I’ve worked with people who have “mental health issues” – I believe that’s the current politically correct term – and/or drug and alcohol problems since I was 19 and still earning my bachelor’s degree. And this job was not my first stint in the realm of child protective services.

So why couldn’t I hack it anymore? That’s the question I keep asking myself. My “official” reason was I want to go back to school and get my master’s degree. That’s true.

It’s also true that I couldn’t see having a family, something I would like to eventually do, while working 50 hours a week at a job that was ripping my heart out every day. Ohh, now we’re getting somewhere…so there were definitely 3 strikes for me, here’s what they were :

1) On my first “go-out” my supervisor and I pull up to the house with the police. The police approach the man in the garage, ask if he is so-and-so, he says yes, they cuff and search him, and pull a loaded gun out of his pocket.

A rational person (no offense to my peeps who are still there) would say “screw this”. I said “gee I’m glad we brought the cops” and kept on going for another ten months or so.

2) A few months after the above incident, I get another go-out that’s a “domestic violence homicide”. I go see the toddler who’s been left behind in all this mess, because now I have to decide where she’s going to live.

All I remember about her from that day- the day it happened – is her big eyes staring at the police and the DHS workers. A few weeks later I go do my “monthly home visit” and she walks up to me and says “mommy?”.

I somehow manage to keep it together until I get home. But I wonder what she thought? Did she think I took her mom somewhere? Did she think I looked like her mom? Or did she just associate me with what is arguably the worst day of her life? Does it really matter – all those choices suck.

3) I know some of you think I’m going to say this one is when one of my clients, someone I was trying to help by the way, threatened to “shoot me in the head”. She had “mental health issues”, and yeah, she probably didn’t really mean it, but what if she did?

But that’s not it. I just got tired of being two different people.

One of the things to know about this work is that no matter what decision you make, someone is going to think you did the wrong thing.

You’ve all seen the Dateline specials – either we “steal babies” when nothing’s actually wrong because we are evil state workers; or something was really wrong, we didn’t do anything, and now it’s our own personal fault someone got hurt.

I’ll be the first to admit, sometimes it’s true. We make mistakes. We’re human. And some workers are incompetent. The problem is when we mess up, it’s a bigger deal than when the guy at McDonald’s forgets your honey mustard sauce.

So what did I mean about being two different people?

For most of my professional life, I’ve understood and accepted that I work in a field that is high stress, low pay, and there’s more people to help than I could ever hope to get to. I got by on the occasional, sometimes frequent, feelings that I had really made a difference in someone’s life.

Cheesy, yes, but true. Maybe they made a better choice based on something I’d said, or maybe they just felt that I cared about them, even if I couldn’t help, and that was enough.

I also accepted I needed to pretty much constantly explain how or why I did this or that, and more importantly be willing to say “oops, my bad” on a somewhat regular basis. Professional Cathy was pretty good at that. Personal Cathy totally sucks at that.

I’m an Adult Child. Seriously, if you look up what that means, there’s a little picture of me. I tend to think everything is my own fault, and even if it’s actually not, I still should have “done something”.

I think I’m responsible when another person has any kind of negative emotion.

I am no good at asking for help, I can do it myself, thank you very much.

I am also no good at admitting when I’m wrong. Case in point, I once stayed married to an alcoholic who spent all my money for two years in part because I was too freakin’ stubborn to admit I was wrong about him and everyone else was right. (But that’s a subject for a future blog).

I’d like to think I’m reasonably emotionally healthy now, but I spent my teens and most of my twenties repeatedly picking myself up, not very well I might add, after making some relatively major mistake.

I felt, and still feel, despite the protests of my close friends and some of my co-workers, that I just wasn’t good at the job anymore. After all, some people manage to do it for years and years and even stay caught up with the work.

It was just taking too much out of me – I got tired of putting on “armor” to go to work every day.

The bottom line is, I felt like I was starting to lose the parts of myself that made me good at the job in the first place. So now what? Well, I’m not really sure but I have faith I’ll somehow figure it out.