This has been a busy week at work. The kind of week where there are so many moving pieces it feels like you are constantly carrying them, trying to make sure none of them drop. Ensuring clients get the care they need often means navigating a system full of unseen steps and quiet coordination.
One evening this week, after a particularly long day at the clinic, I went straight to a city council meeting. It’s a strange transition sometimes. One moment you are holding space for the difficult and often brutal realities people are living through, and the next you are sitting at a council table discussing community issues from a completely different vantage point, in those moments I find myself quietly setting aside the things I had to witness that day and putting on another hat.
There are so many parts of healthcare that most people never see. The parts that are not glamorous or celebrated. The conversations, the follow ups, the advocacy, the small moments of persistence that help someone move one step closer to stability. Without those pieces, people often cannot move forward at all.
It was also a week of grief. More people gone who should still be here. But that is a post for another day.
In the middle of the chaos this week, one moment carried me through. Watching someone go from reluctantly asking for help to slowly opening up and letting me see a small piece of who they are and where they came from.
There is something deeply meaningful about that shift. A person might approach you with guarded eyes, asking only for the bare minimum. Maybe help cleaning or dressing a wound. The interaction is practical at first, almost transactional. But little by little something changes. A small joke. A longer pause in conversation. A story that slips out unexpectedly.
Trust does not arrive all at once. It unfolds slowly.
And I love watching that happen.
What you may not know about me is that I am a bit of a weirdo myself, and that is probably part of why I love working with the population that I do. Many of the people I work with have always lived slightly outside the box. Outsiders in one way or another. People who never quite fit into the tidy structures society likes to create.
Any chance I get, I try to help my clients appreciate their differences. I tell them it is okay to be weird. All the best people are.
I also find myself wondering about the experiences people had before they ever walked through our doors. Every day I see how past interactions with the healthcare system stay with people. Sometimes those experiences shape decisions in ways that can be life threatening. I have seen people who are incredibly sick refuse to go to the hospital.
And when someone finally does begin to trust you, it makes you realize how many things may have happened before you ever met them.
Some of that mistrust is understandable. I do not doubt that many people have been treated poorly because of their race, because they use substances, or because of the way they look when they walk into an emergency department. Those experiences are real and they matter.
At the same time, I also challenge people when I can. I have seen situations where someone believes they were treated differently because of stigma, when what they are actually seeing is the reality of an incredibly strained healthcare system.
Someone might feel humiliated because they were placed in a bed in the hallway, convinced it happened because they are a drug user. But if they looked beside them, they might notice the 85 year old grandmother in the hallway bed next to them.
Sometimes what people interpret as personal rejection is actually the fallout of a system operating beyond its capacity.
None of this erases the harm people have experienced. But it does remind me how complicated healthcare really is for patients and providers alike.
And that is why those small moments of trust matter so much.
Because when someone who has every reason to keep their guard up chooses, even briefly, to let you in, when they allow you to help, to listen, to care, that moment becomes a small bridge across a very wide gap.
Those moments are quiet. They do not make headlines.
But they are often where the real work begins.
And sometimes later, sitting at a council table, I find myself thinking about how many of those quiet moments never make their way into the rooms where community decisions are made.
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