And so life goes on...

Oh, what a week!  I have been up and down like the proverbial yo-yo, emotionally speaking, the entire week.  I don’t seem to be able to get on an even footing and as such am living with mood swings that may not be that extreme but are nonetheless hampering my day-to-day life.

Despite all this emotional rollercoastering, I have been doing quite a bit of stuff over the last few days.  I attended a training session at Anglia Ruskin University on Tuesday regarding the Admissions process for the Social Work BA and MA courses – well, the morning part which was the most important part of the training – and then went off to give a presentation to the MA students regarding Service User and Worker Experience for the first of the two sessions on that particular subject.  I was back at the university the next day presenting the same material to the BA students, my first time delivering to that particular group.

Thursday was a flurry of activity coming up with course content for the second Service User and Worker Experience session that I’ll be delivering next Wednesday and Thursday.  Five PowerPoint presentations, about nine handouts and several hours of collating information for the aforementioned presentations and handouts later and I was about ready to have a breakdown.

Friday was the Men’s Group for guys suffering with mental health problems which is, at the moment, rather poorly attended despite the best efforts of the regulars to get others to attend.  It is quite nice to sit around and chat with guys who know what it’s like to suffer from this invisible health condition so it really doesn’t matter how many are there really.  I’m quite friendly with the regulars and it gives us a chance to chat about whatever we feel like chatting about with the added bonus that no-one will judge us.

Today, I’ve been finishing off the PowerPoint presentations and making up some more handouts for next week’s lectures at the university.  In fact, I finished most of the additions before I started to write this blog entry so I’m quite proud of the amount of stuff I’ve done under quite stressful circumstances.

As much as I have wanted to give up and just let the darkness have me this week, I have continued to work towards a positive goal that I hope will help the BA and MA social work students really get to understand the service user view of their chosen profession and make them better social workers in the process.