Today begins with pain. Physical and emotional. Physical because I hurt my shoulder last night, emotional because I learned on arriving to work that yet another of the patients my coworkers and I have served over the course of months and years, has died.
There have been several deaths like that this year, and I was talking to an interpreter friend about how that is an aspect of the job she's not familiar with. Interpreting is a pretty diverse field, you see, and even one hospital can differ greatly from another. I didn't realize, when I began my journey as an interpreter, that I would be a conduit, not just for people's words, but for their grief and pain; that, in joining a group of professions that work with hurting bodies, I would also find hurting people. It should have come as no surprise to me that when someone's body stops working the way that it should, the person feels unhappy, betrayed, aggrieved, etc. But foolishly, it didn't occur to me. In the same way, it didn't occur to me that when a loved one is ill, or needs medical testing, families feel fear, grief, anger, love, and more... and express those things from the smallest to the most heart-wrenching ways.
I have always been what others call "deep," which in reality just means that I go more easily than most to that conceptual level where ideas and our feelings about them turn out to be inescapably entangled. I can't stand a conversation that's intellectual for the sake of intellect, but when there's passion involved, I'm all in. So I have truly enjoyed, in a way, getting to be with people in the most intimate, emotional processes and decisions that humans go through in life. I count it a privilege. But I wish someone had warned me, because it's starting to become difficult to hold all these stories. My arms are too full, and the thought of holding one more makes me afraid of dropping them, tripping, and falling...
My counselor says this is normal for helping professions. She throws out words like "compassion fatigue" and "PTSD" as things that are common experiences. Me, I remember a very smart PR lady I once worked with who said, "it takes six positive experiences to balance out one negative experience." For her, the point was customer service. For me, it means I need to start very intentionally keeping a list of the good things I see. Flecks of light, joy, hope, peace. Because the bad weighs more than the good, those good things tend to fly away on the wind that disappears memories. But if I list them, maybe my day will look more like mica-flecked rock: dark in color, but sparkling when you turn it over in the light.
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Obviously, there are more ways to practice self-care than making lists of the good things in a day. That has proved a useful tool for me in the past, so as these weeks have been extra difficult, I'm going to pick it up again. But exercise, vacations, and projects where I have control have also proved very helpful. One of the hardest things about interpreting, for me, is that I have so very little control over anything: where I interpret, for whom, for how long, in what type of situation, when I get a break; even to a certain extent whether or not I interpret for someone who, in my professional opinion, needs it or could benefit from it. So another thing that helps me is finding professional projects to work on where I do have control, which for me ends up being teaching and developing continuing education for interpreters.
If you are an interpreter too, I hope that this post helps you. What we do isn't just a workout for the mind, it's hard on the heart as well. I hope this post encourages you to find ways of keeping yourself in balance.
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