The Truth About Crisis Response.

When people ask me what my favorite part about my job is, I lie. I'll tell them the drug and alcohol education, the hilarious things students say, the free apartment in a great city. I lie about this because the truth almost always elicits the same look from people: A mix of horror, shock, and like I'm batshit crazy. The truth is that my favorite part about my job is crisis response.

This look.

In the residence life world, not one thing seems to be as reviled as being on-call, or the duty phone - or, worse yet, the duty phone ring. The ring that, when you hear it out in public, randomly, even when you know you're not actually on-call, your blood freezes in your veins and you think, "OH GOD. WHAT. WHAT NOW." I tend to play along with that mentality because I get self-conscious sometimes. I worry about what people will think of me if they knew the horrible truth...

I love the damn thing. I love 3am duty calls. I love that moment, just before I roll into the room, when I'm not quite sure what's going to happen, but I'm ready to not be ready. I'm ready for the surprise, for the chaos, for all the different directions it can go. I love the feeling of adrenaline, the way it seizes through my veins, the way it snaps every single sense into high alert and everything becomes clearer around the edges. I love the challenge, the pulse, the collaboration, the way I can exchange a glance with another first responder, and if we're on our game, we come in strong, hard, a united front. Mostly, though? I love when shit gets weird.

At this point, I should probably clarify that my love for this part of my job does not mean that I sit around, hoping for terrible things to happen, or for students to snap, or for there to be some disaster, just so I have something to get my rocks off on. For as much as I love a good 3am duty call, I would much rather sleep through the night. For as much as I love talking to students about drugs and alcohol, I would much rather them not get transported to the hospital because they had too much. For as much as I love supporting a student through something tough, I would much rather them know peace, health, and wellbeing. I don't wish for bad things to happen. But I'm ready for when they eventually do. I have to be.

Today, I was leaving my apartment, on my way to lunch, then to a meeting, and not in a good mood. I didn't want to deal with shit, didn't want to work, and honestly, wanted to tell the world to fuck off while I went and sat in the sun and read a trashy romance novel and was grumpy about nothing in particular.

But oh, Universe, you are a saucy, tricky minx.

Just before I left the hallway, I overheard a student screaming and crying from her room, obviously on the phone with somebody, obviously distraught, but I couldn't tell what was specifically wrong. She was just sounded...completely hysterical, screaming all sorts of terrible things. I debated leaving her alone - sometimes you just need your privacy to feel what you need to feel - but there was something different in the way it all sounded. My gut told me not to walk away, and I've learned to listen.

I knocked, and she screamed at me to go away and leave her alone. I identified myself and told her that I wasn't going anywhere until she came out and showed me she was okay. She opened the door just a crack, glared at me through red-rimmed eyes, over puffy cheeks, and said, "I'm fine. See. Now fuck off." Then slammed the door in my face.

I stared at her closed door, then thought, "Oh no this little girl just didn't." Then I knocked again and said, "I'm not moving until you talk to me."

I let her scream at me through that closed door until it sounded like she was going to rupture her vocal chords. People walked by, giving me funny looks, and I told them everything was fine. She screamed and cursed and insulted and threw shit at the door. And I waited. And waited. And waited. And I kept saying, "I'm not moving." And eventually, the crying and screaming stopped, and the door slowly opened. She just stood there, looking disheveled, defeated, and exhausted. I know it's a little messed up, but I had kind of counted on that. Tell me to fuck off? Please. I'm one of the most stubborn people I know.

I told her that it was okay not to be okay, that whatever was going on, she didn't need to go through it alone. Writing it out like that makes it sound kind of cheesy, trite. But the truth is, it's one of my guiding philosophies. When you live in my community, you're never alone. End of story.

I ended up sitting with her in her doorway for a bit, listening to her talk between quiet, hiccuping sobs, about what she was going through. I could feel the adrenaline ebbing a bit as I slipped away from a more immediate and amped response mode. She was obviously moving through something profound, but  the longer I sat there, the more I realized that she didn't need much else than space to talk and to be heard.

At the end of the day, we all just want to feel like we're being heard.

When our conversation ended, she had stopped crying completely. I made her promise to meet with me in an hour, so we could sort out some stuff, mostly around getting her support in some areas, and I left for my meeting. As I left my building, I realized that my sour mood had lifted. My head was no longer foggy, and I felt alert, awake, and okay. She had given me something else to focus on, something bigger than myself and my problems, and we were both going to be okay.

Walking across campus, feeling the breeze in my hair, the sun on my skin, I felt at ease, steady. It was beautiful out, the sky clear and blue, one of those rare, warm San Francisco days. I thought about something that's a constant for me in this work: For as much as I want to take all of their pain and anguish away, it's not on me to save them. It's not on me to save anybody. I'm not going to carry anybody through anything. But we can hold each other up as we walk through the fire together.