Hopeful in spite of the facts
Hopeful in spite of the facts
When I was doing homeless work, there were children everywhere. I knew children that lived in cars, who got cleaned up in gas station restrooms, and who wrote their school papers on old cellphones that were submitted using the wifi…
A while back I wrote a post that was almost entirely a list of things you could do to take better care of yourself, especially if you were in a helping profession. Two of the items on that list involved…
Some years ago, I was talking to the person who was my spiritual director at the time. I was in the midst of unrecognized (by me, anyway) burnout, and she was encouraging me to take some time away. We had…
Someone unsubscribed from one of my newsletters the other day. When you unsubscribe, you are given the option to say why. Here is what he wrote in the box: I had thought that we were friends until your Twitter unfollow…
Since posting my story of burnout, I have had no less than 5 conversations with people in similar places. All people in the so-called helping professions, all doing good work, all exhausted. I used to teach classes on self-care, but…
I’m not sure when it happened. Maybe it was taking Nancy off the ventilators and watching her die as a result of the drugs she just couldn’t beat. Maybe it was when Liz died when relapsed and someone gave her…
I have spent the last 15 years working in the so-called “helping professions”. People like nurses, doctors, pastors, social workers, teachers… that’s us – the helping professionals. And for helping professionals, the main resource we use in our work is…
I am an introvert. This shocks a lot of people who know me. “You seem so outgoing!” “You are so engaged when talking to people!” “You do so well on the stage!” Introversion isn’t a synonym for being shy, or…
The city I live in now is notorious for its poor street maintenance, and sure enough, our first year here, we lost a tire on the hatchback when I hit a huge pothole. At the tire shop, I asked them…
As a child, we had some neighbors – Montaree (we called her Montie) and Mr. Doc. They were retired farmers who had bought a few acres from us and built a small house to live out their retirement. They were surrogate…