Two months is an awkward amount of time. I’ve always felt that way about summer. It’s just enough time to get acquainted and comfortable with a place before you have to leave.
For the first couple of weeks here, quite a few of us were in a honeymoon phase. I was no exception. Ask anybody in our group—I couldn’t be quiet about the Spanish moss. Our everyday walk to the Children’s Advocacy Center was covered on either side with sprawling masses from arching trees. Everything seemed perfect.
After a couple more weeks, I began to see the importance in developing a rhythm here. Because we’re not here on vacation, but rather to work, we need to treat it is as such. And that means finding our spots in the city. What helps us to take care of ourselves. Not just the touristy Bourbon St, or the fun restaurants on Magazine St. Finding our own rhythms in this city is part of self-care. We have to make it our home.
A lot of us are in internships that bring us into close proximity with weighty issues, whether that’s HIV, illness, homelessness, or child abuse. It’s easy to brush the issues away and not address how they may be impacting us individually.
A couple weeks ago, we had a self-care session at the Children’s Advocacy Center. The leader gave the attendees strategies for how we could learn to best care for ourselves and handle vicarious trauma, or compassion fatigue. The American Counseling Association defines vicarious trauma as “the emotional residue of exposure that counselors have from working with people as they are hearing their trauma stories and become witnesses to the pain, fear, and terror that trauma survivors have endured.”
In the session about vicarious trauma, every attendee created his or her own self-care plan. We had to finish the following sentences:
– I can exercise my body by…
– I can be a good friend by…
– Important people I can trust…
– I can relax my body and mind by…
– I can keep myself clean and tidy by…
– I can make myself happy by…
– My hopes and dreams…
– I can eat healthy foods…
Filling out this plan helped me grow in one of my goals for the summer: learning how to handle others’ heavy emotional stories that can lead to vicarious trauma.
Practicing self-care is the primary reason I believe that we can’t just treat New Orleans, this strange two-month home, as a trip. We have to learn how we can take care of ourselves here, which requires finding our own rhythm in the city.
My rhythm has looked like walking along the Mississippi River or in Audubon Park, calling friends from home, journaling, watercoloring, and cooking new dishes with my apartmentmates.
Each of us has to find our own rhythm so we can best care for ourselves—what’s your rhythm?