There is a Cost to Caring: How Much Have You Paid?
As I type this, I am amidst a rare moment…for me. I worked this morning at my new job, and left in time to see the first pitch at my son’s final baseball game of his Middle School career. He loves baseball. Not my sport of choice — games are long, and the lulls are many. In between pitches, innings, even batters, I look down to check the words on my screen, then look back up. Glad now that I can type without looking at the keys.
For years I’ve been late to these things, and far too often missed them entirely. The work-life balance leaned more toward my commitments to the communities I served, and not to those with my family. My thought process was that without enough revenue I’d be doing my kid a larger disservice than would have been the case if I worked any less. Then, over the past half-decade, I didn’t just overwork — I took beatings from some of the shadiest people I’ve ever met. All while trying my best to help.
Today, I was talking with one of my new colleagues and she told me about an experience someone close to her had with his job. Another person taken to the brink. A decade and a half of really caring…then staying awake all night thinking about it. For those of us in the business of people, caring a lot can at times equate to hurting ourselves even more, sleeping less, and losing years of our own lives. Stress is a killer, so they say.
Ever feel like this after work? You shouldn’t.
Teachers, Principals, Cops, Social Workers, Paramedics, Nurses, Firefighters. The people who see the lash marks on the backs of children, the ones on scene when a family dispute turns bloody, or a Mom or Dad is getting NARCAN while the children watch – that’s who I am writing about here. Someone out there has to put out a fire around the charred remains of a fellow human, or use the jaws of life to extract the not-so-living from a wreck. Then, at the end of their shift, they go home. And when they get there, they aren’t dancing in the door jubilant about a Taco Tuesday dinner.
I remember when I was in high school, one of my teachers went on and on about a book that encouraged doing what you love. In fact, that is what it was called. Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow. He was a good teacher – and we had a lot of them. I know now that for them to work in that environment they either had to really really give a shit…or really really not – without much in between.
Good Book. But Not Really True.
If we were to go by the book, money would simply be the byproduct of our spiritual commitments. I love the idea because it implies that there’d be little fear about the instability that accompanies most of our jobs. We’d be like, we love what we do, and people pay us for it. However, this is far from the case. The book I’d write would be called Do What You Love and Losers Will Stalk You. Or Do What You Love While Your Boss Commits Crimes. Go to bed conflicted…Assist them in their BS, live for another day or don’t and pay the price.
Attention needs to be turned. Somewhere, there is a cop who didn’t go along with the planting of evidence. Maybe there is a nurse who stopped the medical mistreatment of an elderly woman. She even argued with the insurance company for additional care. I personally know a daycare provider who wouldn’t let a little boy go into foster care when his mother was incarcerated. Instead, he adopted the kid and wound up raising him as his own.
There is a space in between doing what you love and what else has to be done to keep getting paid.
It’s the space where people are barely hanging on.
Where the weight of what they witness — what they absorb — begins to calcify in their bones. Where paychecks are issued, but healing never comes. Where people sit in their cars an extra 12 minutes after their shift ends because they’re not sure how to transition from the chaos they managed all day to the quiet waiting at home.
It’s the space where good people break.
It’s where you’re praised in public and punished in private. Where you’re told you make a difference, then left alone to clean up the mess no one else wanted to touch. And maybe worst of all, it’s where you start to question if any of it matters — not because you don’t care, but because caring has hollowed you out.
Photo compliments of psglearning.com
You don’t see this space in inspirational TED Talks or LinkedIn posts with sunrise emojis. You see it on the faces of educators who show up to work despite losing children of their own. You hear it in the silence of a firefighter who hasn’t been able to talk about what he saw two shifts ago. You feel it in the posture of a Superintendent, who now has to be a grief counselor, safety officer, fundraiser, and political target all before lunch.
For some of us, this space turned into a trap — one that cost us our marriages, our sobriety, our mental health. For others, it’s still where they live, quietly bargaining with themselves to give it “just one more year.”
So maybe the point isn’t to glorify the idea of doing what you love. Maybe the real work is to build a world where people who do what they love aren’t crushed by it. Where they’re paid fairly. Protected. Listened to. And where it’s okay to walk away when the job — or the culture around it — no longer matches the values that brought them in.
That’s the version of the book I’d write. Not a fantasy about love and money skipping off into the sunset together, but a real, raw manual on how to survive the cost of caring.
Because if we don’t talk about it — if we don’t shine light on what it actually means to be in service — we’ll keep losing the people we can least afford to lose.
And not just from the jobs. But from their families. Their health. Their sense of self. From baseball games that only happen once. From moments like this one I am sitting at right now.
Because if we don’t talk about it — if we don’t shine light on what it actually means to be in service — we’ll keep losing the people we can least afford to lose.
Not just from the jobs. From everything.