ONE TIME FOR THE SOCIAL WORKERS

March Is Social Work Month

What better time to go back TEN YEARS to 2016. To the very beginning. How I got here, and what made me stay. Because being a social worker is hard and this was not the plan.

What I actually wanted to be was a sports reporter—

I wanted to report on sports. I loved sports; I wanted sports to be a part of my future career and that seemed like a cool way to make that possible.

I was playing soccer at FIU, and when I went to my athlete academic advisor to declare my major, she gently delivered the news that the communications school was across the city (of Miami) in Biscayne Bay, and between practices, meetings, weight lifting, travel, and games, making that work was basically a fantasy. A few days later I went back to her office to figure out a new major.

While I was sitting there, she was explaining recreation therapy to one of my teammates. A career built around helping people with disabilities access sports, recreation, and leisure. Creating spaces where everyone could participate, regardless of ability.

And just like that, I was a rec therapy major. 

I imagined Special Olympics, adaptive sports, being outside. Helping people rise above their disability or diagnosis, and realize they are just as capable as an able bodied person, can participate in life just as an able bodied person, just with some modifications. Just as my internship at Jackson Memorial Hospital prepared me for. 

Then I ended up in behavioral health. Which, to be clear, is not that. 

I decided to get my masters after 4 years of working as a certified therapeutic recreation specialist (CTRS). When I got accepted to BU in 2016, I was working full-time on the behavioral health unit at Virginia Beach General. I was running multiple rec therapy groups a day, constantly developing creative groups, and learning how to actually connect with people who were in the middle of some of the worst moments of their lives.

This was probably the first time my career really changed me.

It confronted me with how fragile life is, how indiscriminate trauma, addiction, mental health, accidents are; how we are more alike than we are different. 

It stretched me in ways I wasn't expecting and honestly wasn't always comfortable with. Facilitating so much self reflection, invited me to look at my own behaviors and patterns. I’ve always hated to be a hypocrite, so I wanted to actually practice what I was preaching in groups (healthy habits, relationships, lifestyle, you know…)

The psychiatrists on the unit started asking me to spend extra time with patients. They asked me to spend time talking, processing, and just sitting with people in their pain. They saw something in the way I connected with our patients before I fully understood what it meant for myself. Which is a strange thing to carry. Like, oh– you really trust me to do this?  

Even then I didn't think I was going to become a therapist.

But I knew I wanted more. I wanted a deeper understanding of trauma, human behavior, how someone becomes who they are. I knew I was being stretched beyond what my current training could hold.

That's what led me to my MSW. 

From the start, social work felt different from other paths in mental health.

I was never drawn to counseling programs, MFT, or psychology. Not because they aren't valuable,  but the lens felt too narrow for what I was actually trying to understand. I didn't want to pathologize people. I wanted to understand them, and I was not about to go to medical school, so being a psychiatrist was off the table.

And okay, I'll say it — I think social work is the superior profession. Personal bias, obvi. But hear my case.

What sets social work apart is that it's the only helping profession formally trained to see the person and the system around them at the same time.

Psychology asks what's wrong with you.

Psychiatry asks how to treat the symptom.

Social work asks what happened to you — and then keeps going. What did your family look like? What systems and structures shaped your life? What barriers exist right now that have nothing to do with your individual choices and everything to do with your circumstances (race, gender, social class, education, religion, geographic location, etc)?

That's a fundamentally different question. And it changes everything about how you see someone. 

I admit that social work isn't a perfect profession. It has historically centered whiteness, ableism, and lifted up privilege rather than lifted up the oppressed. That duality is important to name. What I'm most grateful for about my education from BU is that we didn't look away from that. Professors identified the imperfections, and then required us to look at ourselves and do the same. What are my biases, blind spots, what are my own relationships to power and privilege?

We had to understand the lens we were looking through before we could be trusted to use it.

In social work, everything matters. That's not some tagline. That's the actual framework I work within.

Honestly, I didn't get my MSW to become a therapist. I didn’t foresee myself getting into sound healing or owning a business. I genuinely thought I'd stay in hospitals or community mental health settings forever. I never envisioned the road that started in 2016 would lead me here. 

I’ve been in it for a long time. And at times I loved it, and at others the work crushed me.

Working at Stanford felt like social work at its most alive — high acuity, complex trauma, complex cases, real ethical dilemmas, constant advocacy. I served on the ethics committee. I worked across nearly every stage of life, brief postpartum work, end-of-life care, and everything in between. Inpatient and outpatient. I have held someone's hand as they died. I have sat with families in their most devastating moments. I have been in rooms where the whole team is focused on a diagnosis and I'm thinking about the person's entire life outside the hospital walls.

That's the social worker's role on a medical team. To see the patient differently. Not as a chart or a treatment plan, but as a whole human being whose life and whose story, exists far beyond the hospital. 

Sometimes that means advocating loudly. Sometimes it means slowing the room down. Sometimes it means being the person who says, wait– what do we actually know about this person?

Sometimes the team liked it. Sometimes they didn't. And I learned to handle the pendulum. 

I think sometimes about what my life would look like if I'd ended up in broadcasting.

If I didn't carry the understanding of human behavior and systems and suffering that I carry now.

The memories, the stories I hold. Part of me thinks it would be simpler. A simpler life, because blissful ignorance is genuinely underrated, ya know. 

But I don't think I'd trade it. All of it mattered.

I needed every second of it to get me to this point in my life and career.

All of the experiences shaped me to be the social worker and person I am. At this point, I feel like I paid my dues, which has allowed me to be the “modern day therapist” I am today.

I read something recently from a coach friend: rarely do our clients know the impact they have on us.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

Every person you sit with in vulnerability changes you. Just ask anyone who has ever sat with someone in a time of vulnerability.

Social work teaches you something most professions don't: how to witness people without trying to fix them. To ask different questions. To understand that individual suffering rarely exists in a vacuum, and the whole picture is almost always bigger than what we see right in front of us.

I guess I ended up in storytelling and championing resilience after all.

Just not the way I planned.

Which tracks….