Just a month ago, I was having a terrible time with college. I was completely ready to go home and take a break from it all. The homework and classes were more stressful than they were interesting, and despite my medication, I could barely find the drive to leave my dorm. My roommates were (and still are) disgustingly messy people who only started cleaning up after themselves because I royally bitched them out. On top of all that, my daily headaches had started making their way towards daily migraines.
I have wonderful online friends, but no matter how much laughter and happiness they brought me, I always lost it again when I was alone. Nothing I did seemed to work, so the more ideas failed, the farther down it felt like I was spiraling.
My social work group had a project to work on one day, and we had to travel to a local agency to conduct an interview. It was one of those mediocre days, so I was really close to telling them I had a headache and couldn’t go, but I sucked it up and forced myself out of the apartment anyways.
To say that the visit renewed my sense of purpose and reason for being is probably exaggerating tremendously for anyone on the outside. After all, how could interviewing the director of a social work related agency do much more than give a person some new perspective?
It didn’t give me a new perspective. It reminded me of the crazy dream I had somehow forgotten about in the struggle with all the negative. It reminded me that yes, my life may completely suck (on some days), but there was a point to it all and there was an end in sight. It wasn’t as cliché as a light bulb clicking on in my head, or a beam of warm light illuminating the scene before me. Hell, it didn’t even happen that very day. It took a few days of researching the agency and writing my report on it to realize what that visit had done for me.
St John’s Home is very close to what I want to do. They’ve been around for 125 years.
It has an emergency shelter for Child Protective Services to temporarily place children who have been taken from their parents. They might stay only a few hours until another family member can take them into custody, or they might have to stay up to a few months to find a foster home.
They also have a residential program, in which the students (the adults refrain from using the word “resident”, as it has an away-from-home feel to it) stay anywhere from 6 months to about 2 years; some stay longer if they have no suitable adoptive home waiting for them. The goal of the program is to treat their behavioral, mental, etc. problems and get them ready for life in a family setting, whether that means adoption or foster care.
I don’t want to get into too much detail and sound boring, but if you’re interested, you should check out their website or Google “St. John’s Home Grand Rapids Michigan”. The campus doesn’t have an unwelcoming feel to it. The main office is definitely for work, and it shows, but behind the office building is a bridge you cross to walk to the separate houses. And that’s what they are. The students live in houses, with their own bedrooms and personal space. The “parents” of the house are social workers who have a Bachelor’s degree, and there are 3 shifts of “parents” in each house. The students go to the public schools in Grand Rapids, so their lives are as normal as the agency can make them.
I cannot say that my life has made a complete turn around, or that the visit changed my life, or anything of the sort. What I can say is that battling depression is the hardest thing I’ve done in my life, and during one of my darkest times, I forced myself to do something that ended up putting me back on track and reminding me that this is all worth it. The migraines, the stress, the schooling, the disgusting roommates, and being away from home. It’ll all be worth it when I get finished and can make an impact in someone else’s life.
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