This is how it feels to come back together again.
How it had been was desiccation.
Desert plants do that.
I used to think resiliency was visible in the dead limbs of succulents, how they lived in spite of themselves, how much they were willing to let go of in order to keep living.
There is a difference between survival and resilience. It's hard to define living sometimes.
You push some things down, and to the side.
How it felt was my insides were dried up, hollowed.
I am a social person. I believe communities are made of relationships, person to person, person to land, person to animal, person to place, person to self, we are webs of these things.
Sitting in rooms with strangers, being woven into their webs through the threads of their stories, was leaving me with nothing. When people I knew would try and tell me things about their lives, I would feel angry. Like, couldn't they see how little I had left? It used to be that the words and stories of the people around me were gifts, sources of inspiration and rejuvenation. But I began to just feel tired all the time, and desperate.
Desperation is interesting.
Starvation can cause it, isolation, confinement. The process of being cut off from the vital parts of humanity.
Emotional labor is hard to understand, under-studied, under-honored.
My process was a duality of getting bitter and crying all the time.
I kept thinking about this one girl whose labor I attended. She was 21, just a little older than me at the time. Her mother had died during her pregnancy. I met her during labor in the hospital. Her aunt was there, a cold-feeling person. I didn't really know much about how to support someone in labor, I was still learning and I wasn't really ready for all of the mystery, especially hers, covered in grief as it was. She seemed so young and so scared. I watched her labor in the bathroom in the dark, crouching, afraid. I didn't really know what to do or say to make her fear easier. When the anesthesiologist came, her family rejoiced. Then the pitocin, then the internal fetal monitor. I left as her c-section was being arranged. She was feeling much better and didn't need me to stay, she said.
I went home and sobbed in the arms of my lover, a man who was manipulating and lying to me, although I didn't know it at the time. Crying, partly because of bearing witness to this piece of her story, partly because of the cascade of interventions that had unfolded before me and the unknown of what her birth could have been like, in a different world. I cried too because I had been so alone trying to support her, without guidance or support myself, crying because I'd been up all night and I was tired. I was 20 years old.
What you do is you move on. Because there’s someone else who needs your support, someone else whose life has changed from before to after and you can catch your breath, but when you’re done breathing, there’s more work to do. You can leave birth rooms for emergency rooms and the truth is, the main difference will be how many hours you spend there because it’s the same systems at work and mostly you’ll find the same lessons apply: bring your energy low to the ground, find a chair, ask permission, make space with your body and spirit, be kind to nurses, be kind to family, be kind even when rage fills you whole, find love from the last place left inside yourself.
I became full of other people's stories, but began to feel my own resounding, thudding, inside my chest, next to my heart.
There's a part about supporting strangers, about the moment when they aren't strangers anymore. What it feels like when the air grows heavy around you. How it feels to sublimate your most human responses, instincts to comfort, to rage, to mourn. You make your breath still and deep, there is no place for your reaction in those rooms. You try not to take anything else from the person sitting before you. What it's like at the end of the day.
We talk about what it's like, but we don't really talk about what it's like. We see ourselves as warriors, fundamentally. Strong spirited, courageous people who arise from their beds in the dark of night and emerge into the cool air and fluorescent lighting. We laugh it off, the darkness, the bitterness, the killing rage. The rage is a covering for the deep well of grief that comes from the daily reminder that you're not safe in this world and neither is any one you love.
Professions such as ours have a high turnover rate, high burnout rate. We try and try to stay healthy. Long walks, bubble baths, therapy, exercise. You get firmer on your boundaries. Eat out a lot. Go into debt. Drink too much. Some quit. Some get mean.
Meanwhile, it doesn't stop. There's no pause. Just lifetimes of people processing last week, processing twenty years ago, processing what happened when they were small, processing what happened their first week of college.
The grief can very well take you over.
I was as brittle as a desert plant in high summer, breaking down all the time.
It's important to pay attention to your feelings, to not disconnect yourself from them in order to keep working. Sometimes you will see other people who've been doing it longer and they'll seem okay and you'll wonder what's wrong with you that you feel like shit all the time. Don't worry. Your feelings are real. You're not weak. You're not too soft. Your reactions will be a barometer, they will tell you when things are becoming too much. Listening to them will be a fierce dedication to the work itself, even though it can feel like a betrayal. Remind yourself that you care about your work, enough to not risk it through your own desperation. Do not chew your own arm off in order to keep working. Do not lash out at the people around you in order to keep working.
The loneliness was unexpected. Resenting other people's joy was unexpected. The weird sick feeling in my stomach and odd, disassociated panic. Crying after sex. Crying after sex when I couldn't tell if it was my history or someone else's that was making me cry. The stories get all jumbled together, become woven together.
A priest told me I should love my work. Who can love work like this, I said. There shouldn't be work like this. I began wondering about the oldest professions. I thought about my ancestors. I thought about my mother. I thought about my descendants. I thought about the birth of the movement.
How do we love work like this when it can so easily make us sick? How can you not, on one level, love your work and, on another level, hate it because it is making you sick?
Sitting in small rooms with people, sorting through their grief. Sometimes it felt like an alchemical process passing through me. The weight of their story flying from them, borne on their words, into me, and love sparking from me, back to them. Love like a palpable force, like an undoing spell, love like oppression is an actual object we can tear down with our hands. Loving passively, like the act of bearing witness is passive. A passivity that is so dynamic, it is exhausting.
How do you begin to come together again?
Water pouring through cracks. Secret underground lakes. Dowsing. Close your eyes and feel it out.
I was looking at men differently. Assuming things they'd done. I was hating myself, knowing that it was just as likely that they'd been through hell also. Knowing I couldn't tell anything about them from the outside. Knowing the worlds of stories that live within strangers.
We are separated from one another by a thin veil, thin enough that it can be torn apart with our words alone. Stories that can't be unheard, that moment when a stranger isn't a stranger anymore. How you can become changed by the act of listening.
You have to give yourself time to heal.
You have to believe you've been hurt.
It's not a weakness within you.
It's okay to be hurt by this work. You are supposed to be hurt by this work.
Make a soft place within yourself.
Let other people remind you that it's okay to take a break.
Seek out joy.
Trust that there will be plenty of work to do when you've rested.
Try and see your own healing as work.
Wait.
