Today marks the end of my first week (five working days) at the place where I am newly employed. Although really, I spent most of the first day doing paperwork and those silly little orientation things at the administration building, so I was really only at the house long enough to meet the guys and get a brief tour.

And by "the guys", I mean the four men for whom I am hired to play caretaker. It's an interesting situation.

The company that's hired me is apparently having a tough time finding quality (and qualified) people, thus my interviewing for a job that I was underqualified for. Not having a Master's degree, I can't be the house manager of this place, which is what is needed. Once I have my Bachelor's, I can be a Practitioner, which is apparently what they're settling for. The long and short of it is, as everyone else at the house is a Worker (my present classification) I'm being put in at the Manager spot in hopes that I'll grow into the role.

Which means we have four guys who are schizophrenic (with some minor variations for a couple) who need someone to take responsibility as the primary authority when it comes to their daily functioning and productivity -- and, it would seem, I am that someone. Can you possibly have been reading Passing Strange for the last few months and not find that incredibly ironic?

It's a little bizarre, because as my first task is to read through their extensive files to actually understand how these guys to to where they are, it occurs to me that in some respects I may really resemble them more than I do the others who are caring for them. Among the negative symptoms of schizophrenia are social isolation, lack of motivation, disinterest in and disregard for the responsibilities of independent living ... I'm thinking, perhaps in all my declarations of not being insane, I was protesting a tad too much?

Okay, so I'm kidding. These guys clearly actually cannot take care of themselves, and despite my neglect of certain (financial and social) aspects of my own life, I can't pretend that I haven't been fully aware of all that's going on around me this whole time. In fact, the truth is that I'm quite convinced that the problem is not at all that I am insane, but that much of the world around me is. And no, the irony of paranoid delusion being one of the primary positive symptoms of schizophrenia.

So I guess the question is, if from an objective, outside viewpoint I'm not so incredibly distant from these guys in terms of behavior, would that make me a better or worse candidate as far as someone to counsel and assist them? If I'm so close to them that I'm unstable, then the answer would be that I'm worse. Yet if I am in fact stable, we can only theorize that my being closer is a good thing, in that I stand a better chance of actually understanding...

So the truly beautiful irony? Because you can't be objective in viewing yourself, I can't truly speak to my own sanity -- we'll have to rely on whether I've gotten this job soon enough to pull myself out of the financial pit I've dug, and whether my social and cognitive skills are actually up to keeping this job, to indicate that. Which means, my own sanity is decided in whether or not I can care for guys whose sanity has already been denied.