Putting the pieces back together
I've discussed at length how I arrived at my parents house, exhausted and burnt-out. (You can see that saga here). I've talked a lot about how to not get to this point. (Here's an example).
But what does one do when they have reached the point where burnout and/or compassion fatigue has incapacitated them? How does one go about putting the pieces back together?
About a week after I arrived at my parents house, the boxes I shipped via Greyhound arrived. Almost everything was in the same condition it had been when I haphazardly packed it and sort of wrapped the fragile stuff in newspaper.
While I was unpacking, I found a gift from one of my students the year prior. It was a glass angel that one of my 7th graders had given me on the last day of school. And it was broken into many pieces.
I had taught all of the grades at the school over the course of the year I was there, but I spent more of my time with the 7th grade class. I was one of their homeroom teachers and served as an academic adviser for half of them. I oversaw their lunch three times a week. I went on field trips (including a three-day trip to a farm and numerous weekend trips) with them. Some of us read Harry Potter together. I attended some of their Confirmations and Baptisms.
I had been expecting and planning (because I was told that it would be) for my AmeriCorps contract to be renewed, and therefore I, and all 19 7th graders, thought that I would be there for their 8th grade year. So it was very painful when I found out my contract had not been renewed. Honestly, it still is.
So this gift was more than just a cute trinket. It was something that sort of represented my time there. It was broken and so was I. As I lifted each broken piece from the box, I started to cry. It felt like this broken angel was me. I was broken and I had no idea how to put the pieces of my life back together. But, more urgently, my awesome angel, the symbol of the time I had spent teaching and the bond I had built with my students, was shattered.
Thank God for my dad and super glue. With 24 years of experience with children (who grew into clumsy adults) living around fragile objects, my dad is really good at super glue-ing things back together. Which you can see here.
The little glass angel was fixed, with help from my dad, super glue, and time to dry/ set itself. I don’t want to oversimplify it, but in order for me to put myself back together, I needed similar things.
Family, of origin or by design
I am very privileged to have an amazing family of origin who I am close to. I know not everyone has that. But, in addition to the family we are born into, there is the family that we create throughout our lives. We can build our community of friends who are as close or closer than siblings, the parental or grandparent-ly figures, the cool aunt figure, not by blood but by their presence when we need them. I have been blessed with both. When I was recovering, I relied on my nuclear family, who I was now living with. They listened, they cooked, they helped me make doctors appointments and drove me where I needed to go.
I also had my created family-- the friendships I had built along the way. People who knew me very well and had been with me at various difficult points in my life. These people lived in different states, time zones, and countries-- but were still there for me via WhatsApp, phone calls, gif filled group chats and text messages. When I was questioning my self-worth they were there to combat the negative thoughts with encouragement and evidence-based arguments as to why I was being silly.
In putting the pieces back together, family is important. Even if one doesn’t have a connection to their family-of-origin, we all can build our own created family. We are not meant to circle the sun on this little blue dot alone. We need people in the good times, but especially in the bad. We need those shoulders to cry on, the eyes to see us at our worst and still love us, the ears to hear our heartaches and fears. So if there is one thing I could just magically give everyone in the world, it would be those relationships. They don’t happen overnight and they aren’t without conflict. As my mom says, you can trust people to be people. As such, they’ll let you down. But if you surround yourselves with the right ones, they will be there to pick you back up.
2) Superglue/ mental healthcare
I needed professional mental health practitioners to help me overcome burnout, compassion fatigue, and overall depression. I cannot stress this enough. The stigma surrounding mental health conditions doesn’t make it easy for people to seek help. Between the whole “it’s all in your head” and “just be happy”-- people can start to believe that they are either A) weak or B) at fault for their experience with mental illness. Imagine if we treated other medical conditions like that. Take diabetes for example. Our culture has accepted this as a chemical imbalance that is treated not only with lifestyle changes, but also with medication. What if we told diabetics just to suck it up or that they were imagining the whole thing? Yet with mental health issues like depression and anxiety, we sometimes, often with good intentions, advocate those types of treatment. “Be happy”,
I am a strong believer in accessible, affordable, and widely used mental and behavioral health care services. As a society, we have accepted that going to the doctor is useful, and that you should probably go to the dentist. Why isn’t seeking mental and behavioral health help seen in the same light. I don’t judge people for going to the dentist. It’s not like I think they should be able to manage their dental hygiene without any input from a professional. I don’t shame them if they get a cavity or need braces. Yet, and again I think this is often inadvertent and with the best of intentions, we treat people as damaged or weak for seeking professional mental healthcare.
3) Time
Getting well is not an overnight endeavor. It takes time for your body and mind to rest and recuperate and chemically rewire, let alone to relearn unhealthy ways of thinking. So time is a necessity. This was difficult for me to accept. I’ve accepted that I’m not healthy, isn’t that enough for me to be well? I was lucky to be in a situation where I could take real time off. I could quit my job, even though I wasn’t going to be getting any type of medical disability coverage, because I have health insurance through my dad (as a 24 year old) and my parents were willing and able to let me live with them and eat their food for as long as I needed to. I understand that not many people have that option. But the idea of slowing down and not rushing your own recovery, or getting frustrated the pace of it still stands. It has been a year since I left a really unhealthy work situation that was the perfect environment for all of these issues to grow and thrive, which lead me to needing to take a break. And I still have bad days. And that is okay. (also- protip-- run screaming away from anywhere that feeds and nurtures unhealthy habits and thoughts). Recovery takes time, despite how desperately I will it not to.