Amanda Chrismon: How I Learned to Quit
Every Saturday from 8 to 5 for most of my sophomore year, you could find me at a non-disclosed location in Greenville County answering phones. I was working on the CrisisLine run by Mental Health America of Greenville County. For the first few months, I would make that hour-long commute happily knowing that I may be able to make someone’s life better that day. I had always known that I was going take on a career in a helping field, so working at a crisis hotline seemed like a great way to test the waters. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I would settle into the phone room every Saturday morning and wait for people to call and bare their souls to me and I would perfectly identify all of their feelings and offer the perfect solutions that would end all of their suffering. At least, that’s what I thought would happen. It didn’t take long for the reality of the job to set in, but even then, I was up for the challenge.
Calls would come in at what seemed like a constant rate. Someone was facing homelessness. Someone’s dad just died, and they are spiraling back into drug abuse. Someone might lose their kids because their soon-to-be ex-partner is fighting viciously in court for them. Someone can’t find a single reason to be alive anymore. The tragedy never stopped. At first, it was easy to leave it all in the phone room. I would leave, grab dinner with my coworker, and we would laugh over pizza like we weren’t just consoling someone at the end of their rope half an hour earlier. But it started to take a toll on me. I would randomly remember the deeply troubling things that people would tell me, and I would ruminate on them during the drive home. Eventually, I found myself obsessing over all of the awful things that are happening to people everywhere. It seemed like such an unmanageable tangle of disaster and strife. My own depression flared. I started to dread the idea of trying to untangle everyone’s problems.
The commute turned into the worst part of my week. I sat silently in a daze hoping some hand of fate would keep me from reaching the call center. I knew something needed to change, yet I still showed up every week and never mentioned my feelings to anyone. Everyone there was answering the same kind of calls that I was, and they didn’t seem to have an issue. This had to be a me problem, right? I knew that to say that I was struggling was to admit that I wasn’t cut out for the job. I started to think that my life-long plan to work in a helping field was a mistake. If I couldn’t be successful in this field now, how would I ever be? This self-doubt clouded everything I did. I hung up after every phone call thinking that I made all the wrong choices and could have done more. The longer this went on, the more I saw it affecting the quality of work I was doing.
I couldn’t bear to think that I could be making someone feel worse, so I opted to do more work with a less intense and more conversational service that the CrisisLine provided. This service was for people who needed companionship or just reminders to eat, clean, or pay bills. I knew that I was in too deep when even light conversations about remembering to take medication were too overwhelming to me. The only thing I could think of to remedy my situation was to quit. I had never quit anything before, so the thought of that was terrifying. I would have to admit that I had failed to do what I was hired to do. I knew that I was letting my supervisors and everyone that I worked with down. I was leaving them with more work to do because I couldn’t keep up.
One Saturday afternoon, I sat in front of my supervisor with shaking hands, and I quit. I apologized relentlessly and anticipated a disappointed look and irritation about having to find a new person and work out a new schedule. Instead, I was met with compassion and understanding. My supervisor assured me that there was nothing to be sorry for and that my health should come before anyone else’s. Her kind and patient response should have made me feel relieved, but I was filled with confusion instead. Did she not understand what I said? I was quitting. I wasn’t coming back. I wasn’t of any help to her anymore. But she still hugged me before I left and said that I could call her if I ever needed her. I went home stunned and still filled with shame for not being able to stay at the job that was filling me with trepidation.
It wasn’t until several months and a lot of therapy later that I realized that what I experienced wasn’t a total loss. Don’t get me wrong, it sucked, and I would never want to go through it again. But I learned about setting professional boundaries. I learned how to quit a job. I learned that there is absolutely no place in the field of crisis intervention for me, and I am more than okay with that. I suffered for a long time because I didn’t recognize when I had reached my limit emotionally. My work suffered because I wasn’t able to put myself entirely into helping others. I have a much better understanding of how to care for myself as a person who plans on spending their life helping others improve and grow. I just never thought I would learn something like that from quitting.
Amanda is a senior psychology major with minors in child and family studies and human services. She retroactively completed her breakaway from July 2018 to April 2019 with Mental Health America of Greenville County. She will be graduating in May 2021 and will be pursuing a Master of Education in Counseling and Development with a concentration in school counseling at Winthrop University.