Fierce Grace Advocacy

My first SART call came on my sixth shift.

Five shifts of waiting — of sitting with my phone, mentally rehearsing, wondering what I would say and how I would say it — and then, finally, the call. I drove to the hospital in the dark with my heart doing something complicated in my chest. I had prepared for this. I had trained for this. I knew the protocols, the language, the philosophy. I walked in with all of it tucked under my arm like a shield.

And then I met her.

She was young. Tough in the particular way that very young people sometimes are — not hardened exactly, but efficient. Self-contained. She knew what she needed and she knew what she didn’t, and she moved through the process with a kind of quiet competence that broke my heart a little. She didn’t want engagement. She didn’t want warmth, or connection, or a permanent advocate. She wanted to sign what needed to be signed, complete what needed to be completed, and be done. Her answers were short. They did not invite follow-up.

I got her to choose a couple of bags of chips. I couldn’t get her to drink water, even though she was clearly dehydrated. I held space for someone who didn’t want space held — which turns out to be its own particular skill, one that doesn’t appear neatly in any training manual.

And still, I felt useless. I felt like a failure.

It took me a little while — and, fortuitously, a therapy session the next morning — to understand that those two things could both be true and still resolve in the right direction. The call had gone the way it was supposed to go. We had followed her lead. We had not pushed, not projected, not made the experience about our own need to help. From a training perspective, it was almost ideal — she was so self-sufficient that I was able to be present for the full forensic process, learning, witnessing, doing my job simply by being there.

She didn’t need me. And that was okay. Showing up for someone who doesn’t need you is still showing up.

And then, just as I was collecting my things — forty minutes from the end of my shift — another call came in.

I stood there for a moment with my bag in my hand. Three hours. Three hours of sustained presence, of holding myself carefully still, of tracking every word and silence and microexpression in that room — and I was done. Not dramatically, not in any way that would have been visible to anyone else. Just done in the way that a body knows when it has met its edge.

I texted the dispatcher. I told her I hadn’t prepared for a back-to-back on my first call, and asked if anyone else was available.

They were. Another advocate came in. The second client was taken care of.

And I sat with that — the relief, and underneath it, the familiar whisper of failure. You should have stayed. You should have had more. You should have been able to do more.

But here is what my therapist helped me see the next morning: asking for reinforcements is not a departure from the work. It is the work. My job as an advocate is to show up fully — not just physically, but in every way that matters. To be present in some of the darkest and most difficult moments of another person’s life. That is not something you can do halfway. That is not something you can do while running on empty, while still carrying the weight of the three hours that came before.

If I had walked into that second room depleted, I would have been doing that client a profound disservice. She would have deserved better than a checked-out advocate going through the motions. They all deserve better than that. Knowing when your bandwidth is met — and acting on that knowledge honestly — is not weakness. It is the same client-centered philosophy that guided every decision I made in that first room. I put the client first. I just didn’t recognize it in the moment, because it didn’t look the way I expected it to.

I did not cry when I got home. I expected to — I am someone who cries at the stupidest things, at commercials and song lyrics and sunsets. But the tears didn’t come. Instead there was something quieter and stranger: a kind of shell shock. A heaviness that didn’t have a name yet.

She hadn’t expressed much emotion. She hadn’t needed to — she had her own way of moving through it, and it was working for her. But I had felt it anyway. The weight of what had happened to her, of her life circumstances, of her youth, of the particular heartbreak of watching someone be so competent in a moment that should never have required that competence. The grief was there in the room whether she showed it or not. I absorbed it the way you absorb things you witness — not loudly, not all at once, but thoroughly.

I got home. I found Pepper. I gave Ryan the shape of the night in broad strokes — a small debrief, enough to say this happened and it was hard — and then I slept for six hours like a person who had been somewhere. I woke up with a gnawing headache and a heavy heart.

This, too, is part of the work. Not a failure of resilience — evidence of it. You cannot feel the weight of what you witnessed and walk away unchanged, and you shouldn’t try to. The point is not to be unmoved. The point is to have somewhere to put it — a therapist, a partner, a dog who doesn’t ask questions — and to let yourself be held by whatever is waiting for you on the other side of the shift.

She didn’t acknowledge her own strength that night. I don’t think she could — not yet, maybe not for a long time. That is the nature of surviving something: the bravery is often invisible to the person who is living it.

But we saw it. The nurses saw it. I saw it. Every person in that room who showed up to do their small part of an imperfect, necessary process — we all saw it. That is what witnesses are for.

She may not have expressed much emotion, but I felt it anyway. She may not have seen herself as doing anything remarkable, but we all felt it anyway. She may not have cared whether we were there or not — but we all did. We cared. We showed up. We held the knowledge of her strength carefully, in the hope that someday, when she is ready, she will be able to take it back and hold it herself.

That is what advocacy looks like sometimes. Not a breakthrough. Not a moment of connection. Not the particular satisfaction of knowing you helped. Sometimes it is quieter than that — a blanket chosen, a bag of chips accepted, a process completed with dignity intact. Sometimes the whole point is simply to bear witness to someone’s survival, even when they are not yet ready to call it that.

I drove home in the dark the same way I had arrived. But I was not the same person who had walked into that hospital with her heart doing something complicated and her protocols tucked under her arm like a shield.

My first call taught me more than I could have anticipated. It taught me what it means to follow a client’s lead even when every instinct wants to do more. It taught me that knowing your limits is its own form of advocacy. It taught me that grief doesn’t need permission to be present — it will find you anyway, and you have to have somewhere to put it. And it taught me, quietly and without fanfare, that I can do this work.

I feel more ready for the next call. And for that — for all of it, even the hard parts, especially the hard parts — I am grateful.