Achieving a Milestone and Looking Ahead to What’s Next

I’m back!! It has been awhile since I last posted but starting this week that’s going to change. Life was busy and as a way to avoid feeling overwhelmed, I decided to take a step back from the blog. I’m sorry that I didn’t share with you my plans for a break. At the time I figured it would be a few weeks but I ended up needing more time to get one chapter finished before I could start looking forward and planning for the future.

In 2013, I was involved in a serious accident that definitely altered my life and the plans that I had for the future.

After getting hit by a bus and sustaining a traumatic brain injury I started to think about what my future would look like. My recovery looked like it would be long and take many years. So what was I going to do with myself during this time?

I need a challenge. I’ve never been the kind of person who can sit still and do absolutely nothing for an extended period of time. In the early days, I got back into my hobby of scrapbooking to keep myself occupied but eventually I needed to do more.

With the support of my treatment team I looked into getting my Masters in Counselling Psychology. When I was getting my undergrad degree in Psychology, I always figured that I would get my Masters and continue in the Psych field. Though, after four years of studying I needed a break and shifted directions slightly.

Over the years, from time to time, I would revisit the idea of getting my masters but the timing never seemed right.

Well, now I had all the time in the world!

Achieving a milestone

In the spring of 2014, while I was waiting for my final surgery I started the Masters of Arts Counselling Psychology program at Yorkville University. This program was perfect for me as it is all done online. The schedule is flexible so that you can work when it makes the most sense for you.

Having the flexibility to work when I was able to and take breaks and rest as I needed is really the only way that I was able to manage in the program. There is NO way that I would have been able to sit in a lecture hall and listen to a professor lecture the material. My injury has left me with a few deficits and a processing delay is one of them. I don’t retain information very quickly and listening to someone intently can be exhausting.

The flexibility of the program was helpful as I was going through my recovery. Between reading my cognitive neuroscience textbook while waiting for an MRI scan (interestingly enough I was reading about head injuries at the time), to taking four days off to recover after my prosthesis surgery, I am grateful that a program like this exists.

After several years of hard work and finally completing my practicum after delays and some complications on June 21, 2017 I graduated with my Masters!!

Achieving this milestone was definitely the result of some blood, sweat and tears!! Sometimes lots of tears, lol. Between the papers that I needed to write, and the discussion questions that I had to answer every week there was definitely a lot of work involved. Not to mention all of the course material that I needed to read!!

Now, a milestone moment that I had thought about for years has finally been achieved! I have a Masters!!

Looking forward

So what’s next? As I look forward to the future I have some pretty big decisions to make. My practicum taught me a lot and one of the biggest lessons learned is that right now I don’t have the strength or endurance for full-time employment.

I’ve made the decision to focus on my health and my recovery. I’ve upped my fitness goals to regain my strength and I’ve started back into a daily meditation practice. Do you ever find that when you start to get stressed the first things to go are your health and wellness goals? The two things that help the most with times of stress.

Part of these plans means that my blog content will be lighter than usual. I’m planning on sticking to a twice a week posting schedule for the foreseeable future. I’m trying to find the balance between doing too much and not doing enough. I’m the kind of person who does better when they are busy but I can definitely be guilty of taking on too much at a time.

I’m thankful for all the readers who have stuck through me during my journey. It really means a lot to me that you continue to come back and read what I write. I felt like you deserved an explanation for my absence so I decided to write this post.

Thanks for reading!!