Maybe you have read the title and your fingers are pulsing, anxious to fly across the keyboard and unleash your righteous fury. You are ready to scroll down directly to the comments section of the online version of this article and let me have it. You are ready to tell me, like the good social worker you are, that hardship is relative, that it is damaging to use “us” versus “them” statements, and that we must give ourselves permission to feel what we feel. And what do we feel? Exhaustion. Secondary trauma. Spinning wheels. To you, I say—I know.

 

I know, and thank you. I know, and thank you, but....

 

Your client is more tired than you are. She is probably hurting more than you are, and he probably has more to be angry about than you do (even if what he has to be angry about is the terrible situation that he caused himself).

 

I do not mean to dismiss or minimize your feelings. I know that the tired is real—the grief, the crippling imposter syndrome, the ever pouring out, the can-I-be-burnt-out-in-my-twenties(?!). I feel it. I just want us to remember that our clients are really, really tired, too. Maybe greater perspective can be a precursor to greater gratitude, and greater gratitude can be a precursor to sticking it out in this field on the days when we are absolutely certain that we cannot.  

 

As social workers, we have learned that we should not (no, never) use the phrase: “I know exactly how you feel.” Okay, well, can I just...maybe...just this once?

 

I know exactly how you feel.

 

Even as I write those words, social work student sirens are going off in my head, because yes, we all have our individual professional and personal struggles. Total empathy is totally impossible. And yet, as important as it is to remember that our struggles are deeply individual, maybe it is equally important—freeing even—to remember that our struggles as helping professionals are also deeply universal.

 

In fact, in full disclosure (I know, we’re not really supposed to do that either), last night I was hurting. The clients I thought I was cheering on toward the finish line dropped out of the race, every case review and court report needed my attention all at once, and another foster family had put in another 14-day notice asking for the removal of one of my teens (his seventh in four months). I was bone, body, and soul tired.

 

Maybe you have no idea of the struggle of another disrupted foster home. Instead, maybe you are all too familiar with the agonizingly slow pace of improved race relations in the United States. Maybe you are utterly overwhelmed by the manifestations of generational trauma in your community. My daily struggles are not the same as yours, but you are a social worker. That is all I need to know to know that you, too, have been bone, body, and soul tired....

 

Last night, I wondered aloud if any of what I was doing mattered. Had anyone’s life been improved by my presence in it? Was change even possible? With more patience than I deserved, my husband lovingly talked me down from the edge of that cliff.

 

....This morning, the sun rose and so did I. I did show up to the office, and I rounded the corner to my cubicle to be greeted by the photographs of my children and families tacked haphazardly around my space. Those beautiful, tired clients of mine. And do you know what I wished in that moment? Not for five more minutes of sleep or an extended vacation. I wished that their hurts were the size of mine.

 

Few of my clients have the luxury of crying into a loved one’s arms about their hurts. Most of my clients are in places of hurt that even my best empathy cannot get me to. Often, they are utterly alone in those places. For some of my clients, I am asking them to stay away from the people who have given them a sense of belonging—gangs or abusive relationships or drug buddies. Is it for their best interest? Yes, I think so. But I do not dare forget that it must also be terribly lonely.