Diane,
What a great analogy.  It really seems true for me, but I like to think that
the waves can be overlapping and perhaps vary in intensity.  Just as at the
beach every wave is not as strong as the next. LLL got me in the water, but
then I switched to childbirth education and being a birth doula (thought I
wanted to be a midwife) came back to LLL, but later had to go to work and
started working for WIC running a peer counselor program and serving as
Breast Feeding Promotion coordinator. 15 years of that and I was totally
burnt out so now I'm a hospital based LC facing totally different
challenges. But I'm still in the water so to speak helping moms breastfeed.

I just read an article about burnout that talked about how it was higher
when people no longer felt they could make a difference.  The thought
occured to me that perhaps we begin to feel that we aren't making a
difference as the pendulum swings in the other direction. Or perhaps we try
to catch another wave because it is more challenging on the upside when we
are still learning new things.

Peg Merrill, IBCLC
Parkton, Maryland

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