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I am laughing to myself at the title of this one. Brinkman’s is a little market across the street from my neighborhood in Findlay, Ohio. It holds a very special place in my heart. I have cried in that parking lot on two separate occasions and made out with my high school boyfriend there, as well. Oh they also have wonderful homemade kettle corn. I used get off the bus in middle school and walk to Brinkman’s for a Hersey’s bar and bag of kettle corn. Side note: who in their right mind willingly chooses to eat a straight up milk chocolate Hersey’s bar? Apparently 6th grade Marissa did. Like really, out of every other candy bar?
Back to the whole purpose of this story about Brinkman’s. Unfortunately, one of those parking lot crying sessions was this past Friday. * Sigh * If you didn’t know, my least favorite gland in the body is the lacrimal gland, aka, the thing that produces tears. I hate crying. I will choke down my tears until they are a little knot in my throat. I then take that knot of balled up tears and swallow them. Then, they travel down my esophagus into my stomach and -- okay okay, I will stop there this is getting out of hand. All of this is to say, I really don’t like to cry. That is my last resort when I am feeling sad or down. When I allow myself to shed some tears, that means I have exhausted all of my jokes and illegal substances! Kidding, of course! (No I’m not).
I am not sure what came over me on Friday. Actually, I know exactly what it was. I drove up to Findlay for the weekend. As I was approaching the exit for Findlay, I started to feel anxious. I realized that I really didn’t want to be going to Findlay at all. What was I to do? I didn’t want to be in Troy either. Wait, I don’t even want to be in Ohio. Okay, no problem. Let me just turn my car around and drive out of the state real quick! Then I started to feel “the” things. My face got hot. My eyes started burning. The throat. The knot. FUCK. I knew it was coming. I whipped my car into trusty ole Brinkman’s as soon as I could.
This might seem very contradictory of my last post but I don’t think it is at all. I can still be appreciative and sad at the same time. Sometimes transitional phases of life straight up suck and that’s just that. It’s frustrating. I anticipated feeling like this, so it’s not really a surprise. I knew I would spend a lot of time alone and being alone is hard. You know what else? This has really been the true test of whether or not I want to be an OT. Forget the last 5.5 years of classroom learning. The thought of dropping out of my fieldwork sounds really tempting at times. I could move, get a PAID job doing something else, be with my friends, and live happily ever after! Except, I know I would not be happy long-term. It would be way too corny to say that my purpose on this earth is to be an Occupational Therapist, so I am not going to say that. However, I do think there is something inside me that was made to care for people. Especially the old ones. My heart flutters when I see that I have an 80-year-old patient with dementia on my schedule! There is just nothing better.
I would imagine how a normal person feels when they see a baby is equivalent to how I feel when I see an old person. It’s funny because a lot of my classmates want to work with kids, but old people are basically kids. For example, I had a 94-year-old woman with dementia on my caseload last week. Oh she was so cute (and confused), I just wanted to throw her over my shoulder and take her home with me. She also had almost no hearing, as expected at 94. When I was about to leave her room, she asked what to do when she needed to go potty. Her words, not mine. I explained (over, and over, and over, and over) that she needed to press her call button and someone will take her. Still not understanding, I grabbed a marker and piece of paper and wrote “WHEN YOU NEED TO GO POTTY, PRESS YOUR BUTTON.” I was cracking up. She was cracking up, too. Then I was cracking up more because she had no idea why she was laughing, she was just laughing because I was laughing. After that whole ordeal settled down, she complimented my hair for the 5th time, and I left her room smiling to myself. My hair was in a pony-tail, I might add.
4 weeks down, 8 to go.
Finally, a picture I took in Ohio.
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