Foolish Naivety.

Looking back there is some thought provoking conjecture and disagreement on when my mental health career began. Was it that morning of 16th June 1990 when staggering hungover and tired across Old Court at my college I picked up a letter that sent me headlong into psychiatric meltdown? That blisteringly hot day the following summer when I first saw the mental health team? Or when I heard a steel door slam shut in the Victorian Asylum where then send me for a "rest" just before my 22nd birthday? When I received a call on a cold November day asking if I wanted to attend a day hospital? The special hospital in London where they sent all the untreatables in 1994? Getting my first job at South Kent College as an overly qualified but unemployable teacher to provide learning support to students on my old programme for mentally ill people? Or going to work for Kent Social Services and the "enemy" as a Community Support Worker in the autumn of 2002?

Many starting points there and a myriad of answers depending on which side of the mental health divide you sit. What I do know is that almost a decade ago in June 2007 as I caught a train to Hatfield for an interview that changed my life I was an optimistic, arrogant and combative character ready take on the world and change it. God was I naive in my expectation. It was so much harder than I imagined.

Now I'm morphed from the rabbit caught in the headlights of that first year to an old, grizzled, at times cynical but also still getting results practitioner.

Today we interviewed a range of people for a mental health post which made me think back to that summer a decade ago that brought my life here. I wonder sometimes how on earth they gave me the job as some risk. There were certainly better qualified people than me who applied. But I had beaten the odds a few times in my career and the rest is history. The problem with history is it never sits still and it is always evolving.

Reflecting after a tiring but interesting day I have more Beethoven on the radio. It is Ash Wednesday so I will listen to the Miserere after this. And I must decide what to eat. It has been a diet free day. Big lunch and the temptation to get ribs. It is March and the year careers on. Easter will come and go and that decade mark will be marked. Have I really tarried in one place so long? That's never happened in my life before.

Have a good week, probably be on here again on Sunday.

I Heard a Voice.