|
A NOTE FROM ERIN One of the things I think about most in the work I do is trust. People trust me with very private things: hiding their mental illness from their co-workers, losing their brother or best friend to suicide, or even sharing details with me about the night they almost did not survive themselves. They share about rape, abuse, addiction, shame, fear, and the complete exhaustion of trying to keep functioning while something inside them is falling apart. Sometimes, they tell me what it feels like to be transgender right now, or what it’s like to love someone who is, and watch the world debate their humanity in public. There is an extraordinary vulnerability in telling another person the thing you have been carrying alone. Often, these expressions of vulnerability are shared with me via messenger through social media platforms or during zoom sessions, and I find myself struggling to react appropriately . I feel inadequate responding through a screen. A message arrives, I read it, and my words feel embarrassingly insufficient. What I want to offer is safety: a hug, a hand across a table, or a genuine look that says I hear you, I believe you. Instead, technology is often between us. So I sit with the words for a while, remembering that sometimes the most important thing I can offer isn’t advice, reassurance, or a perfect sentence. Sometimes it is simply letting the other person know that it’s safe to share their truth with me. I have walked down many of the paths we are watching explode across the news right now: rape, suicide, mental illness, addiction, and the long road through shame and fear. I know what those roads feel like when they are lonely. That is one of the reasons I do this work—not because I have extraordinary wisdom (I don’t), and not because I believe my experiences make me uniquely qualified to tell anyone else how to live (they don’t). I just remember what it felt like to need someone, and I want to be here, to be useful, to offer a space where someone can express the difficult thing without immediately being judged or ridiculed. I want people who are struggling to know there is still somewhere they can bring the messy, unfinished version of the story, the version they are not sure how to say out loud yet. So much of what is happening around us feels overwhelming right now. The headlines are loud, the language is cruel, and human lives get reduced to arguments, statistics, and political positions. But most of the conversations people share with me come as one person, one story, and one moment of honesty. That is where this work begins for me, and that is where it matters most. If you have trusted me with part of your story, thank you. I know what that trust costs, and I will continue trying to meet it with the care it deserves.
|
