I am looking from behind my eyes,
my physicality a veil I watch through clearly.
The skin of my eyes a barricade
to the onslaught of traumatic content
I can no longer hold.
I see their tears,
but my eyes are dry.
I witness their emotion,
but I remain emotionless
I am looking with the warm face of compassion
though I am cool as winters stone.
I am masquerading,
A marionette.
The mind that wields me
unseen
unknown.
I am going through the motions
while inside
I am motionless.
Some other part drives me to
sit, stand, speak, act.
There is no internal impulse
I have lost my heart.
I am a wooden shell,
all elbows and knees
and forced stringed articulation
© Sabrina Santa Clara, 2021
The story behind the poem
I wrote this about a year into the isolation of the pandemic. I had just moved back to Colorado, alone, into a house full of renovations and a contractor who made everything harder. The move itself was its own ordeal. I drove from Las Vegas three separate times before the final move that December, hauling my life a piece at a time, and somewhere in there the trailer picked up bedbugs I fought back and forth across those trips. I got COVID twice. And through all of it, I was still the one holding hope for everyone else.
Here is what humbles me about it. I never used to understand therapist burnout. I was careful. I didn’t overwork. I did my practices, kept my boundaries, tended myself the way we are taught to, and I thought that made me immune. But that year burned me out anyway: the isolation, the upheaval, and the particular weight of being the steady one for other people while my own ground was gone. This poem is what that felt like from the inside. Watching everyone’s feeling through glass, wearing the warm face while nothing moved underneath.
I still don’t fully know how I got through it, or how, even hollowed out like this, I kept showing up and truly tended to the people who came to me. I have come to believe there is something quietly heroic in that, and I don’t mean it grandly. Therapists, healers, caregivers walk some version of the heroine’s journey every single day. We descend into someone’s underworld with them, hold steady in the dark, and climb back out, only to do it again tomorrow, usually while carrying our own. I keep this poem as a witness to the year I learned that burnout is not a failure of discipline. Sometimes it is simply the cost of staying tender in impossible conditions, and proof that you can be emptied out and still, somehow, show up with love.