept going through difficult times and have been able to do so because I work with good people who also believe in what we are doing. I learned a long time ago not to take what individual clients do personally. I don't take credit for their successes and I don't feel responsible for their failures. We are in the business of providing opportunities and when we do it right, sometimes good things happen. Sometimes they don't. It depends on the individual client and whether or not they choose to take advantage of the opportunities. But, when we have done a good job, we have identified the most important issues and have provided the appropriate opportunities and more often than not, clients choose to make positive steps. We have now entered a period where doing a good job is becoming increasingly difficult. On the surface, things look pretty good. We have been together for quite a while. We are as much on the same page as any 8 individuals can be. We work well together. But under the surface, we are starting to fall apart. It isn't a matter of not doing a good job. My people are doing an outstanding job with the clients we have with the resources available. The problem is that they simply can't keep up the level of effort they have been expending for much longer. In the past, when we were presented with new challenges, we went looking for new resources. In general, it was stressful until we identified the available resources, got comfortable with the providers, and then the process sort of settled down into our regular routine. (I'm not sure that makes any sense. It does to me, but I'm not sure it will be clear to anyone reading it, but I don't know how else to describe it...) Now there are 4 basic areas of focus (sort of): We deal with issues of criminality. We deal with issues of substance abuse and addiction (which overlaps significantly with the criminality). We deal with the special issues of sex offenders (also an issue of criminality, but the attendant risk to the community and the necessity of specialized treatment programs put sex offenders in a class by themselves). And we deal with issues of mental illness (the clients, not the staff...). What is killing us is that increasingly, the resources necessary to successfully work with our clients just aren't out there. We don't have the funding to provide them ourselves and the community resources who would have provided them in the past are in as bad a shape financially as everyone else. So to get anything done, it takes more work, more effort, more persistence, more time, more energy. While we know what we are doing and how to do it, and manage to continue to do amazing things with our clients, my staff are getting worn down by the frustration and effort involved in getting necessary treatment and opportunities for our clients. And I don't have any answers for them. I can't fix the problem. I mostly don't seem to able to do anything helpful. So when I woke up this morning, I was miserable. I didn't want to go to work because I knew it would be more of the same. I had a really bad headache and I seriously considered calling in sick. I didn't, but it took 2 cappuccinos and an hour of feeling guilty to talk myself into showing up. This is four mornings in a row now, and I have passed the benchmark I set for when it was time to get out. I've had a draft of a generic resignation letter on my computer for several years now, but I didn't use it today. I'm not really sure why. by Cziltang
Posted: Thursday, October 23 2003 09:03:07 PM