When You Gaze Long into an Abyss...

Placement was good.  Refreshing.  Affirming.  Enjoyable.  Even the dark stuff was satisfying, and those parts which should have angered me actually empowered me.  I was in a good place.

And then something came along and arsed up my good karma.

It's just that, as with so many things in life, no job is complete without paperwork.  (And on that statement, I have a post waiting in the wings for Sunday...)  It's just that the paperwork from 121 requires a lot of personal reflection.

And there's the problem.  Perhaps I'm not as much of a reflective practitioner as I'm supposed to be.  The part of the form giving factual information about my placement was fine.  There were plenty of hard facts that I could sate to evidence the work carried out on my placement.  But there was one particular question that stumped me for the better part of an afternoon. It asked me what have I learned about my lifestyle from my experience, eg sense of worth worship life, time management , priorities, vocational commitment and comment on my spiritual development?

bugger.

So I left it, drank 1.5 litres of tea, then went back at it.  I just don't like talking about myself.  What have I learned about my lifestyle, or my sense of worth?  I'm toiling even to put an answer here, despite having written the form and sent it off to my supervisor.  The question felt a little too wooly, and I just didn't like writing an answer.  Perhaps there is something inside that I don't want to talk about, and the whole section of the form that contained this question was getting a little too close.  Yet, if I can't talk about myself, how am I going to get other people to open up to me?