Meandering Thoughts of a Psychologist

  Graduate students generally dislike the “grunt work” they are expected to do to support research, and I was no different. As a young woman in my twenties, I would much prefer completing my course work or focusing on my personal research dissertation. Afterall, I chose to go to school in the frozen tundra (Buffalo) to work under a specific professor doing eating disorder research, so I was unhappy at first with a portion of my graduate assistantship being assigned to a professor who studied social justice. Not only was this a content area that was not my personal passion, but I was expected to transcribe hour long interviews. I had a recording software that enabled me to listen to the interviews, repeat the words, and the program typed the content. This sounds easy enough, but the software was less technologically advanced at the time, and the tasks usually required me to follow along correcting paragraph by paragraph the words I spoke. I hated it at the time, but it really made m...

  It is hard not to feel helpless and overwhelmed with life in America today. It is hard to know where to trust the news because it all seems slanted in one direction or the other – to the left or right. It all feels confusing, but there's a strong sense within me that the attack on immigrants in the United States feels wrong, and the leadership by Donald Trump feels unsettling. I watched my pastor friend’s message about the example of the Monks walking for peace and her message that peace begins within us. This message of finding peace within the self first is important, and I also know that it is necessary for me to find peaceful networks of others who share similar values, even if our political views differ. Otherwise, it's quite disorienting to exist isolated in a community that largely supports what seems to be White Christian Nationalism. This week I protested ICE brutality with a few other dedicated citizens in Rabun, and I was happy to see that we received more posi...