I worked in healthcare for 20 years. Half of that was in inpatient rehab and a prison clinic. I have always had a core belief that if someone is hurt, I should help them. If they called me a bitch or threw a chair at me or acquired their injury committing an act that would be an exception to my dislike of the carceral state if I were on the jury, it was not merely a function of my job to help—it was a soul-deep imperative, regardless of my personal feelings toward the person.
During those 20 years in healthcare, it was starkly obvious that perhaps 10% of my colleagues possessed a similar nature, or at least successfully performed one. A larger segment of the remainder had no qualms about refusing care, delaying care, or administering inadequate care to people they didn’t like on the basis of skin color, accent, religious markers, “gay-dar,” visible disability, or something unpalatable to them in the medical history, such as an abortion. A great many people who go into an industry with “care” in the name do not care at all. They like the more-than-retail pay and job security, but they love the power to choose who suffers.
Those of us in the 10% do everything we can to pull the patients we know are most likely to be abused. Before we can treat the people our colleagues loathe, we have to protect those people from our colleagues.
When a tiny minority of caregivers does the vast majority of “difficult” care—communication barriers, physical assault, and everything between—and absorbs the psychic damage of jumping between wounded human beings and those who would cheerfully do them more harm, that tiny minority burns out quickly. I’ve wished phenomenal nurses the best of luck in their next career after 6 hard years; lasting 20 generally means you had a horrific childhood and developed superhuman powers of dissociation.
The superhuman who wished me the best of luck in my next career escaped from Darfur. She tapped out of healthcare when it became clear effective public health policy cannot exist in the world of corporate interests and doorknob-licking stooges who can say in the same breath COVID is fake and China released COVID in a germ warfare attack against the US of A.
Even superhumans reach a breaking point. If we stay, a significant number of our fellow humans will be better off. If we stay, we will drop dead of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion and be of no help to anyone ever again.
“Put on your own mask first” is the hardest lesson every helper has to learn.
Hearts heavy with guilt for those we abandon, we choose to live to help another day, in some other way, under less poisonous conditions.
I currently live in the rural South of the USA. In 2020, a neighbor who learned I volunteered for a voter registration drive said I’d be the first person he executes when his glorious leader gives the order to round up traitors. Our host said, “Hey hey, let’s not ruin the cookout talking about politics,” scowling at me, and returned to his college football discussion.
The political temperature of this place is no secret. If you pass 5 houses without seeing a Confederate flag, the wind knocked it down and it’ll be flying high tomorrow. In the town bulging off the interstate like an aneurysm, every intersection bears a municipally funded sign telling the reader to give money to church charities, not to the homeless. Close your eyes and throw a rock, and you’ll hit a church with a sign out front bearing a biblical quote that’s flagrantly bigoted out of context.
I’m skim-milk white, no identifiable stripe of queer, and placated a flared-nostril, ghoulishly eager query about the Jewishness of my curly hair with “no, Scottish, like the redhead in that Disney movie,” and even I feel the menacing chord of this place vibrating in my bones.
But I am a helper, and these are my neighbors. I’ve gotten so good at rounding up escape-artist goats, I just herd them home without even bothering to call their owner. Sure, I’ll take your house keys and look after your dogs when you have a family emergency elsewhere. Of course I’ll bring dessert to the cookout, where one of you will make a death threat and the rest of you will act like I earned it by trying to add a drop of coffee to your skim-milk electorate.
Every job interview I’ve gone to in a tri-county area has involved some form of crime taking place in front of me, and every application requires a pastor as a reference. A few years ago, I tried to lend a hand to packing donations for hurricane relief after one of the volunteers mentioned they were overwhelmed, and the pastor overseeing the operation turned me away at the door because “you’re not one of my girls.”
I put money directly in the hands of homeless people to ensure it doesn’t get spent on whatever “church charities” are doing that mustn’t be witnessed by an outsider.
I have looked up voting records that prove not just a particular politician but a political party as a whole is opposed to a seemingly reasonable neighbor’s trade union, his brother’s veteran benefits, funding the public schools his grandchildren attend, the river he likes to fish in not being a dumping ground for industrial waste, regulations that interfere with corporations feeding him listeria, and every other benefit of living in a society that he claims to value, only to be told that’s sure interesting, but he’s going to keep voting the same way he always has because he’s “loyal.”
So I was immune to surprise when 74 million voters and millions more “fuck you for not pandering to me, specifically” voters/abstainers decisively declared the political temperature of this country on November 5. I admit, the enthusiasm and excitement of the Harris campaign gave even this cynic a tiny glimmer of hope occasionally, but I never lost sight—was never allowed to lose sight—of the enthusiasm and excitement of the deeply racist, deeply misogynistic, deeply self-absorbed, and violently antagonistic culture that goes underrepresented on TV because it’s bad for America’s brand.
Before the results were even called, I saw a flood of a tactic I recognize very well.
“You made me do this” is on page 1 of the abuser handbook. People with a power-dominate-oppress fetish are always quick to claim they have no control over their own behavior. The devil made them do it, or “God,” but their preferred puppeteer is the person they just struck. “Look what you made me do.”
They’re liars. They did what they were always going to do.
Speaking from personal experience and historical observation, complying with abusers has never prevented them from doing what they were always going to do. Giving your hateful parents access to your children, throwing a different victim into the volcano, moving to a state where you have fewer human rights in order to “flip” the electorate, and being “friendlier” in general to people who get a dopamine rush from cruelty would not have altered the outcome.
No one who blames you for someone else’s freely performed actions, as per the first page of the abuser handbook, has good intentions. If you had such amazing manipulative powers, this is not how you’d make your puppets dance. Punt that shame right back to the people trying to keep it from sticking to them, where it belongs.
They did what they were always going to do.
I’m not going to prognosticate here. The calm I derive from knowing what must come next in a logical sequence of events routinely inspires paralysis in others. I’ve done my Cassandra duty for the “amusement” of my peers with superhuman powers of dissociation, and it would not be helpful to inflict my predictions on the less hardened.
The one personal item I put on the list, no danger to anyone reading this, was the first: that one of my neighbors would approach me within 5 days and say something to the effect of “Now that you’ve lost, fall in line like a good little girl.”
The morning of November 7, that specific neighbor cornered me in the shed, blocking the only exit, and said, “Now that that’s settled once and for all, we’re all going to get along peaceably, right?”
He seemed surprised when cornering, looming, condescending, and labeling me the instigator of conflict failed to bring me around to their way of thinking.
I’m a helper. I don’t “get along” with people who choose harm.
Another thing I’m not going to do is grandstand about how courageous and defiant you must be now. Not everyone has 50 years of experience with deliberately inflicted hardship. It took me 10 years of daily exposure to learn how abusers operate. You might be brand new to any form of hardship. You might be safe enough that your existence doesn’t make you an everyday target, slowing your education. I’d no more tell you to spit in your tormentor’s eye than I’d tell a 5-year-old to try it.
If defiance will get you killed, be meek and survive.
But have an uncrossable line. Stop short of doing harm yourself. No matter what anyone tells you, no matter what you tell yourself, you are responsible for your own actions. No “___ made me do it.” No “I was just doing my job.” No throwing your shame at a scapegoat. Stay better than that.
I have crossed another threshold of burnout. Too many people in the line of fire of a flared-nostril, ghoulishly eager firing squad chanting “Look what you made me do.” Too few protectors to go around. Too many spectators who never have and never will do anything but complain that the 10% didn’t do enough to make everything perfect all by themselves.
There isn’t a reservoir of help that dries up, no finite supply of aid that’s first come, first served and gone forever when the last unit leaves the shelf. The only limits are the time required for a particular form of aid (being engaged in the labor of helping here precludes engaging in the labor of helping there) and the endurance of the helper. Helpers are not vending machines that spit out cans of aid at the push of a button. We are human. We need rest. We need brief respites from the cries of those in need and from the eager ghouls purposely creating those cries and from the armchair critics who’ve never helped anyone in their lives but know how it should be done.
At each of these burnout thresholds, there is not an end of aid but rather an adjustment to the flow. Seal off one valve (such as a career), and the flow to the remaining valves increases.
The valve I’m closing this time is the one that benefits anyone who gleefully ushered in the era ahead of us, anyone who’s going to wring their hands and whine that they didn’t know this was what they were voting for, and anyone who says this is good, actually, because it will be easier to build a shining progressive utopia on a scorched wasteland than to work around so many obstacles. They “won.” I will not stand between them and the consequences of the victory they proudly claim.
The remaining valves flow toward the people who didn’t want this future, fought against it, and will be its first victims. My limited time and endurance are devoted to helping and protecting the targets of hatred to the maximum extent I can. It won’t be enough, but it will be more than if I wasted another second of my life treating arsonists’ burns so they can get back to setting fires.
They choose whom they hurt. I get to choose whom I help.
So do you.