Two perfect words to sum up the answer to the ‘question’ in
the title above would be “A LOT”, and even until now, I haven’t stopped being
grateful for my involvement in the choral world. As the motto of that one choir I heavily involved with was “we’re more than a choir,” it really was more
than a choir. It was an awesome journey of experiential learning, self-discovery,
resilience building, and even some healing process took place there..
As I told my brother a few times before, a good school is a
good place for building connections, and it was being in this university that gave
me these connections through joining the university choir and one other choirthat’s kind of related to the university choir. Other than being a very good
social support back then, apparently these also exposed me to people from
various backgrounds: ethnicities, study field, hobbies and interests,
personalities, relational pattern, talents, dreams, opinions, age,
developmental level… Somehow it is this thing that has helped broadening my
knowledge and better equipped me with a habit of a more ‘person-based’ than symptom/disorder-based
approach when it comes to doing psychiatric assessment. It helped reminding me
to continuously seeing people and things (stressor included) within its
context, and that one context might not always apply to another context despite
the same diagnosis those contexts produce. As I was ‘cursed’ by this anankastic
trait, however, sometimes it can be frustrating when I just can’t get a
colleague to understand the importance of that context in the diagnosis and
therapy-related decision making due to my currently still-occasionally-inadequate
communication skill, but… I guess I’m getting better, despite slowly, so
hopefully I could continuously help improve the understanding of one’s
condition to get him/her better treated :p
It is also these connections that have helped me surviving
in my current weather of academic limitations here there and everywhere. I mean…
damn, this place doesn’t even have a proper library (I’m still occasionally cursing
it, sorry), let alone a serious dream of expanding horizons of knowledge in order to
seriously help make this world a better place for the ones in need. It is these
connections that help me keep that serious dream by offering a reliable access
to some brainstorming partners at times when my head feels like it’s gonna
explode, translators when I need help with translating some questionnaires to
use in certain research, and valuable information such as scholarship opportunities
or free resources for references. It helps keeping my head above the water and preserving
my sanity despite those rejections that I occasionally perceive from the people
who somehow says they’re trying to ‘stick with the rules’ and ‘protect the
tradition’ when they just don’t like my idea, so… for me it means a lot to have
these connections.
It was also choiring that has given me a pretty good start
to significantly build my communication skill and resilience. With reasons I
couldn’t really understand, at times of doing event organizer work in the
choir, I was mostly dealing with public relation and/or paper/document work.
Being in the public relation division means I was ‘trained’ to get used to that
endless texting of writing announcements and responding to people who replied to those announcements. I was also trained to get used to getting a response rate of
10% or less (and not taking it personally), being the person who got snapped at when something went wrong
although it didn’t always have to be my mistake, and still speaking calmly with an alto range despite having a significant amount of anger after being
(somewhat continuously) snapped at. In addition, doing document/paper work trained
me to tolerate that notorious pain-in-the-ass part when dealing with
bureaucracy, and how persistence and determination (added with a little sweet
adorable kiss-ass-like polite smile) would mostly help to get what I’m aiming
at. I also learned to filter which information to share to which party and
with which media or which timing I should deliver that information. And of
course, I learned to make elaborate plan that enabled most things to be taken
care of properly… and somehow it has helped me to better spot those “gaps”
when someone is trying to blurt out an elaborate lie right in front of my face.
Again, as I’m a slow learner, however, even until now, I still make sooooo much
mistake regularly, but I guess I gradually make less mistakes each time, so it’s
been nice J
Being in a choir also means that I was used to listening to
many voices at once, quickly sorting the beneficial from the non-beneficial
ones, and acting upon it accordingly be it in the form of adjusting my own
voice (and gestures!) to it, or ‘confronting’ it. While this ‘skill’ doesn’t
really have a solid basis and seems to mostly rely on ‘gut instinct’
(I’m not sure if I’ve used this term correctly), I found that it is somehow
train-able. I mean, after doing some shots of psychodynamic-based psychotherapy
and/or talks, I somehow realized that with more textbook reading and more
listening practice, my interpretation of things gets more accurate as time goes
by, and I arrive to the ‘goal’ quicker than I was before! Somehow better
listening equals better questioning; and with the better-formulated questions,
you get better answers. You save time, and you frustrate yourself less. It's just cool.
Well.
I guess that’s pretty much it. Each shrink would develop
different styles of practice derived from their own various backgrounds, and that’s
just okay. It could even be awesome
since each person (ie shrink) might affect another person (ie
patients/clients/colleague) in his/her own different way. That being said, I
guess this might make psychiatry an ever-developing field of science, so… isn’t
it just amazing to be within this delicate network of virtually limitless potential
developments? For me, it is, and so I’m grateful. Well, not every single day, I
have my bad days too, but.. I guess I’m mostly grateful. It’s been a super cool
ride :D
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