Last week I was having a conversation with someone that I’ve known for over ten years, and I was telling him about an incident that happened at work. I explained that a colleague had come to me about a student issue, and I found myself not feeling very sympathetic about the situation. In another time and place, I might have had a different response, but I felt no sympathy at all.
Given the particular set of circumstances around the student issue, I felt far less liberal than I have in the past, and I lamented to my friend that I felt like I was getting more conservative in my old age. My friend listened as he always does, and then said that rather than becoming conservative, it sounded more like a case of compassion fatigue.
“What?” I said.
“Compassion fatigue,” he said.
“Is that a word?”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s a word,” as he smiled to himself.
We proceeded to talk about compassion fatigue as the feeling of being so exhausted from taking care of others’ needs that the ability to feel compassion diminishes.
Bingo!
I went home and looked it up online, and found this site: http://www.compassionfatigue.org
Now, I don’t think that I “suffer” from compassion fatigue, but I do think that teaching has become so much about care giving, that it’s very easy for me to feel exhausted by the amount of compassion that I’m expected to show on a daily basis.
Does being a strong, effective educator require an endless supply of compassion? Where do the boundaries exist around compassion? What are our own limits?