"i’ll take the rapists for 500."

<---------- This is kinda how I feel lately. :)

The second school year is off to a blazin' start. Contrasted with the first year in Gainesville, it's like night and day:
1) I have furniture. 2) I have friends. 3) I have a clue what I'm doing.

And about a year late, the whole experience is finally being normalized. The next round of first-years have moved in, and they're going through more or less the same thing. Except with couches. But my suspicion was right. Moving to a new place where you don't know anyone just plain sucks for a while, and it especially sucks if you have even a hint of uncertainty whether this giant commitment, which hugely impacts the future course of your life, was the right decision.

By now I know it was the right decision. After waiting a year, I've finally put my hunch to the test and explored whether clinical work is the glovelike fit I sensed it to be. And it IS. It's so much more daunting than I ever imagined. But I'm thrilled by the challenge. People are terrifyingly complex. The ways we affect ourselves and one other are myriad and diverse.

So I get why we need years of practice. If I've learned anything so far it's that we're all very different, often in ways we can't immediately see. I can't know what's going on inside the person in front of me, or how she sees the world. Her experience isn't mine. But it's my task to help with what's going on inside. So if I want to help, I have to learn how to do it on her terms. My point of view is irrelevant if I don't know how to work from hers. And understanding is only the beginning. The real work is making constructive changes amid the complex web of each person's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. And they actually hand out degrees in this? As if it's something you could ever be professional at doing?

Psychology is often criticized as a pseudoscience, but look at what people are. It's justifiably limited by its subject matter: every person is infinitely unique. Human behavior often follows trends, but there are no concrete laws, no guaranteed cause-and-effect. And although it should be the ideal toward which we strive, I'm not sure we should want psychology to be strictly governed by empiricism. Wouldn't you be horrified if human beings could be encapsulated by a set of scientific formulae? Give me free will and limited empirical control any day. It keeps things interesting.

Which is why I'm right where I belong. In all their weirdness and complication, people are fascinating. I can't see myself getting tired of trying to understand. And their strangeness and messiness and big and small hurts, one way or another, come out in the end as beauty. Lucky me to witness so much bizarre beauty for a living.