results

moving on... If you too would rather just sit and zone out by the Limmat rather than dealing with my problems, you can do that at eaudiospheres.ch!

Sorry to leave you hanging for a week. Our final score is 2/3, possibly 2.5/3 if we're interpreting generously. Could definitely be worse.

• Kid 1: Driving test successful! Driver's license now in hand.
• Kid 2: Passed, and by a wide margin, which is...something of a miracle? Berufsmaturitätsschule here we come! 
• Me: Well...

It's not a red light, they said, but it's not a green light: it's an orange light. (I hadn't realized that we call the middle traffic light 'orange' and not 'yellow' here, which just goes to show that I should really work on my own driving project. But I digress.) The orange light means that I can't move forward with applying for the program I wanted to start in the fall because although I *probably* possess the competencies required to work in the church, there is some question about my ability to perform under stress and in social situations. Maybe I'm autistic - and that would be okay, but they'd need more information about what provisions would need to be in place to compensate for my deficits. Or maybe I'm not autistic - "an assessment that doesn't yield a diagnosis would also be a diagnosis," he said - and that would be okay too, then we'd know that I'm just kinda weird and we all need to learn to live with it. I mean...in any case I am kinda weird and we all need to learn to live with it. But my word on this isn't good enough, they need an expert to evaluate me and give them additional information. 

On the one hand, fine. FINE. My iffy performance in the interviews points to my own internal struggle about exactly these things, and goodness knows I'd love to get some more clarity around them. Maybe even help or therapy, although please have mercy, I'm 52 years old, do they really think I haven't tried already?

On the other hand, AAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH. This is all nominally about working in the church, but the first year of the program is all classes anyway. So it feels like they could easily enough have given me a conditional green light: "go ahead and start, but if you don't get some additional psychological assessments done in the next X months you won't be allowed continue." But they didn't do that. Maybe they didn't think of it. Maybe, as we learned in our favorite video, "'maybe' is Swiss for NO," and the orange light is in fact just red. 

But in another something-of-a-miracle, I've made a new friend who is a psychologist and willing to help me figure out what to do next that will have a chance of both fulfilling their requests and helping me personally move forward even if this isn't my path. I can't tell you what a relief it is to have an expert on my side in this.

So stay tuned.

In the next post: drowning my sorrows in public transport.