Individual Heroism Won’t Save Us

Last week, the New York Times reported that Dr. Lorna Breen, the emergency medical director at the New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in Upper Manhattan, died by suicide. By all accounts, Breen was a hero, and it was this self-sacrificing heroism, according to her father, that would become her undoing during New York City’s COVID-19 outbreak:

“Dr. Breen, 49, did not have a history of mental illness, her father said. But he said that when he last spoke with her, she seemed detached, and he could tell something was wrong. She had described to him an onslaught of patients who were dying before they could even be taken out of ambulances. ‘She was truly in the trenches of the front line,’ he said. He added: ‘Make sure she’s praised as a hero, because she was.’”

As a psychotherapist writing to you during Mental Health Awareness month, I have to say that at present I’m exhausted: physically, personally, spiritually, but especially, professionally. In a moment where medical professionals like Breen, chaplains, grocery clerks, mail carriers, and delivery personnel risk life and limb each day to keep our country afloat, it would seem a fundamental misreading of the room to admit personal defeat in the face of what seems more and more like months of teletherapy from the comfort of my home. I guess I’ve finally realized that there are only so many ways to ask “and how would you say this seemingly unending global apocalypse really feels for you today?” It’s hard to blame someone’s emotionally stunted parents for that one.

However, brave or not, here we are, or, rather here I am, admitting my lack of heroism all the same. For the first time in my career, I can feel my lack of “okay-ness” leaking out of me.

Normally, in moments very unlike our present, I could sit and laugh with extended family without fearing that my presence will expose them to an early death. I could get takeout without having to surgically remove the food from its packaging in a designated clean room like it’s a rupturing spleen. I could even venture to a quiet park where I’m passed too closely by a jogger or family of five without having my existential ire erupt out of me like a sermon, delivered only to my weary family on the way home. Most days I was able to have a tough day at work without having to forage for canned beans and toilet paper in surgical gear at our local Kroger as a nightcap.

Because I live in East Tennessee, I suppose I could join the rest of my state’s leadership in just pretending like things can go back to normal because we’re all tired of staying at home not getting our nails done. Regardless of what you may believe about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of opening almost everything but the one thing functioning societies actually need (schools) back up, being abandoned to make decisions that are not ours as individual citizens to make is the most crippling of maladies facing us right now. Elected officials who refuse to make or enforce difficult decisions because they don’t like “government telling people what to do” may at first feel like a proper respecting of our autonomy as citizens, but it’s actually abandonment.

Abandoning citizens to their own devices in the midst of a confusing and scary time isn’t a governmental strategy or a “respecting” of peoples’ rights — it is an abdication of responsibility out of a fear that people (or rather, corporations pretending to be people) won’t like you or vote for you again. And it leaves adults like Breen or my chaplain friend in South Georgia, Will, to clean up the mess until they can’t anymore.

Breen’s life and death, if we will allow it, teaches us that individual heroism in the face of a leadership vacuum will always be co-opted, branded, cynically celebrated, and eventually used up and forgotten because it allows those who benefit from doing nothing, to keep doing nothing. My fatigue, your fatigue, my anxiety, your anxiety, our collective pain isn’t a failure of our heroism, of how we can’t take it anymore, but is rather, a reminder that we shouldn’t have to be heroes to survive in this country. The pain is our body’s quiet acknowledgment that we were owed something better from those in charge, and every time they forward this responsibility to us (as private citizens, pastors of churches, owners of businesses) and we claim it as our own, it can and will only produce chaos, fear and this overwhelming sense that we’ll never be enough to fix it.

In this kind of moment, the most important thing we can do is care for ourselves the way we always wanted to be cared for by those who came before us. Because when we patiently empathize with, rather than shame, the depression and anxiety and overwhelm leaking out of us right now, we may discover that some of the things these feelings are noticing about our world aren’t wrong, they just don’t have answers we can provide at the moment. And when we come to this, the edge of our responsibility and understanding as individual citizens (no matter how well-educated or experienced we may be), it is time to finally reject the temptation to be heroic and keep going, and to instead curl up with something or someone that reminds us that we aren’t alone to fix or save the world.