Reflecting
When I was in high school, I read the novel First Blood, which is the novel that the Rambo movies were based on. As is often the case, the movies were very unlike the book. In the novel, John Rambo, a homeless Vietnam vet, is passing through a small town
Reflecting
The longer I am away from doing work on the streets, the more I realize how traumatic that work actually was, the ways it impacted me and my brain, and the very real ways it continues to show up. Here’s a small example: I’m not sure exactly when
Resilience
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 found a retreat that sounded lovely to me, but there
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It was September of 2016, and I was fried. It was my 10th year of doing frontline work with virtually no break for very little money. My wife had a heart transplant the year before, changing our lives forever and dramatically complicating it. Some people who cared about me had
Best of
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 if I did it now, I wouldn’t call it
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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 laced heroin. Or before she died, when she