You were doing your best. You were. So was I.
We did our best on a good day when we slept well and the staffing was decent and everyone went home okay. Our best on the days when none of that was true. Our best with what we had, in the circumstances we were in, with the tools and the energy and the support that was — or wasn’t — available to us. We did our best even though we probably went home feeling guilty. Like we could have done more, should have done more. We did all that we could in that moment.
That was enough. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that caregivers carry that doesn’t have a lot of language around it yet. It’s not just tired. It’s the weight of a standard that was never realistic to begin with. The gap between who we were trained to be — endlessly patient, always giving, never breaking — and who we actually are when we are running on three hours of sleep and a granola bar and a shift that was supposed to end two hours ago.
That gap is where the guilt lives.
And for nurses and first responders especially, that gap can feel enormous. Because the standard we hold ourselves to is impossibly high. And the system we work inside knows that. And sometimes — let’s be honest — it counts on it.
Doing your best is not a fixed thing. It moves. It changes depending on what you’re carrying that day, that week, that year. The version of you that showed up on your worst shift was still doing her best. The version of you that had to emotionally disconnect to get through a night was still doing her best. The version of you that went home and had nothing left — she was doing her best too.
We are not the sum of our worst days.
Self-compassion — and I know that phrase makes some of you roll your eyes, I see you, I’ve been you — is not about letting yourself off the hook. It’s not soft. It’s not a bubble bath and a candle. For those of us who have worked a sixteen hour shift and then driven home in the dark wondering if we did enough, self-compassion is actually the hardest and most radical thing we can practice.
It means looking at yourself with the same honesty and fairness you’d give a colleague. Would you tell her she failed? Would you tell her she should have done more when there was literally no more to give?
Would you tell her she did not do enough?
No. You wouldn’t. So why do we say it to ourselves? Here’s a radical idea, we don’t have to prove our worth by grinding ourselves down to nothing. Doing nothing is doing something. As Celeste Headlee explores in Do Nothing, we can do nothing and still not feel guilty. Doing nothing can be doing something too.
We do the best we can. And our best — on every single one of those days — was enough.