Emergency room

Most of us have been in a crowded emergency room. We’ve seen the nurses rushing around to care for everyone. Professionals aiming to calm nervous energy of loved ones that wait in the lobby. So many people in and out with various injuries and stories behind them. Like a revolving door of trauma and anxiety. It’s said that most nurses experience burnout from the long hours, understaffing, and constant high pressure environment. The never ending pain of pain, trauma and challenges they experience daily, causes mental and physical exhaustion that is only cured by time away.

I’ve watched the events in our country over the last year or so, and reflected on some of those from further in the past. Together we’ve watched a man die while calling out for his mother, peaceful protesters be labeled as thugs, basic human rights be politicized and belittled. While these things were not events that happened to most of our families personally, they were felt interpersonally by almost every one of us. Some of us sympathetic but other empathetically impacted simultaneously. The mourning, the loss, the alienation of our basic principles has caused a mass feeling of heaviness, anxiety, and a deep desire for peace.

Almost daily, we turn on our tv, pick up our phones, or hear on the radio that there’s been some sort of tragedy, or unrest. We like to stay informed and aware, but simultaneously exposing ourselves to trauma peddling. The idea that the sky is falling daily, is a feeling that can cloud our sense of judgement and breed paranoia. The mix of these wide ranging emotions, along with a slight anger for even having to deal with all of this is creating an environment that none of us are trained for. Dr’s and nurses and soldiers sign up to run toward and handle the trauma that most of us want to look away from, but these days, that same level of trauma is packed in our phones, being carried around in our pockets and living in our minds. If the professionals, that are highly trained, cannot handle their trauma without a break, what are we, the untrained, supposed to do when it seems like there’s no escape. The conversations with loved ones, coworkers and friends is dominated by what’s going on in the world and most of it seems negative. Many of us are wearing signs of burnout and we don’t even know it. Irritability, distance, lack of sleep are all trauma responses that go unnoticed at first but ooze out from time to time.

But the question is, what do we do to escape? In the midst of a pandemic, quarantine, winter, what do we do to recharge. I believe in disconnecting. Usually traveling somewhere remote, but since most cities are closed, unplugging has served me well. Sometimes putting the phone down, doing things to take my mind off what’s happening around me has been healthy. We have to be as diligent about our mental health space as we are the health of our bank accounts. Our desire for peace has to be the reason we stop sharing videos of our peers being murdered in the streets. Ending the trauma cycle starts with controlling the things we can. It’s impossible to stop the bad things but it is possible to consume less of it. Consuming too much of the bad thing slowly impacts all of us.