Hallie
Weather: ~50 degrees, windy, light rain, grey skies.
7am my first alarm goes off, but I stay in bed until 7:40am. With my cat curled behind my legs, and my cute teddy bear clock ticking away, I sit and think of my dreams from the night prior and the busy day ahead of me. By 8am, I’m on the bus to my therapy practicum at a local hospital.
On the bus, I sit next to an older white woman with glasses and brown hair. She notices my lock screen of my two cats, and says how beautiful they are. She then proceeds to show me her cats on her phone. So cute. Along the bus ride, I glance at her phone and see her shopping for retinol on Amazon.
I get off the bus, and decide I need a coffee. This semester, I accidentally got addicted to caffeine. At this point, I drink it less for the energy, and more just to avoid a terrible headache. I try the iced coffee from the hospital’s cafe for the first time, but it’s not good.
It’s my eighth week in my practicum, and at this point I’ve got the rhythm down pretty well. The format of the day is basically the same each week: I check in with my supervisor in the morning, then we work on any related tasks to prepare for the therapy group at 1pm, after which I reflect and catch up on some work. My supervisor and I end the day with another check in. Even though the format rarely differs, the dynamics of the group each week vary greatly, as there are always new patients.
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Throughout the day, I wonder: would anyone actually care to read how my day was? It’s like, when you ask someone, “how are you?”, and they respond, “I’m good!”; do you actually care how that person is doing, what’s going on in their life? Or do you ask it just because?
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For lunch, I eat a two-day-old Italian hoagie from the grocery store. It makes me incredibly nauseous, and I have to sit out of the group for a bit, LOL.
I’m saddened to see a patient who had been discharged a couple weeks prior back in the group again. I’m happy to chat with her though, as she’s very sweet. I feel very grateful that I don’t have a chronic medical condition that requires me to be in and out of the hospital, like many of the patients I work with. Everyday I’m humbled and learning something new.
By 4pm I’m leaving the hospital, and decide to check out a nearby fancy food court as a place to get homework done. It’s a really cool space, and I’m overjoyed to see they serve La Colombe. I get a hot half-caf coffee.
By the time I’m home, it’s 7pm. Immediately, I get in my PJs to make a dinner of chicken, spinach, hummus, tomatoes, and naan (tasty, and less nauseating). My roommate and I take a moment to process our days and decompress.
It's approaching 8pm-9pm, and I’m really exhausted from the long day. I was going to watch a movie with my roommate, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay awake. I reason to myself that if I went to sleep at 10pm, I could probably wake up around 6am and get some work done before my retail job at 11am. 12 hours later, I am proven a fool.
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My academic and artistic interests focus heavily around memory, community, and sentimentality, as the “A Year in Philadelphia” project also captures. I consider myself an incredibly nostalgic person, and have great interests in capturing the little moments of everyday life. You can keep up with my art on @/halliev.art, where I explore these subjects in more detail.
Thank you for reading!
Hallie would rate her day 7/10, 4 out of 5 stars. She is a lover of cats, art, psychology, and travel. You can keep up with her art at @/halliev.art.
