As I read Sarah Gundle’s essay “I Can’t Remember His Name” (Intima, Spring 2023), I recognized a young and eager clinician who felt both moved by someone’s story and inept at affecting change, a dissonance that can reverberate throughout decades of practice. I, too, remembered my earliest encounters, when my own therapeutic skin was most supple and soft, vulnerable to the bruising weights of trauma, addiction and injustice. I recognized the writer’s spontaneous tears – and the impulse to minimize and dismiss them in accordance with the guidelines of rational detachment and therapeutic rapport.
“I can recall many of our conversations, the gentle character of his voice, and the resignation in his eyes, but not his name.” Years later, the writer puzzles over what she remembers about an individual and what she does not. Implicit in her piece is the guilt, though it more closely resembles shame, that his name eludes her years later. Not his words or his gestures or the way his eyes would crinkle at the edges when he smiled or go dark and vacant when he didn’t. Not her compassion for his misdiagnosis or the way he felt seen while in her care.
Why is it hardest to show this same compassion to ourselves? Does it stem from our inability to affect change in all the ways we’d hoped? Or because, despite our efforts, we may not prevent further illness, trauma, incarceration, even death?
In “Managed Care” I wrote about four of the patients who, years later, still roam about my memory. Though I can recall vivid snapshots and scenes and stories of each, I remember the name of only one. I most remember feeling overwhelmed by the chasm that separated how I could help and how I could not.
If self-care is burnout’s antidote, though I’m reticent to believe in such simple solutions, perhaps its precursor is self-compassion — and the bridge that spans the distance between what we couldn’t do and what we did. Maybe if we considered our efforts to hear the stories of patients’ illness as a valuable intervention, we’d use a gentler metric to assess the efficacy of our care.—Jennifer Anderson
Jennifer Anderson worked for twenty-three years as an inpatient psychiatric nurse for children and adolescents. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Antioch University and begins her study of narrative medicine through Columbia University's C.P.A. program this fall. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review and Iron Horse Literary Review. She lives in Wisconsin with her husband and their three teens. Her essay, “Managed Cared” appeared in the Fall 2024 Intima