doin' da paperwork
Nobody, that I know of, likes doing paperwork. No, I take that back, my mother does. She spent tax season putting her number-crunching skills to work at H&R Block. But most people I know don't like it, especially those of us in the "helping professions" because we would like to be spending all of our valuable time helping people (as I am clearly doing at this moment).
But I am currently having an intriguing problem completing my paperwork here at my internship site - a residential facility for youth adjudicated for criminal acts. I'm attempting to fill out an "intake report" for one of my unit's most recently acquired residents. I seem to be able to only sit and write one sentence at a time before needing to get up and leave my office or surf the internet. I think the problem is that the sentences I have to write are so painful, I can't really handle the fact that I'm writing what I'm writing. For example, "Bob's (not his real name) father is deceased; he was murdered in 1994." Or this, "Bob's life has been marked by several traumas, including witnessing one relatve stab another to death in 1997." If I can't handle writing this stuff, I wonder how these children can manage (or perhaps not manage, as their residence at this facility might indicate) living it.
This leads me to at least one conclusion: it's a good thing that I'm planning to become a social scientist, rather than a social worker. Don't get me wrong, social workers are great. Many I know are fantastic, at that. I've been having a lot of fun "playing" one this summer. But I think my psyche is far better suited for handling this material when it is "data" vs. the facts of someone's life for whom I am somehow directly responsible. Maybe I'm just too soft*, as my young charges would have it.
*- the term "soft" denotes, in slang, the condition of being a chicken shit, for those of us not quite caught up on the young people's lingo