My superpower can be my kryptonite too

While walking back to a car parked in a large Veterans Health Administration (VHA) medical center parking lot, I felt tears welling in my eyes. There were duck ponds with their ducks that I was quickly walking by – even a pseudo-rustic bridge over a connective feature between two larger ponds, but I didn’t have time to take a moment to decompress.

I wasn’t there for me. I’d gone with a peer military veteran to that VA facility specifically to help advocate for them. I know I did some good in fulfilling that function, but it didn’t feel like enough; in the end I felt like I failed.

I went to aid this veteran trans peer because I care about her and it seemed my strengths would be helpful. I am well versed in the VA regulations regarding trans veterans and health care and I’m a pretty assertive person. My plan was to demand appropriate treatment in accordance with VHA Directive 2013-003, Providing Health Care For Transgender And Intersex Veterans, dated February 8, 2013, and demand that it must be accomplished in a timely manner. Bureaucratic delays and snafus had delayed the appropriate health care treatment not only for her transition, but also for her general health needs – and that just had to stop.

In the end, except for some small victories, it didn’t stop. A bureaucrat at a San Diego VHA facility gave my peer wrong information regarding which facility she needed to receive primary care treatment at, and it turned out this mattered a lot. This bureaucrat’s misinformation was in the end going to cause unnecessary delays that couldn’t now be avoided. It seems the VHA offices were in two different districts, and the VA districts don’t have a means to exchange information. By being misdirected up to the central VHA/VA district office, my peer had begun a new intake process as if she were a new patient. To go to the VA facility that is closer to her home in the future, she would have to go through yet another intake process.

She has been going through intake process after intake process after intake process and never receiving care. It was angering, frustrating and heartbreaking.

I was there when she answered intake questions she’d answered multiple times before, and I heard the narratives of her service connected and other health care conditions for which she was reaching out for appropriate treatment. It made the experience even more angering, frustrating and heartbreaking.

So near the end of our meetings, when I knew the potential for my being of assistance was over, my eyes welled with tears. One of my personal strengths is a deep care for my friends and my community, and it’s often expressed in near boundless empathy. That empathy is something I can’t turn off; however, it’s connected to my own service connected mental health condition.

So my “superpower” deep empathy is my kryptonite too. My peer, dealing with her own concerns that I was there to help with, was saddled in the end with the burden of my visible, intense emotions. It didn’t matter that I ended up weeping because of what I saw happening to her, and it pained me that, even though I helped her in resolving some of the issues with the VA, in the end my strength was also my weakness. I wasn’t able to provide her the emotional support she might have needed because my empathy for her overwhelmed me.

B.F. Skinner once said, “A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.” I feel failure not born of a mistake, and to work past these feelings of failure means I need to pick up my intense emotions and try again to serve my friends and to serve my community. It’s just what I need to do.