Friday 27 November 2015

Procrastination and graduation

Hi folks,

Been a while since I have put anything up on here. Partly due to an awful lot happening but mainly down to my spectacular ability to procrastinate. This in itself got me thinking about why I have the ability to anything else, and I mean anything, apart from the thing I either need to do or have promised myself I would do, for example this blog!

I love to write, I keep a diary of things when they bother me and I work through a great deal of my own stuff by writing it down. In reality when I don't understand why I'm feeling what I feel or I have something that really upsets me I write down whatever flows through my pen. It some how helps me order my thoughts and sometimes changes how I am feeling, lets me be more rational as if I have got rid of the unhelpful bits floating around my head.

No one ever sees it, it is no one else's business. More often then not I will destroy what I have written ( that in itself can be a weird realise for me, like I've killed off the negative stuff.  When things have really bothered me I have been known to burn bits in the garden fire pit).

If this is the case why do I struggle so much with getting down to producing essays and things that people will see. Well that's all a part of my spectacularly avoidant personality. I am very conscious of others reading things that I have written, that comes from a number of things I think but I suspect it's my worry about being unmasked as a bit stupid really.

In my head I can talk a good game, waffle on sounding plausible for Great Britain, but actually committing something to text to be read by another human leaves no where for me to hide what I perceive as my lack of knowledge in either the subject of the piece or the English language in general.

Spelling and grammar has always been a thing for me and anyone who knows me even a little bit will tell you at one time or another I will have been quite defensive about it. Usually by way of a slightly dodgy joke or quoting how long the English language had been around before someone decided we needed rules. You will have noticed on my first post I mention this quite quickly, almost excusing it or giving you advanced warning not to expect anything else. I do this with clients and groups as well, which I am not proud of really. I would be (have been) mortally embarrassed if someone corrected me in public so I get in first.

So I avoid thinking about it, avoid doing anything that I know people will see and if people do see it and have to comment on it I will avoid looking at it until I absolutely have too. My Dipolma essay results I would look at the mark to check I had passed and then go back a number of weeks later in some cases to read the feed back, when I felt able to deal with the inevitable comment about the spelling and grammar. Sounds daft doesn't it and in truth I know that not being able to handle all the rules of language does not make me stupid.

So there you go after a great deal of procrastination I do get there and this blog may well be my therapy for dealing with the defensive behaviour around it (hmmmm suspect not but we can hope). It's all a bit self indulgent but I hope someone seeing a fellow spelling struggler doing ok really might be helpful. I aim for this to be the end of my blog procrastinating!!!

So now what I actually wanted to talk about (ok you got me I really mean show off about 😉). I graduated on 31st October 2015 with my SCOTAS Diploma in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Groupwork. Obviously I've known for a a while that I qualified and have been working as a CBT therapist for a number of months now but this was the official day, the official ending!

Its a powerful thing that ending, marking the change and the achievements. Emotional in many ways, not believing that we would ever get to the end, new friendships and bonds that in a lot of cases I think will last a lifetime and family being there to see all this. There were people missing from that family that made it even more emotive for me but I know they all would have been proud that day which makes me smile too. Always good to mark an ending.

Right that's the end of my ramblings for the moment. Thanks for reading!

Nadine

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