Happy Dance! I got back my grade for my major assignment of the trimester, a report into the health impacts of different systems of income redistribution (welfare). The subject is at Masters level and I was given 96% for the report! 91% for the overall subject. That’s despite wrapping up the trimester with pluerisy.

I am so happy to have found Public Health, the bigger picture thinking suits me so much and it links across all the projects I love, whether that’s policy level advice or direct client work. All of them need to be underpinned by this understanding of the context in which people are crushed or thrive. Social determinants of health are so crucial and I’m stunned there wasn’t a whisper of them in my mental health peer work trainings.

So that’s a big confidence boost! I’ll be graduating at the end of the year and then will have the option to continue on to the grad dip or Masters – or go sideways into a different field like philosophy which is also pretty tempting. There’s a lot of philosophy in what I do, really we’re all philosophers at heart in some way even if we never verbalise it. We hold beliefs about people and life and live to them. I have very fond memories of some of the conversations with the hearing voices group around a campfire in my backyard, that rare space in which it was possible to break the social conventions that normally silenced us and talk openly, if we wanted to, about how we experienced the world. Even if it was just to have a whinge about the stress of being on welfare.