SNWJ: The Beautiful Mess Series: Sick and Tired

Sick and Tired

John Paul Derryberry

The Beautiful Mess Series: Not everyone beats cancer, but we rightfully celebrate the fact that everyone fights the diagnosis. Not everyone wins their battle with mental health, but we only praise the people who overcome.  This series examines why we need to change this view of mental health. 

Remember we are using the pronoun “They” in these blogs to avoid revealing details about the people I’m writing about. 

The Introduction blog http://jpderryberry.com/blog/mess
Story 1: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/themariojumper
Story 2: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/the-escape-artist
Story 3: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/theoldtownbully
Story 4: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/neverbeenkissed
Story 5: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/ithreup
Story 6: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/dontknowme

Story 7: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/madeforwalking

Story 8: http://jpderryberry.com/blog/youre-telling-me-theres-a-chance

We spent six stories on the people suffering from mental health, how it's a beautiful process, and how they create moments of growth for those around them. Now we switch our focus to the dedicated staff who engage in this beautiful mess, who sometimes come home with bruises, bite marks, in tears, and emotionally exhausted. There is a reason why we do it. It is because most staff members understand that this field is about navigating the messy parts of people's lives and helping them see that they belong, deserve our love, and can create a better community. 

(The staff in this story gave me permission to use identifying features and will be identified as staff or their preferred pronoun. The individuals in the story will remain unidentifiable.)

Sick and Tired:

It was my first big meeting at a new agency. The network of people I would be calling my new team all attended. We sat around office tables as everyone does in these meetings no matter the industry. Except one table was off in the corner and a short, flustered man walked into the room carrying a plethora of "I'm sick but trying to make it through work" tools. He had the cough drops, the Kleenex, an extra layer of clothing to fight off the chills, and a cup of coffee to fight off exhaustion. He apologized for his condition and promised to sit as far away as he could so he would not infect any of us. 

He took his seat, and I chuckled because I had seen this situation so many times before. Social workers are feeling as though they don't have the luxury of taking a sick day. The staff's already a paper-thin team and all the work is backed up two months. It's power through, with enough medication to slow a small horse to a trot, and then pump yourself with enough caffeine to make you stay awake. He was sick and tired and probably he was sick and tired of being sick and tired, but there was work to be done. There is always work to do in social work. The job is never-ending. My new colleague was ordered home, rightly so by his boss, during the meeting. 

That scene was a microcosm of the impact that a social work job has on the people who call it home: always feeling like they are behind on their work, being short staffed, and having to power through whatever personal crap they are experiencing to take care of the people on their caseload. The number of social workers I have witnessed allowing their own life to fall into disarray, for the sake of not letting it affect their clients, is staggering.  It's wrong; it's a tired trope and unfair that our non-profits continually ask this of our social workers. 

My new colleague was a wizard of a social worker once I got to know him. He took on cases no one else would. He would battle the powers that be to keep those severe cases moving even when people around him wanted to give up. The reason he was stretching himself too thin with his physical health was the same reason he was a great social worker. He knew that to do the job well required a commitment, an emotional commitment. The question for every social worker is how to draw that line, those boundaries, between your life and the life of the job

Watching my new favorite colleague embrace the beautiful mess of social work made me re-think the beautiful chaos of the lives of social workers.  How do we not bring it home with us when we work in such intimate spaces with people? We have witnessed attempted suicides, we have watched our clients receive diagnoses giving them weeks to live, and we have watched them flush all our hard work down the drain.  When others ask what it's like to be a social worker, it's impossible to find the right words to describe how utterly amazing and downright soul-crushing it is, depending on the time of day.

It would be easy to read this and say, my new colleague should have never been at work. He was sick and needed to take care of himself. The problem with that answer was, because I was so new, I didn't know the full details. The night before, a long-time client was rushed to the hospital due to a health condition. This individual clung to life, and my new co-worker couldn't bear the thought of lying in bed with a harsh cold, while his client was clinging to life. That is the job, these are the choices we have to make daily. It's a mess, but it's a mess we must embrace. I do not know the correct answer for these situations, and maybe there isn't one. That's the beauty of it. Every social worker is doing their best to stay one step ahead of not becoming sick and tired of being sick and tired.