My first experience with volunteering was as soon as I turned eighteen. A few years earlier, in middle school, someone came to our school from Junior Achievement and taught us Economics. In full transparency, it wasn’t necessarily the subject matter that sparked the idea but I remember thinking, “They have to use volunteers.” Sure enough, they did. Teaching has been a passion since I can remember: I’ve always curated special relationships with my own teachers and started volunteering teaching a third grade class French when I was in the 9th grade. So, it was natural to seek out an opportunity that would put me in the classrooms. I loved Junior Achievement. I would teach multiple classes at the same time and, for each class I taught, I ended it by giving each student a personalized, handwritten letter and a unique, written-only-for-each-child short story. It was a priceless experience I still cherish.

From volunteering with Junior Achievement, I branched out to mentorship via Project Affirm and Big Sisters in America and a program in college where I was mentoring an inner-city girl, helping her learn about Christ. Ultimately, it was only a matter of time before my passion for volunteering and for teaching circled to raw areas, to where I was most hurting. First, it was to become a CASA – court appointed special advocate – for children who were in danger of being removed from their homes until, when I was still in college, I signed up to work with the local Sexual Assault Service Provider in Nashville. This meant an intensive training, but I wanted to be on the phone lines. Seeing as I was nowhere near ready to do this, I think I was ultimately seeking connections with others who had been through something similar to me. Either way, I took the training to be a support specialist on a sexual assault hotline.

The training program is an intense 40 hour experience that, at the time, was mostly in-person but which, nowadays, is all completed virtually. The 40 hour training consists of training in suicide, self-harm, flashbacks, biology, and all kinds of things that can be very triggering. The 40 hours does not include the additional hours of shadowing sessions and being shadowed by a licensed clinical worker that are required. In total, training takes about 45 hours of training, exams, shadowing and group sessions. It is not a light undertaking.

But it is so worth it.

I logged 68.08 hours on the hotline in 10 days. On average, I log between 30-60 hours per week. My cumulative time on the hotline has been draining and hard, rewarding and impactful. Here are a few things I’ve noticed:

Demographics – The hotline is completely anonymous. This means folks don’t have to tell us anything they don’t want to–and we never ask for any identifying information like names, locations or ages. This protects privacy and can help people feel more comfortable in sharing sensitive details. Given this, I don’t always know who I’m talking to. I can’t always say for certain someone’s gender or approximate age. Despite the anonymity, the sheer number of people I’ve talked to assures me that there are people everywhere who are struggling and social class, gender or age doesn’t make you more or less susceptible to mental anguish. For me, this is a hopeful thing that working with the hotline has shown me. No one is immune to suffering. Many people–if not everyone–wants to be heard, acknowledged, believed and to know that they are not alone. Even if you feel like no one understands, someone does. Because they are all reaching out to the hotline for the same support.

Hope: I’ve talked to many people who, when I ask, What made you reach out to us? respond by saying, I was having these thoughts — thoughts of self-harm or suicide — and decided to do this instead. It’s been a long time since I’ve offered to walk someone through the sensory grounding exercise who has refused to try it. Most of the time, when I offer to provide resources, they accept. And when someone has told me that they are contemplating self-harm or suicide, they virtually always agree to promise me that they won’t harm themselves while we talk. When I offer to help them explore ways to create a safety plan, they usually accept the offer. They are searching ultimately for hope. They aren’t sure it’s there, but they are willing to cling to any that’s offered, and that hope helps sustain them through the moment of trauma. It’s also shown me that the words hope and rescue have two very different definitions. According to the dictionary, rescue means “to save someone from a dangerous situation” but hope is, “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen; a feeling of trust.”

I cannot rescue anyone. I want to, sometimes. I also want to tell them my opinions. But what I mostly want is for them to see a way out of the pain, to plant a seed that there is a way out. If that seed is planted, they won’t need rescuing because they are capable of making the best choices for themselves. I want them to be empowered and to believe that they hold the keys to their future. Because in giving back control of their lives to them, I hope I’m lighting a spark of hope.

Support: I’ve discovered that support sometimes feels overwhelming. Sometimes I hear what someone has been through, or know that I’m talking with a minor currently going through abuse I can’t stop, and it feels overwhelming. Sometimes I can be triggered; something that might be completely mundane to someone else flattens my heartline. Sometimes the things that are shared sound very complex and involve so many components that it’s hard to know where to start. But, many times, the support that’s most helpful is listening and validating that the emotions they feel are real and valid. Many express guilt or self-blame. I didn’t say ‘no’, we’re married, so I can’t say no, I don’t know why I didn’t fight back, I wish I had known sooner — these are common sentiments. We have powerful conversations about how consent is NOT the absence of a ‘no’ but the PRESENCE of an enthusiastic ‘yes’ and how there are circumstances under which someone cannot give consent. I’m often reminded that the little things are the biggest things. When I’ve felt inadequate for saying something like, “I’m here for you” or “You did not deserve that,” survivors have responded with, “you’re the first person to tell me that.”

The definition of “support” is “to bear all or part of the weight; to hold up.” In the moments when the flashbacks are debilitating, when the nightmares are too scary, when the thought of getting up is overwhelming support is standing in the gap, offering compassion and allowing that person to not be strong for just a little while. Compassion is not the same as sympathy. Sympathy is recognizing the pain while still protecting yourself, something like, “That’s awful that happened, but it’ll get better soon.” Compassion is allowing yourself to feel someone else’s pain: “That’s awful that happened. I’m here to listen if you want to share more.” It’s the difference between how Joy & Sadness comfort Bing Bong in Inside Out. And supporting compassionately is hard because it means allowing myself to feel painful emotions can be very hard. Until I realize something important: there are people compassionately supporting others every day of the year, every hour of every day and to find them all we have to do is reach out. While I listen to the worst things people can do to each other, I’m reminded that, at the same time evil is happening, others are combatting it with kindness.

When I was growing up, I didn’t believe that what I was going through was “bad enough” to need support. I didn’t believe I had the right to “complain” about anything because there were people who were walked into gas chambers, deprived of food until they became living skeletons and had their children literally ripped from their arms. I compared my pain to others’ and found that mine wasn’t “bad.” That is a lie of abuse. You can’t compare pain because something that seems minimal to me might be the thing that causes another to contemplate an entire bottle of pills. Lies like, “that’s nothing” can cause someone to keep secrets until the secrets explode in catastrophic ways. If it hurts, it matters. There are nuances and subtleties in every person’s life that make the “small” losses more significant. Working with the hotline and with survivors has taught me that hope begins by acknowledging the power of the individual pain.

618,000 children ages 12 and under were abused in 2020 in America. Of those, 58,092 were sexually abused. 1,750 children in America died in 2020 as a result of abuse. In America, someone is assaulted every 68 seconds and every 9 minutes that person is a child (sources: Mandated Reporter and RAINN). These statistics matter because they remind me of a few things.

1. We are not alone. It took years for me to use appropriate verbiage. Until publishing The Character led to me speaking in public about what happened to me, I used the term, “I was hurt.” I thought I was being stupid, but I couldn’t say “raped” or “abuse.” I still can’t say “raped” easily. Most of the people I speak with don’t say, “I was raped” or “I was abused.” More than half will say, “I was hurt” or “something happened.” So not only are we not alone in the fact that others have been abused, we’re also not alone in how we are coping with the abuse.
2. Behind every number, there are real stories. And most stories don’t start at the climax; most stories begin with the rising action. In other words, most abuse doesn’t start out as abuse. That man telling the thirteen year old how pretty she is and that she’s very special doesn’t seem like abuse; it could just as easily be a caring adult seeking to lift the confidence of that teenager as it could be a perpetrator deliberately grooming that girl before abusing her. The stories of each of these numbers matter.

This week, I spent 68.08 hours on the hotline, talking to survivors. And, in every conversation, I am praying that what I say resonates with that person, that the person feels encouraged and supported and that a seed of hope can be planted. For me, hope came in the form of my daughters. For someone else, it might come in the form of a grounding exercise that prevents them from reaching for the razor blade. For others, it might come in the form of a book they read or a story they see on the television or through therapy. And, for some, it could come from talking to someone who’s been there. Finding hope is a treasure hunt. Treasure hunts are not always easy, and the path to the treasure is rarely straight forward. It’s easy to get lost on the way. But that doesn’t mean the treasure isn’t real.

If you need help, the hardest step is often the first one. But there is help to be found by reaching out. If you visit RAINN, on the top of the screen, you will find a phone number. If it is not safe for you to call, or if you’d prefer not to, there’s also trained support specialists who will chat with you anonymously. You can find help here