Helping Our Helpers

ARE YOU GETTING THE HELP YOU NEED? 

What does “self-care” even mean? I’ll tell you what it normally sounds like, “Congratulations, you wiped your own ass, do you want an award?” Or it’s selfies of our feet while we take a bath and post it to show everyone that we are “relaxing.” No we are not, we are not soaking quietly with your phone on silent because the whole time you are soaking, you are like, “I need to do the laundry, check me email, scroll, scroll, what should I eat for dinner, I’m fat, I’m not lovable…..” and to shut that all up we fuck with our phones. And that’s just the ground level. But, there is a special kind of hell that goes along with being a nurse, doctor, lawyer, therapist, coach, civil servant, and “helper”. 
That hell entails never being able to fully take care of ourselves on all levels because we run on caffeine and imposter syndrome. Fuck, some of us are fancy and run on Adderalll and Lexapro mixed with spurts of mental health days. The point is that helpers are overworked and under-resourced but somehow because we “know how to help” we should know how to “help ourselves.” 
Don’t get me started on the ironies and paradoxes that exist within the “Mental Health” system. Oftentimes, the system is worse than the clients and filled with “half-healed” people who burn themselves out to fund a life they don’t even like. But, “leaving corporate America to live in a van” isn’t the answer. It’s a temporary solution to long-standing issues. 

So let’s talk about the solutions. 
After ten years helping “hurt people”, I know that the only people I can truly help are the helpers. 98% of the “recovery” community will remain addicts with overdose deaths on the rise. I can’t help that population and remain healthy myself. No one can. I had a supervisor tell me, “You have to be kinda sick to do this job.” Veterans clinics are so overloaded many people slip through the cracks and kill themselves because support couldn’t be accessed. I can’t help them either. One in six women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. Many of them will go on to be sex-workers and continue to be brutalized by men. I can’t break that beast of a cycle. There are a lot of things I can only scratch the surface of: Homelessness, poverty, politics, racism, and homophobia to name a few. 
The helpers are the ones who collectively choose to be responsible for the woes of the 
world. 
The thing about being a helper, is you have to prioritize getting help. You have to actively seek it. You have to feed yourself. And most importantly, we are meant to graduate our roles as helpers because we heal ourselves of the need to fix others. We find different footing that guides us along “less traveled” roads. And I am here to guide you along this long, winding, and at times “fucked up” path. 

Reach out and get the help you need! 

Get help