Guest post by Luna: Born for OT

http://lifelessonsfromot.blogspot.com/2012_01_01_archive.html

This is the first post written by a first year OT student, whose native language is not English. It's beautifully written and thoughtful. Thanks for sharing, Luna. 🙂 I will be adding her to my blog roll and hope you all will too 🙂
Have you ever experience that feeling that you are in just in the right place. That without knowing it, your personality and past experiences were preparing you for this moment. Well, that's how I felt when I started my first semester as an Occupational Therapy student. 
Since I started my baccalaureate, I already had in mind to continue my graduate studies to become an OT, but the truth was, I only knew a little part of what being an OT really meant. I knew that the profession was diverse, but I didn’t imagined how much. I knew it helped people, but not exactly how. I knew I wanted a profession where I could be creative, be near the patient step by step in the recovery process, help change lives. I wanted a profession in which the person wouldn’t be seen as a number or as a disease, but as a human .What a relief was to reaffirm I had entered the right master's program!

Even though I enjoyed and learned a lot from my baccalaureate in biomedical sciences, I always felt as if something was missing. I never heard talking about spirituality, therapeutic use of self, self-awareness and much less about client-centered intervention in any of my classes. All this concepts helped me understand that the profession I had chosen was much more transcendental than I thought.  In one of my first assigned readings the quote from Adolf Meyer: “We bring opportunities, not prescriptions” helped me realize that what was missing in biomedical sciences were opportunities beyond those that the medical model alone can offer.

After learning the values ​​and beliefs of the profession, I confirmed that they matched my own. In a couple of days I already felt as a part of OT, or that OT had always been part of me, I'm not sure!  That semester I understood what “vocation” really means; to feel that this is what you were created for. Without knowing it, my whole life I had within me the seed to become an OT. Now, all I need to do is work hard to make it grow. 

“You know how much your vocation weighs on you. And if you betray it, it is yourself who you deface, but know that your truth will slowly be, because it is birth of tree and not finding of a formula. “

-Antoine De Saint Exupery

Jul 16, 2012 | Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: 1