⭐Musings⭐

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Writing a piece on the current science around dreams. Doing some field research.

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08/12/2025 Ramblings about Work

The first step may just be writing, and not really worrying about what comes out. Spelling mistakes? Who cares. The main thing is that you write, which is the difficult part, cause I don't really know where to start.

So, this is a letter, kinda, to past-future me. I only have a few days left at my current workplace. The first job I got after university, really the first job I got after sluggin' it in fastfood. I have a lot of mixed feelings, about both the nature of work in general, and the work specifically I do. The specific is perhaps the more interesting thing to write on. I'm a technocrat of sorts, or maybe an "atheistic" theologian. I staff the modern-day confessional, as a sin-eater, a counsellor, a therapist - if you will.

Within the duration of my now 1-year stint at this role, I've had the honour of meeting a large number of people, and bared witness to a number of great tragedies, and amazing shifts, but mainly suffering in all its forms. - Therapy is one of the few places where people make space to suffer, for an hour at a time, free from judgement. It's also a space where people look to for guidance and healing; I don't have any particular words to heal, to balm maybe, and to soothe... But words alone aren't typically potent enough. Maybe, if we just talk enough, it might undo the knot we're stuck on.

There are thousands of theories to draw on, and a couple centuries of research about the "talking cure" or therapy, - scant of which was actually the focus of my education, consequently I've often felt like an imposter, researching as I go. - Fearing that I have secretly, without trying, deceived all my co-workers and management alike, and that one day I'll be found to be a fraud. In attempting to battle this empty theology, and imposter-anxiety, I turn to the technologies and typologies, that outline, systematise and structure suffering, with the hopes that this will in-turn, structure and systematise healing for those in front of me.

However, I remain uncertain, lacking a general theory, or a trans-theoretical reason for why I do, what it is I do. - I must resist the urge to become chiefly technocratic; to squash all the little jagged bits of people and their problems into a box, the latest label or new bit of technology. To reduce healing to a mechanical art, or a sting of fast-fashion buzzwords. - Which healing simply isn't. But I also mustn't overvalue the role I play. - A large learning of this year has been just as much about me, as it's been about my absence. - That is, how absence or space in itself can be healing.

It dawned on me, about how the clinic and its rooms are just as important to therapy, as the curtains are to a play, or the frame to a painting; although often invisible in its re-telling, or completely different in its re-production; The painting or the play would struggle instability without the context that encapsulates it (although the post-modernist movement challenges this in theory, art and therapy alike). The amount of work the room and the space does is difficult to quantify, and likely difficult to understate. With space and time, most things heal. In a space free from judgement, designed in someway to put you at ease, and to partition the processing of suffering from everyday life, to instead take place in a private room . The main reason for this is the sensitivity and privacy that people typically exhibit around their pains, that it is in fact easier to open up in a space outside of your day-to-day work; But also perhaps some part of it is for the comfort of society, to see suffering as a primarily private task, divorced from day-to-day life.

Perhaps you can tell by my tone that I'm not really sure about my job, and about its fit for me. In fact I sound kind of uncertain about everything - and that might be my natural state. I enjoy it, I find it to be noble and brain-stretching, and I want to help people. But I'm always walking that balance of technocrat theologian and sin-eater, at a time when the world isn't getting any less cruel (when is it ever?).