Diary of an NDIS Support Worker Day 7

 12/11/2024

Dear Diary,

I like to find a pattern or a habit that I can form quickly to overcome a sense of disorder.

I start the day by texting two friends 'good morning' and then get up and start the day. Open the blinds in a particular order, make my bed, have a coffee, write a while.

But I need more than that a lot of the time and try to build things into the day that feel like a pattern, a habit something that as a person living alone most of the time, brings a cadence to the day..a rhythm and feeling that a routine can carry me through good and bad times.

I've moved four times in the the last four years, new suburbs, new shafts of light over the furniture. Habits and rituals forming and reforming.. to bring a sense of steadiness in an unsteady world.

Writing this blog every day is helping me make sense of why I am where I am, post job, post marriage, post Kamala not winning the U.S election.

I'm reading a Season of Death by Mark Baker, he writes with pride and wisdom on the rituals and traditions he and his family incorporate into their lives. I am envious of the richness of these patterns - that have guided them through, births, deaths and marriages..

When I feel very anxious or overwhelmed I build in routines that ground me. It could be a walk to the bay after work, an exercise routine in the morning, a coffee with a friend that emerges as something that we 'always do.'

These routines come and go. When I was married we had rituals and routines, things we always did with the kids, with neighbours.. and then when I left the marriage there were new routines that had to be created. 

NDIS work is casual, and yet there is a requirement to help people with cooking and cleaning and taking them places, to be part of their lives in a meaningful way, be part of the fabric of their lives, become part of their habits.

I've been thinking a lot about the Ken Loach movie Sorry We Missed You, it's about self employment in the gig economy. A family spirals into debt, they are over worked and underpaid.

The movie is bleak, as many of Ken's movies are, but what I love is that the stories are not a Disney version of life. They are about ordinary lives and how many families and individuals have very few people they can rely on to make their lives work - a mother a father, for many that's it. For many it isn't.

NDIS work is a bi-product of so many aspects of modern life that dislocate us from each other, from ritual, from highly functioning families and communities.

I feel like I am trading in care and kindness to random strangers on  on an app. This is high end trickle down economics.. from the mad man in the white house to the person on the street. 

(Trump is choosing his cabinet and Putin is putting lurid pictures of Melania on Russian news..  )