I am still reeling from the craziness of the last two years. I sit and I ponder what brought me here. In my 20s i was a complete underachiever, generation x slacker and unambitious... Then I thought I would never have a house or a new car or a partner or anything that my parents and my siblings had. Then slowly over time my life evolved, i got another degree, and started working as a social worker. And that became my all consuming passion, it was nothing for me to work 60 or 70 hours in a week. And I thought i was well on my way to future promotions and then the bottom fell out. Within 2 years, I was diagnosed with Chron's disease, then over the next five years I lost my MeMe, 3 uncles and an aunt, a client committed suicide. I became totally burnt out, and became a total robot. But suddenly I had the house, the car and the partner. And yet i longed for more and more. And then my uncle was diagnosed with terminal cancer, my car was dented, and i started to lose my grip on reality. I started to believe my fears and anxieties were all about to come true. I started seeing and hearing things. Then i just lost it completely. This last year is a blur, my memory is tarnished, I only remember bits and pieces, and I have no recollection of Oct 07 to Mar 08 or very little. I was off work, but went back for 9 months, thought i was doing so much better. Then my car broke down several times. My partner's car broke down twice. Our savings gone. Then my parnter lost his job two days before my birthday. Then two weeks later I am in a car accident and have soft tissue damage and whiplash. And then the trauma really begins, I begin to hear and see things again. And i begin to fear that someone is out to kill me. There is no way to describe how it feels to not be in control of what your mind is doing. Unless you have been there its impossible to understand. Its impossible to understand what social work does to a person's psyche- we must be perfect role models, sane, stable, and we can not show any emotional attachment. Do you know how hard that is to do after 8 years of working with the same client??? And now I just want me back and yet I have no idea who that person was. Who I am now is so far removed from who I was. I thought i had it together, i really did, but now I see I was just existing and not really living. And the bottoming out was inevitable, and I never thought it would happen twice in the same year. I just hope now that i have some clarity, that I can move beyond being crazy and back into relative stability. Only time will tell.