TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF!

It's August! Where did July go?!

I've found that my last few weeks have been a bit rough. I was starting to feel pretty overwhelmed, exhausted, and I wasn't enjoying my time at work or in this corner of the province nearly as much as I had when I started. I was feeling pretty run down.

The other day I started working through this workbook on compassion fatigue that Karen sent me a few weeks ago. Compassion fatigue is (from what I understand) an exhaustion of your ability to feel empathy, similar in symptoms to burn out, PTSD and vicarious trauma. People who work in the "helping profession" are fairly prone to it. I found it really useful to start reading about it, because it gave me a framework to better understand why I might be feeling overwhelmed. 

Thinking about it objectively, I think it's super normal to feel exhausted. A bunch of stressful things were coinciding (still are coinciding!). I feel really good about starting to recognize it though. At Kim's suggestion I bought a sketchbook and some pencil crayons to do some colour sketching and I already feel better. 

MORAL OF THE STORY? 

This profession is stressful. Working with people who come to you because they're in a dilly of a pickle is stressful.  Being a student is stressful. Trying to figure out what you want to do with your career is stressful. Thinking about how you can explain why you're interested in insolvency law in an interview when you're not actually sure what it is is stressful.

And yet we're not really taught how to manage it, or even to take self care seriously. So here's a question for you:

WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF TODAY?