Things I Wish I Could Blog About

I wish I could blog about my patients. I really really wish I could blog about my patients. I hear some wild stories. But I can't blog about my patients: it would be a violation of their confidentiality.

I wish I could blog about how my work makes me feel in a completely honest way. But I can't blog about how I feel in a completely transparent way: this is a blog and not my private journal.

I wish I could blog about the things that annoy me. Sometimes I do.

I wish I could blog about a legal case I reviewed recently, but I can't blog about that because it would be really stupid.

I wish I could blog about the stuff I know from being an officer of our state psychiatric society but I can't blog about those things because I can't.

I wish I could blog about the things I hear people say that other shrinks do that don't seem quite right to me. I can't because I'm not always sure that I'm in the right and it's good to at least try to stay humble.

Sometimes stuff happens, and I think I'll write about it, save it to drafts, and publish it months and months later when the moment has passed. I never do this.

I wish Clink would blog about mental illness and violence, and what issues might be considered regarding the tragedy in Arizona.

I wish Roy would write more about the zillions of things his mile-a-minute brain turns over in any given hour. He thinks a lot about hospital psychiatry and public policy and technology and how electronic medical records may help medicine.

It's bad enough that I wish for me what I could write, so I'll leave the others alone, but while I'm wishing.....

I wish I was either never hungry, or better yet, that I had a metabolism that could buzz through 4,000 calories a day of mostly ice cream and pizza. And while I'm at it, I wish I truly loved to exercise, that I was naturally athletic and could carry a tune and sing with a beautiful voice. If all these things were true, I might blog about some of them.

I wish I could blog about the things in my own head that make me a little nuts. One of the things about being a shrink is that one vaguely puts on the pretense of being sort of sane, at least in a public setting.

I wish I could blog about my trials as a parent, but I'm not sure what that would lend and there are moments it wouldn't make me very popular. It's really hard to be totally transparent about all the issues that being a mom brings up and sometimes the feelings I have-- for better and for worse-- get echoed by my patients.

Thank you for reading Shrink Rap.