What Having a Job in a Domestic Violence Agency Means (for me)

• It means sitting with the violence in my own life everyday. Consciously or subconsciously.

• It means living in childhood coping mechanisms again just to get through a meeting.

• It means choosing to notice my defense strategies, name them and struggle to learn when it’s appropriate to let them go.

• It means knowing why I go to work everyday.

• It means work doesn’t feel like work. It feels like family. Family in all the wrenching and life giving ways family can be.

• It means no longer being able to name something as triggering. Not because it isn’t true but because the word itself feels too violent.

• It means trying to shed the stories that lay flat in office filing cabinets so that I can look at families on the street and not wonder.

• It means thinking of Pearla Ann Louis' body folded into a suitcase when my housemate doesn’t come home and isn’t answering hir phone.

• It means that’s my first thought. Not that she’s working late and hir phone is out of battery.

• It means wrestling with what I really believe about love and why we want it.

• It means changing.

• It means side stepping self-righteousness and failing. Daily.

• It means learning how to listen and hold what I would rather speak away.

• It means not embracing the feeling that I am inadequate just because I don’t know how to respond. Those responses shouldn’t have to come so easily.

• It means seeing how it’s possible to work through/with trauma.

• It means watching people transform their lives.

• It means gaining some perspective.

• It means trying to say all these things even though I’m told it’s not ‘professional’ to feel them.

• It means cultivating better boundaries.

• It means “this is not about you” has become a temporary mantra.

• It means listening to people tell you they could never do your job. Even though they already do.