I just met with Suzi, one of my coworkers here at The Army, and it made me feel decently better. I was kind of concerned going into it; Suzi tends to be pretty harsh when someone isn't following through on what she says she'll do. So I was a little nervous, wondering if she was going to be on my about my follow-through with my clients, etc. But it went well. She just wanted to touch base, find out more about what my clients are doing and working on, because she or someone else here will be taking over their case in a few weeks when I am gone.
Suzi apologized for how I've basically "fallen through the cracks" here at practicum. We talked about it, how it really does suck that none of us here have any real supervisor these days. I've been feeling it a lot lately, just the fact that I haven't had much for supervision in any aspect of my life recently. I've hardly met with Maria Teresa at all this semester; I haven't had Theresa here at SA since the end of February; and Barb has cancelled class (both of them that I have with her) as often as she's held it the past few months. It all really leaves me feeling at a loss for how to direct things. So I feel proud for what I do accomplish, but I don't always know where I should be going. And I guess that until more recently, I didn't even realize how much I was feeling that lack of supervision.
I did let a few tears out in Suzi's office, which I'm sure were not connected at all to the fact that I've had about seven hours of sleep in the past two days. And combined with the fact that I've hardly been eating, let along eating healthy. It's enough to throw my entire being out of whack. But on a positive note from all this non-sleep, I got everything for my practicum write-ups turned in on time to Barb yesterday, and then I spent last night making them into a poster. And my poster looks really good, let me say. It's blue and green and yellow- all ready for Earth Day! ;)
Suzi made me feel better by reassuring me that everyone makes mistakes, and that's what this learning process is all about. She didn't make me feel bad for not always knowing the right thing to do. And maybe I'd been expecting that a little bit, I don't know. She also let me do some advocating for my clients, and recognized that at the rate things are going, we're setting them up to fail in a few aspects of the program. So we talked about how to fix that, and it felt really good. Really full of social worky goodness. :)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
