Being Human Writing

Written By Sarah Revie

Softness is heavy. It sounds gentle but carrying it every day; in crisis calls, intake notes, late-night worries. It begins to ache in the bones. We are told to bring empathy, to hold space, to stay curious even when the stories are unbearable. And most days, we do. But softness is not weightless. It gathers. In our shoulders, in the silence after meetings, in the moments we tell ourselves to keep it together because someone else needs us to stay steady.

We talk about meeting people where they’re at. But rarely do we talk about meeting the worker where they’re at; tired, hopeful, stretched thin between policy and compassion. In harm reduction, we make space for the messiness of being human. We remind people that perfection isn’t a condition for care. What would it look like to offer that same grace to ourselves?

As someone who works within these systems and has also accessed them many times while seeking care for my own health, I have felt this weight from both sides. The fatigue of the worker and the ache of the person in need of care. I have seen the cracks in the walls from both inside and out, and it’s there, in that in-between space, that I’ve learned just how heavy softness can be.

Sometimes I think softness needs a place to rest, too.

There are days when I can feel it sitting in my chest; that quiet exhaustion that doesn’t announce itself but lingers like a fog. I’ve learned to hide it well. To nod in meetings, take notes, say the right words about boundaries and balance. But sometimes, after a hard session or a phone call that doesn’t leave my mind, I sit in my car and just breathe, waiting for my body to remember that it’s safe to exhale.

It’s strange, the ways we learn to compartmentalize care. I can spend my morning supporting someone through their pain, and my afternoon trying to convince myself that mine deserves attention too. There’s a kind of guilt that comes with needing help when you’re supposed to be the one giving it — as if vulnerability somehow cancels out competence.

But I think the truth is softer than that. Care work, in all its forms, asks us to walk through our own wounds again and again — not because we haven’t healed, but because empathy lives in the places we’ve been broken open. And sometimes that tenderness becomes too much. Not because we don’t care, but because we care so deeply that it hurts.

There’s an ache that comes from holding boundaries in the face of someone else’s suffering. How do I tell a client I can’t come to see them in their moment of crisis because I need to eat lunch, when they don’t even have food or a roof over their head? How do I choose myself in those moments without feeling like I’m abandoning them?

This is the quiet math of care work. The calculations we do in our heads that no one trains us for — how much we can give before we start to disappear. It’s a strange kind of privilege to pause, to rest, to eat. And yet, it’s also survival. Because if we don’t, we eventually join the long list of helpers who gave until there was nothing left.

The guilt is quiet but constant. It hums beneath everything. The emails, the case notes, the small talk in hallways. It’s the guilt of stepping away, of saying not right now, of knowing while I’m trying to refill my cup, someone else is still empty.

I know, rationally, that I can’t pour from nothing. That self-preservation isn’t selfishness. But the system doesn’t always make space for that truth. It rewards the worker who stays late, who skips breaks, who says yes even when they’re shaking. The culture of care asks us to give endlessly, then calls it “burnout” when we collapse. As if exhaustion were an individual flaw rather than the logical outcome of impossible demands.

Sometimes I wonder if guilt is what happens when compassion has nowhere to go — when we’re taught to turn it inward, to blame ourselves for what the system withholds.

Sometimes I notice it in the smallest moments.
Like standing in line for a coffee between visits, watching the barista write my name on a cup while thinking about the client I just left — hungry, restless, still waiting on housing paperwork that’s taking months too long. I take a sip and the warmth feels like proof that I have more than they do, and somehow that feels wrong.

Other times it’s when I drive away from an appointment that didn’t go well — when someone’s anger spills out of their own exhaustion, and I carry it home in my chest. I replay every word, wondering if I should’ve stayed longer, done more, been softer, been firmer. There’s no clean line between care and guilt, only a series of choices that all feel like compromise.

But lately, I’ve been learning that care doesn’t always mean giving everything away.
That softness can be shared, not spent. That sometimes meeting the worker where they’re at means offering a quiet nod in the hallway, a text that says you’re doing your best, or a supervisor who reminds you that taking a breath is still part of the work.

I’m learning that hope isn’t loud. It’s slow, patient, and often built in community — in the moments where we let each other rest without apology. When we remind each other that we are not the system, even when we work inside it.

But I also think the weight of our exhaustion isn’t just personal — it’s cultural. We live in a westernized, individualistic society that teaches us to compete instead of connect, to measure our worth by productivity, and to view vulnerability as failure. It harms all of us. We forget that we are meant to belong to one another. That community care is not an optional add-on, it’s how we survive.

It’s time we start supporting each other and rooting for one another’s success and growth rather than waiting for someone to fail. We need to move past the idea of cancel culture and toward education culture; one where mistakes are met with dialogue, learning, and accountability, not exile. Where we walk alongside people while they struggle instead of turning away.

Because none of us are meant to do this alone. And maybe that’s the real antidote to burnout. Not tougher skin, but deeper connection.

Maybe meeting the worker where they’re at means building rooms that can hold their humanity; where vulnerability isn’t seen as weakness, where rest isn’t something we earn through exhaustion, and where softness has a place to land.

Because the truth is, care doesn’t end when we turn inward. It expands. It grows roots when we finally let ourselves be tended to, too.

Softness is still heavy.

But now, I’m beginning to see that it isn’t something we have to carry alone. It can rest between us — in shared glances, in laughter after hard days, in the quiet understanding that we’re all trying to hold more than we were ever meant to on our own.

Meeting the worker where they’re at starts here — with honesty, with community, with the permission to be both helper and human. The weight of softness doesn’t disappear when we acknowledge it. But it does become easier to hold when we remember that we were never meant to carry it alone.