When the Healer Needs Healing

He kept telling me nobody cared.

This morning, sitting here crying over a man I barely knew, I keep thinking:

Then why am I crying over it?

A couple of weeks ago, a man reached out to me through one of my ads.

He had relapsed.

His relationship with his family had fallen apart.

He was homeless.

And he was in a very dark place.

He told me he wanted to end his life.

At that point, this wasn't a conversation about my work anymore.

A human being was hurting.

So I talked to him.

I gave him crisis resources. I tried to get him connected with people equipped to help him. I tried to keep him talking.

And somewhere during that conversation, I stopped seeing a stranger who had found me through Facebook.

I saw parts of myself.

Not because our lives were identical.

They weren't.

But I know what it is like to make bad decisions and then look around at the destruction.

I know addiction.

I know shame.

I know what it feels like when your life doesn't look anything like the life you thought you would have.

There was a time when I made a pretty good mess of my own life.

I got another chance.

I changed mine.

And a big part of what I do today is trying to help other people see that the version of their life they're living right now does not necessarily have to be the version they die with.

Then he reached out again

A week or two passed.

Last night, he messaged me again.

This time felt different.

He told me he had tried.

Nothing was working.

He had enough of trying.

Then he gave me his wife's phone number and asked me to pass along some information to her.

That was the moment I knew this wasn't just someone expressing hopelessness.

He was saying goodbye.

I did what I knew to do.

I stayed in the conversation.

I tried to get him connected with immediate help.

I contacted the people and resources that needed to be contacted.

And I sent his wife the message he had asked me to send.

Eventually, I went to bed hoping someone had reached him.

Hoping he had accepted help.

Hoping something had changed between our last conversation and morning.

Then I woke up.

There was a final message waiting for me.

He thanked me for what I had done.

He asked me to tell his wife how much he loved her.

He said goodbye.

Then he blocked me.

I still don't know what happened.

I don't know whether someone reached him.

I don't know whether he changed his mind.

I don't know whether he is alive as I write this.

There is something brutal about not knowing.

Earlier this year, I lost my cousin to suicide.

That had an ending.

An awful one, but an ending.

This doesn't.

Maybe that's part of why this hit me as hard as it did.

Maybe some of what I'm feeling belongs to this man.

Maybe some belongs to my cousin.

Maybe some belongs to the version of me from years ago who understands more of that darkness than I sometimes want to remember.

It's probably all of it.

“Nobody cares”

He kept coming back to those words.

Nobody cares.

He believed he had ruined everything.

He believed people were better off without him.

He believed there was nobody left.

And I can't stop thinking about that today.

Because somewhere out there was a man completely convinced that nobody cared about him.

And here I am crying.

He didn't really know me.

I didn't really know him.

We never worked together.

There was no long history between us.

He was simply a hurting person who crossed my path.

And I cared.

Maybe not in the way he desperately wanted his family to care.

Maybe not in a way that could repair everything that had happened.

Maybe not enough to make him believe there was still a future.

But I cared.

So when he said nobody cared, he was wrong about at least one person.

And I wish he could have felt that.

The questions afterward

Then come the questions.

Did I do enough?

Was there something else I should have said?

Was there some combination of words that might have reached him?

Could I have done something differently?

Could I have saved him?

Those questions are hard because there may never be an answer that completely satisfies them.

I can replay the conversation a thousand times and probably find a thousand things I could have worded differently.

That's what hindsight does.

But I also know what I actually did.

I took him seriously.

I stayed with him.

I tried to connect him with help.

I brought other people in when I knew this had gone beyond something I could handle alone.

I cared.

And apparently I cared enough that, when he believed he had nobody else, he reached out to me again.

That's heavy.

I'm supposed to be the one helping

My work is about helping people.

And many of the people who find me are carrying things I recognize.

Addiction.

Pain.

Fear.

Regret.

Old beliefs.

Lives shaped by things that happened a long time ago.

I don't stand outside those things looking in.

I've lived some of them.

That's part of why this work matters so much to me.

I know a person's life can change because mine did.

I know somebody can become almost unrecognizable from who they once were because I did.

So when I see somebody standing in a place that resembles somewhere I've been, there is a part of me that desperately wants them to see what I can see from the other side:

This does not have to be the end of your story.

But wanting that for somebody does not give me control over what happens next.

That's a hard thing to accept.

I help people.

I look for what's underneath.

I look for what can change.

I look for a way forward.

And sometimes there isn't something for me to fix.

Sometimes something just hurts.

Today, the healer needs healing

I have a full day of clients tomorrow.

People will call me with their own pain, their histories and the things they want help changing.

I want to be there for them.

Actually there.

Not physically on the phone while half of me is still sitting inside this conversation wondering what happened to a man I may never hear from again.

So today I'm doing my own work.

I'm paying attention to what this brought up in me.

My cousin.

My past.

The helplessness.

The questions.

The grief for someone I barely knew.

I'm not trying to convince myself I shouldn't feel it because he wasn't a friend or family member.

Apparently that's not how caring works.

Sometimes another person's pain lands in a place inside you that was already tender.

Sometimes helping somebody else opens something in you.

And sometimes the person who spends his time helping other people has to admit:

Today, I'm the one who needs some attention.

I don't think that makes me less capable of helping people.

I think pretending none of this affects me would.

I don't want to become so good at helping people that I stop being human when one of them gets to me.

So today I'm letting it get to me.

I'm letting myself cry.

I'm doing my own work.

And I'm reminding myself that being there for other people also means knowing when I need to be there for myself.

He kept saying nobody cared.

I don't know what happened to him.

I don't know if I will ever know.

But I know this:

I cared.

And today, that's why I'm crying.

If you are thinking about suicide or are in emotional crisis in the United States, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. If there is immediate danger, call 911.