Here If You Need Me
A longer title would be: Stop over-functioning and get comfortable disappointing people.
But I also want to recommend a book of the same name. A good one for us helping types. It’s the memoir of a Unitarian Universalist chaplain who came to the vocation tragically and accidentally. Her husband, father of their four children, was killed in a car accident. He was a State Trooper preparing to be a chaplain. When he died, she took up his path to keep him close.
So, it’s the story of that and her becoming. Becoming a person who embodies love for herself and others, if and when they need her.
She watches people crumple in grief. She holds bodies. And she holds an inner strength to witness and stand in solidarity with whatever a person is feeling in a crisis.
We in the helping professions are drawn to helping, sometimes a little too much. With the best of intentions, we mistakenly intuit people need us, when in actuality, we need to be needed.
Freud believed altruism was a high-level defense. A way of taking care of others to avoid dealing with our own stuff. As we all know, it’s easier to clean someone else’s house than our own.
A newly ordained clergy once asked me, “How can I be available 24/7?” Like most of us, she kept her cell phone by her bed and was very concerned about turning it on silent. What if there was an emergency? What if something happened and she was needed in the middle of the night?
My response, “If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of your people.” Maybe on the night when the parishioner is in ICU and in critical condition, maybe that night the phone stays on. But in my experience we helpers anticipate crisis. We are worst-case-scenario-planners, at the wait and at the ready to swoop in and take care.
But we gotta trust that God’s helping too, right? Some nights we need to get solid sleep.
We are here, if people need us. We are here, when people need us. Except of course, when we’re not. We will miss calls. Our lives will sometimes take priority. That happens and it’s ok. Disappointing people is not the end of the world. It’s part of being and becoming human.
Here if you need me. It’s become something I type in emails and texts. Say to people in conversations and truly believe. Sometimes people need me. Sometimes they don’t. All the time, people appreciate knowing someone cares, someone will show up, if and when they are asked.
