Finding Your Calm in the Crazy

Written by Samantha Hawkins, published May 12, 2021

Finding the calm amid the crazy is certainly easier said than done.

For those of us in public safety careers, worrying and stressing out over everything is just about as common and as natural to us as breathing. I’ve been in 9-1-1 for six years now, and believe me I know firsthand about dispatchers having mini panic attacks on the floor. (I’ve blown out a few fuses in my own head at times too.) When you’re under a lot of stress it can be difficult keeping your problems in perspective. Sometimes the simplest dilemma can look like a mountain standing in your way. Or that busy radio that you usually enjoy working can just seem suddenly overwhelming to the point of you wanting to rip your headset off and fling it halfway across the room. And sometimes the uncertainty and confusion that comes with the difficulty of a situation can get so, so very loud in your head.

When I find myself feeling the frustration building because a particular problem is screaming at me to face it, I will take a mental step back from the situation and just try to find my center again in all the craziness around me. I call this: turning the caps lock off in my head. This past April, I found myself having to do just that. I was in the middle of a ten-day stretch. I was feeling a bit exhausted from back-to-back shifts on “phones” duty at my center as well as a little wrecked, physically, after three intense days of peer support training that required me to wake up (and stay up) earlier than usual. Meanwhile, I had been sleeping in bursts of just two-three hours a day, due to my staying up late working on articles, and constantly tweaking and re-tweaking a PowerPoint presentation I was working on about “empathy in 9-1-1 calltaking.” I remember that by day four of my extended work week I had developed a serious bout of writer’s block and was on the verge of deleting slide #19 altogether because I was frustrated that I couldn’t find a good stock image to illustrate the text under that topic. I popped a couple of Excedrin to deal with the migraine I had developed.

By day six I was a half-eaten bag of sunflower seeds away from questioning my entire life’s purpose, including why I was even in this line of work. I had been assigned to work my favorite police radio but even twelve hours of that turned into near-chaos. I was finding their radio traffic baffling and unintelligible. I was infuriated by even the slightest missteps; like when a brand-new officer out of mandate bungled giving his traffic stop over the air. I was sitting at my desk looking over the notes from the previous days’ worth of lectures and trying to make sense of it all, but my brain wasn’t cooperating. I took a routine 9-1-1 call from a citizen who needed to get an accident report and I literally zoned out while they were talking to me. When I asked the caller to basically repeat everything they had just told me within the first minute of the call, they responded by snapping at me angrily and calling me “some kind of a moron.” I scolded myself silently.  THEY’RE RIGHT. YOU ARE A MORON. That was the first call I had answered that day and it didn’t inspire me at all to want to answer any more phones. The rest of the day I tried to act like all was well though, wearing the biggest smile I could muster on my face.

Day eight was without a doubt my breaking point. I came home that morning from the 9-1-1 center and decided that instead of getting some much-needed sleep I was going to start assembling the full size upholstered daybed that had been delivered by the furniture store the day before. I was running on negative-X-many hours of sleep at this time and a can of Red Bull. I put the whole top frame together, screwing in what felt like no less than a hundred bolts and washers. I was hazy, working on my own version of autopilot, but overall satisfied by my progress. I was positive that this had been the smoothest thing to happen for me the whole week... that is until I came across a glaring discrepancy between the instructional manual before me and the number of parts I had left to work with. I soon realized that I was missing a very crucial part for the assembly of my bed. I must have spent at least ten minutes searching the floor of that bedroom as though there was any way I could be overlooking a four-feet-long piece of wood. I was barely doing all that I could to keep my head above water as it was, and this was one surprise tidal wave that I didn’t need.

I just crumbled to my knees on the carpet as the tears began to fall from my eyes. I FAILED. I FAILED. I FAILED. Was all that was playing over and over in my head. The caps lock button in my head was stuck down. I was bombarded by so many depressive thoughts. Like how worthless I was to my family coming home every day exhausted and having little to no energy to do anything outside of work. Like how the previous two days I had given my callers less than my usual 110%. Like how I was only a few weeks away from Mother’s Day. Like how another 9-1-1 awards banquet had come and gone, and after six years in this job I still didn’t have a single life-saving award to show for any of the medical calls I had taken. And now, as a final straw, I was staring down a partially assembled bed with a mess of hardware scattered about the floor. I realize now that my amygdala (which acts as the emotional control center in our brain) was just firing all over the place. I wasn’t having a panic attack exactly, but I was having a very emotional episode due to all the cumulative stress over the past several days.

In that moment I was ready to turn in my two-weeks' notice and just quit life altogether. Instead, I got up and removed myself from the situation as quickly as possible. I got a glass of something cool to drink and I just sat there in the kitchen collecting my thoughts and my breath. I turned off the caps lock in my head and started tackling the crazy thoughts coming to me one-by-one. First of all, I knew that I wasn’t worthless to my family. I was just having a hectic week and feeling very lethargic. Something that I was sure they understood. Second, the emotional and physical fatigue was bleeding over into my job, but I was still doing my best and trying to be patient and attentive to my callers. I actually answered just as many phones as I usually did, if not more on those days. Third, Mother's Day wasn’t exactly around the corner. I still had plenty of time to buy a gift on Amazon and have it delivered long before the holiday. Fourth, just because I didn’t have a plaque or a medal to show for it, didn’t mean that I hadn’t contributed to a life being saved. I know that a lot of what we do in 9-1-1 doesn’t reap a lot of praise or recognition since our impact is often invisible. In truth, I didn’t really need an award to know that what I was doing mattered. Lastly, the problem of the bed was not beyond a solution either. The next day my mother actually took care of phoning up the furniture store and picking up a replacement of the missing part.

I called it a night and slept like an absolute baby for the first time in a while. For me, finding my calm meant doing something that I knew would help ground me spiritually before I took on the day. I prayed and read a few Psalms from The Bible. I opened my morning with words of encouragement and inspiration, and I had a very needful mental reset. I told myself that I was going to have a good day, no matter how the day went, and no matter what obstacles happened along my path. Out with the all the stress and worry and chaos and in with the positivity and optimism and hopefulness. I went to work feeling refreshed, and my faith in humanity was wonderfully restored too. Through the rest of my work week, I didn’t take the insults of any 9-1-1 callers personally, and I wasn’t feeling bogged down by the weight of the calls. Sure, the crazy didn’t magically go away overnight, but guess what? I was still standing. It's all too easy to lose our calm in the hecticness of everyday life, but it’s absolutely amazing when we can find it again! Crazy happens; just don’t let it take away the peace from your heart and mind.

Thank you, Samantha for sharing your talents with us. If you are interested in writing a blog, please email 911derWomen@gmail.com. Sign up for our newsletter on our homepage to stay up to date with 911der Women programming, exclusive content and blog updates. Click here and scroll to the bottom!