F*ck Your Administrative Assistance Retraining.
Tags: retraining, ptsd, burnout, canada
Published: 2021-10-20 06:48:19

So I flamed out in chunks like the Challenger at my mental health worker frontline job in February 2020. PTSD. Was it the violence? The morally-destitute management of the company? Who cares. It sucked, and my central nervous system and me bounced.

Like everybody else, I watched the COVID bodycount, ate my Vitamin C, bought gold and watched things of all magnitudes fall over.

At some point I began to wake up from the fever-blistered Blursday of psych assessments, punching stuff and COVID claustrophobia and considered what the hell I should do next. Worker's Compensation decided that I was permanently restricted from working with violent or potentially violent people. IE. people. Thank God.

My psych assessment said I was liable to decompensate in stressful situations in chaotic environments. I advised all I would smack a bitch if I was forced to work with other people in an office environment.

Worker's Compensation considered all these things and declared Administrative Assistant/Customer Service Rep the perfect fit as my retraining option. I told them I would rather *shoot myself in the face*. 

They told me they had 20 plus workers being retrained as Administrative Assistants/Customer Service Reps. I wondered aloud how many of those were male. As an older female worker, I wondered a lot of things, and decided I was going to buck this shit like a rented mule. I told them I wanted to retrain in web development. 

They did not see web development as a viable option. I appealed.

I refused to accept that I was now only worth training for a $17-an-hour job that was a *guaranteed spectacular fail*. PTSD is srs biznaz and my one hope was being able to retrain in something I enjoyed that I could do from home where I felt safe. And that at the very least matched my $26 an hour wage from the job I could no longer do after 9 years in the trenches.

I could no longer even use the phone without having a panic attack and I asked how they thought their career choice was even possible give it contradicted the twenty-page psychiatric assessment they themselves ordered. They told me that they were not actually required to use it in determining their decision. 

Well then. *Holy fuck*.

I've had a lot of adversity in my life. The red-headed stepchild variety of rented mule. Dealt those A.C.Es. It made me a great mental health worker. I am persistent, I am acutely observant, I am an outlast-the-cockroaches-at-the-end-of-the-world-level problem solver. 

So I fought. And fought, and fought some more. I lost what progress I had made on the PTSD front because you can't heal under that much stress. I was fighting for a future not lived in poverty, a future where I was not cast aside.

And I won. After a year of mountains of paperwork and assessments and carefully-worded seething emails and brutally stressful phone calls. I put together a program of very specific online courses and resources I would need to become a freelance WordPress and Shopify developer. They agreed to fund it. **I fucking won**.

I have only four months to do this incredibly heavy course load. 

**I'm here to kick its ass**.