September Update

I have recently discovered that, from time to time, fate intervenes even in the blogosphere and people will eventually find (and possibly even read) your blogs.

With that having been said I've decided to give it a shot for the month of September seeings as there's only approximately 24 hours left before October. So without any further adieu, I give you........ SEPTEMBER UPDATE!!! (not a very grand title I know but be glad you're getting anything)

Since my last post there's been a lot of things going on in my life. My dream of performing in the Russian ballet fell through on the heels of a bad night with a leotard and a liter of Stoli so I decided it best that I look for something slightly more befitting of a 23 year-old in the midst of a quarter-life identity crisis. After searching for jobs for the better part of the summer, something happened that I certainly didn't forsee: I was hired.

I suppose it wasn't so much the fact that I was hired that surprised me but the position that I was hired to fill. It was a position as a teacher's aide in a school for children with behavioral/mental disorders. To clarify, this does not mean that I work in Special Education. In fact, it's almost the opposite. The students come primarily from broken homes where substance abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and crime are all common to daily life. To say the least, these young people need as much support and guidance as they can possibly receive.

The reason why it was so much of a shock to me that I was being hired for this job wasn't only that it would be a great opportunity for me to try my luck out in an educational setting, but also because only a month before all this I had come to the decision that I wanted to try and get into guidance counseling. Now I've always been fairly skeptical of "signs" and "fate" but the mere fact that I had been called in for an interview with this type of school got me thinking that there might be more to this idea of getting into counseling than I had thought.

Now, three weeks into the school year I can already see positive signs that this could turn into something much bigger for me. Coming home happy, not being anxious to leave work right at three, or spending my free time at home thinking about different ways to make the classes more fun and interesting to the students: these types of things don't take a rocket scientist's analysis to determine that I'm clearly happy there. Now I know that I've only been there for the better part of three weeks and that anything can happen, but at the same time, when I was unemployed and looking for work, anything COULD have happened, but not just anything happened: SOMETHING happened, and it's "something" that was exactly what I was looking for all along. To quote President Obama, I get to be the change I wish to see in the world, and if anyone believes that there's something better out there than that, then I'd like to introduce you to some of the kids I work with, or the kids that the people of United Way work with, or the kids that the people of Make-A-Wish work with, or the kids that the people of Roswell Park work with... then we'll talk.