Written by Michael Elwan – Lived Experience Solutions (LEXs)

This new series is written from lived experience. It includes personal reflections on illness, loss, and caregiving. Please read Michael Elwan’s writer-in-residence series with awareness and care.

A Letter to Those Coming Through

This letter has been forming for some years, in the quiet moments between sessions, and I have decided to write it now.

I sit on this side of the desk most weeks. The practitioners I supervise are social workers, peer workers, senior leaders. Many of them are migrants. Many carry lived/living experience of their own. Over time I have come to recognise a particular question, asked in different words by different people, that arrives at a certain point in a career.

How much of myself do I bring into the room?

That is one way the question gets asked. Sometimes it is not asked aloud at all. It surfaces as a pause, a small turning of the eyes, a sentence left unfinished. The words vary; the place inside the practitioner from which they arrive does not.

I have come to recognise that place. There is a particular posture I notice when someone with their own history first begins to feel the cost of the in-between. The shoulders are slightly lifted. The voice is steady. The eyes are alert to judgement.

I used to hold myself the same way.

This piece is for them, and for the peer worker about to walk into their first multidisciplinary meeting, and for the senior leader who has carried a private history into rooms that never quite asked. It is for anyone who works inside a system that does not yet know how to hold what they bring to it.

What you carry

You will arrive in your role already knowing things the team does not.

You will read silences before they become words. You will notice the apology doing the work of a sentence that cannot yet be said. You will hear the careful arrangement of a family’s account, and recognise which part has been folded inward to spare someone in the room.

This knowing was formed before any of your qualifications.

It was learned in households, in waiting rooms, in long evenings beside someone whose world was narrowing. It was shaped in languages other than the one you now write your notes in. It is older than the framework you are trained to apply, and it does not always match its shape.

The temptation, in the first months, is to mistrust it.

The system rewards a different fluency. Diagnostic categories. Risk thresholds. The clipped grammar of clinical handover. Your earlier education does not arrive in that shape, and there will be moments when you wonder whether it counts.

It counts.

What the system will ask of you

It will ask you to translate. Often, and without quite naming what it is asking.

You will interpret cultures you live inside. You will explain meanings you assumed everyone understood. You will summarise decades of context into the sentence the room has time for. Sometimes you will be thanked for this; sometimes it will pass unremarked.

Some of that work is necessary. Translation is how knowledge travels between settings, and your skill at it will, in fact, be one of the things that allows you to influence what happens next. I want to be honest with you about that. The ability to carry meaning across registers is part of what makes you useful, and it is part of what will earn you a hearing in places your earlier self could not enter.

But translation has a cost, and the cost is not equally shared.

The room asks you to make yourself legible to it, and rarely asks itself whether it has become legible to you. It welcomes the part of your story that fits the frames it already has, and quietly leaves the rest at the door. Over time, you may notice that the parts of you most relevant to the work are also the parts the room finds most difficult to receive.

This is the labour you may not yet have named. It is real work. It is skilled. It is often invisible. And it is one of the reasons you will be tired in a way that supervision focused only on cases will not reach.

Not every room is like this. There are teams, supervisors, and services where the work of holding lived/living experience has been taken seriously, and where the room has done some of the legibility work itself. If you are in one of those rooms, you already know it. What this letter describes is what remains common enough, across enough settings, that the question I opened with keeps arriving. The letter is for those settings, and for the practitioners still inside them.

What I want you to be careful about

Don’t translate yourself out of existence.

There is a version of this work in which you become so good at making yourself useful that you forget the ground you were standing on when you first walked in. Track that. Notice when your own language begins to sound like the system’s. Notice when an explanation arrives faster than the feeling it is explaining.

Your fatigue is not a deficit. It is data. It is telling you something about the gap between what you carry and what the room can currently hold. The temptation is to read it as weakness, or as a problem of your own making. Read it instead as information about the conditions you are working inside.

You do not have to bring all of yourself into every room. Discernment is not betrayal. There will be parts of your history that belong to the work and parts that do not, and the line between them is yours to draw. Anyone who suggests otherwise is asking you to do labour they have not earned the right to ask for.

And remember that you are not the only one in the in-between. The loneliness is real, but the position is not unique. There are others, in other services and other countries, who are holding versions of this. Find them.

What you will need

A practice of being held while you hold.

By this I mean supervision that understands both the clinical frame and the lived/living experience one, and does not collapse one into the other. Peers who know the terrain you are working in well enough that you don’t have to translate it for them before you can think. A community of practice that does not require you to be the cultural interpreter every time.

These are not luxuries. They are the holding structures the work requires of anyone, and they are particularly necessary for those of us whose knowledge was formed in the kinds of rooms that institutions do not yet have language for.

If those structures are not available to you in your service, that is information about your service, not about you. Build them outside it.

Closing

The practitioners I supervise are still holding versions of this question. We do not resolve it in single sessions. I am not sure resolution is what is needed. What is needed, I think, is the recognition that the question is the right one, and that asking it does not disqualify you from the work. It is one of the things that makes you good at it.

I cannot tell you what to bring into the room. I can only tell you that the room was built without some of you in mind, and that this is something to know rather than something to apologise for.

Somewhere, on the other side of a screen or a desk, someone is doing the work you are about to do. They are learning what you are learning. They are tired in the same particular way.

Speak when you can. Rest when you must. Find your people. And keep some of yourself for yourself.

Click here to see our Writer-In-Residence guidelines and all of our previous Writer-In-Residence posts.

About the writer