Burnout comes from several sources, Cooley said. Most social work programs are metrics-based; numbers determine funding. In the realm of crisis response, measuring the outcome of those served is nearly impossible. Counting people who come in and out of the doors is easier. This puts immense pressure on managers to prioritize a factory-like approach to mental health care. The needs are so often greater than the resources, or the humans doing the work. 

“I work in the mental health social work field. And you will hear ‘self-care’ more regularly in that field, [than] anywhere else," Cooley said. "It is also where it is the most ‘Catch-22-ed’.  I mean, it is [what] we talk about all the time. We encourage one another to be engaging with it as much as we can. Your boss is telling you to engage in self-care one day and then on your next day off is calling you and asking you to come in.” 

“It can feel very much like a bottomless pit where there is no end there; it doesn't get better. You don't ever feel yourself getting out of the pit, you're just in it,” continued Cooley. Burnout is imminent.  

Having experienced burnout on more than one occasion, Cooley has learned that it’s hard to know when you are in it. They said one of their most valuable skills is the awareness to know when they are feeling a sense of burnout and creating a remedy as soon as possible.  

It takes a village to smelt 

Cooley didn’t need the physical work of others to make this happen. They wanted to share the magic. “[It was an] excuse to invite friends over and have people engaged and turn it into an event as opposed to just me sitting there by myself in a chair watching charcoal burn away and hoping that it works out,” they said. 

Self-care can take any form needed for the individual, but for Cooley, it usually means doing some elaborate process, often at a great expense of effort, and maybe for no real end product.  

“I was not efficient at all. It required a lot more energy …  there wasn't anyone who said, ‘Well, you can't do it like that because it has to be done at this time or it has to be done this way.’ I was like, ‘Well, I just want to do it this way, so I'm going to,’ and those are the things that are replenishing because I mean, I'm entirely getting to direct what it is I'm doing and why,” Cooley explained.  

And that is a sense of agency: feeling for a moment that you have the power to direct your own actions. For Cooley, self-care looked like giving themself a moment where they were the captain of their own ship.  

It isn’t lost on Cooley that they work from a position of privilege that others may not have. Many literally cannot stop to care for themselves or they will be fired, lose their housing or not be able to feed their kids. And this is the Catch-22 Cooley refers to. They can either feel guilty, not care for themself, and reach irreparable burnout, or they can stay replenished and able to give. 

“We exist within a capitalist system that is built around extracting as much from whatever the medium is, whether that is materials and resources or people. And one of the challenges when you talk about self-care is that you're saying things that are in opposition to our cultural norms, which makes it really challenging to actually enact the things you talk about when it comes to self-care,” said Cooley. 

Cooley suggests "individualism" is a negative result of capitalist ideology.

“I think nothing facilitates self-care better than pulling people out of the enforced individualism mindset that we have become so attached to in our culture because that's how you get caught in a system where you can't take self-care or you … lose your job, don't have a place to live, whatever it is," they said.

Cooley continued: “If we were supporting one another in the way that we all have the capacity to … [then] no one would ever be in a position in which self-care meant losing their job or losing a place to live, because those things would be available through community.” 

Cooley isn’t immune to feelings of guilt when choosing to care for themself momentarily over caring for others. But, they are practiced in knowing they serve better when they are in a position of strength.  

“When we care for ourselves, when we have the energy we need to show up and be present in our lives, it only benefits [other people],” Cooley said. 

Starting next year Cooley will enter into their master’s program and prepare more fully to contribute to the discussion of creating a framework where everyone could take time to give themselves a moment of self-care. 

“A huge part of why I don't feel guilty about taking self-care and taking time is because my desire is to facilitate building as much of the community scaffolding as I can from a place of stability and health in myself so that other people are able to utilize that same framework," Cooley said.

There’s one more ingredient in smelting that hasn’t been mentioned: limestone. In smelting, limestone serves as a flux. The process starts by building a fire in the furnace with charcoal. Then you ‘charge’ the furnace in layers of charcoal, ore and flux. Then you repeat in that order every 15 minutes or so and the layers sink and the iron gathers in the bottom of the furnace.

By taking some time off to smelt iron, Cooley has shown a model of a flux for our lives in the form of self-care: routine replenishment of the spirit in order to be more able to give of the self. 

Cullen Purser is a multimedia journalist at Rocky Mountain PBS. You can reach him at cullenpurser@rmpbs.org.