questions have been answered, but i thought i'd post some pontificating here anyway.

i also talked with my counselor at the department of rehabilitation, and she assured me that as long as it's towards me degree or towards my career she'll be able to get interpreting services for me. when it comes to actual jobs that's another question but that's something that we don't have to worry about.

so knowing that i have that takes away from some of the pressure about how am i going to function in an internship or volunteer setting, because most of those aren't going to have the sort of resources to provide interpreting on a regular basis.

so then it comes to what type of addiction-related setting am i most interested in, and the answer is that i really don't know, but i think it's more important to find somewhere, within any of the categories, that's going to be a smaller program. smaller and less stress equals less mutism and more coherent conversation, or at least less impairment from the mutism. smaller number of people around means more likely for everyone to be able to know about whatever communication requirements i have and remember it rather than having to introduce myself and my needs again and again and again. residential programs are more likely to be able to extend a counseling session of needed to accommodate for communication issues.

i mean, i know that sessions can be extended, because providers frequently manage to do so for me. but i have this sinking suspicion that the insurance companies won't want to do so in the reverse.

i have the same suspicion that should i manage to continue down the road towards getting my msw and becoming an lcsw (my ultimate goal, however far down the line) at some point i'm going to need a very, very good lawyer. or multiple lawyers, because there's a few too many areas for thinking that i'm going to be able to find one lawyer with all of those areas. disability and employment, health insurance, professional licensing requirements, so many moving parts to the idea where it could be okay for a normally fifty minute clinical hour to go seventy minutes? haha yeah.

second thing was that what sort of communication do i present to an organisation, and unfortunately what i think my professor was hoping would be that written and aac communication would be less necessary with interpreting services, but it's not that simple. i don't know if i'm ever going to be fluent enough in asl in order to not need my aac with me and for a significant portion of my communication. and i don't stress about it, because the deaf community is used to multimodal communication, and people having varying amounts of fluency in asl and using gesture and homesign and all sorts of shenanigans.

but of course there's no specifically deaf rehab programs or anything that could make this easier.