Hey everyone. I know what you're thinking. "Laura, you were on a roll with the consecutive almost weekly posts! What happened?" Well folks the content of this post actually happened just about 4 months ago and it was a bit of a doozie (doosie?). I'll preface all this with this statement: I've seen a lot in my 8,000+ days of life. I've had a lot of things yelled at me, thrown at me, and I've had ridiculous things claimed of me. I've had to develop quite a thick skin over my life time, and honestly I appreciate it. You can't go through your life feeling the brunt of every whim, mood, and bad day of everyone you meet. If you worried about everything that you couldn't control or influence, you'd spend a lot of your time being depressed. I didn't always know this, and I've spent a lot of time feeling bad about these uncontrollable things.
Anyway, I digress. At my job, there's a lot of people that come in and out. People from all over the state, country, even the world. These people all have different experiences than what I have. No one can blame anyone for something that they don't understand. Ignorance is not always a bad thing. There is truly a first time for everything. However, I am a firm believer in the "live and learn" mentality, as well as "don't judge a book by its cover".
In March, I was bringing a resident back in. A coworker of mine pulled me aside and said "hey, there's a lady inside visiting someone. She is made uncomfortable by little people... I just wanted to let you know". Now this coworker is my friend and made sure I was okay and I shrugged it off and said it was fine. I continued bringing the resident inside, and my friend warned me "there she is".
Now, I'm an overly courteous person, and I made it so, God forbid, she didn't have to walk by me. I ducked into the dining room but that wasn't enough. The woman ran away from me and locked herself into a closet. She claimed to another coworker of mine that little people, or "midgets" are evil. They are the Devils spawn. They'll bring you to Hell. She was so emotionally distraught, she had to be walked out of the facility.
Now... anywhere else this might happen, I wouldn't have cared. This happened at my place of employment. The place where I am supposed to uphold a professional attitude and appearance. This woman indirectly pulled the rug out from under my feet and ripped all my emotional baggage put from under the bed. In front of my colleagues and my residents.
I broke down and cried in front of my coworkers and my residents. It's now one of the moments in my life I rue the most. I try to be strong for my residents. I am the sunshine in the hallways, their "little red haired girl". And that day I wasn't.
Now I know you're probably saying that we can't all be happy all the time. But it was a pretty failure feeling moment. This is something that hits deeper than I can ever express. Someone was afraid of me, scared, ran away from me. No one can know how that feels unless it happens to them. Someone was in genuine fear of me, and that hurts.
I was told that the woman is mentally ill. I feel for her... but I also have a beating heart... I'm going to continue to hurt from this for a long time. I will always be wary of her when she comes in. We now have our administrator walk around when she comes to visit because... she ran away from me... I am told because she is mentally ill, because she can't control her actions, I have to feel okay. I have to move on. I have to be the better person. This is something I will always have to live with.
There is always going to be something that we can't control. Something that hurts. But we have to power through it. We have to focus on the things we can control, and we have to focus on the positive. If we focus on those negative things out of our control, we are going to be miserable.
What did Monty Python say? Always look on the bright side of life, right?
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