They Were There – A Human Reckoning with What Healthcare Workers Lived Through
Author’s Note
I’ve thought a long time about whether to write this.
Not because the story isn’t important—but because so many of the people who lived it are already carrying too much. I don’t want to speak for them. I don’t need to translate their experience. But I do want to name something I see—something I believe still matters.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had the privilege of listening to healthcare workers in raw, private moments: professionals who showed up for work day after day while the world spun in circles around them. What they carried, what they swallowed, what they still don’t talk about—it deserves more than silence. It deserves more than clapping and forgetting.
This isn’t an analysis of trauma. It’s not a guilt trip for the rest of us. It’s a psychological reflection on what happens when human beings are asked to do the impossible, while being told it wasn’t that bad. When the systems around them failed. When politics distorted the truth. And when the moment passed without ever fully being seen.
If you were in it—really in it—I hope this feels honest. And if you weren’t, I hope it helps you understand something you may not have known how to ask about. Either way, this is written from a place of dignity, not diagnosis. Not to dissect what broke, but to reflect on what was held. And to offer, in the clearest language I have, some measure of psychological truth.
—RJ Starr
They Showed Up When the Rest of the World Was Spinning
They didn’t ask for a spotlight. Most of them didn’t even want it. They just wanted to do their jobs—whatever that looked like, moment to moment, when the rules kept changing and no one seemed to have solid ground beneath them. While much of the world was debating the existence of the crisis, healthcare workers were living inside it. Not abstractly, not metaphorically. Viscerally. Hour by hour, body to body, decision to decision.
And through all of it, they kept showing up.
This is not a story about collapse. It’s about endurance. It’s about what it costs a person—emotionally, psychologically, even existentially—to remain steady in a system that often wasn’t. To be calm while the people around them panicked. To offer care when the tools were incomplete and the guidance delayed. To be called a hero one month and ignored the next. And to keep working anyway.
The early phases of the pandemic brought tragedy, yes—but also confusion, improvisation, and political distortion. Messaging was inconsistent. Leadership wavered. Systems frayed. People in hospitals were forced to do sacred work in an atmosphere that often felt chaotic at best and adversarial at worst. What they lived through wasn’t just exhaustion. It was exposure: to suffering, to contradiction, to a kind of moral and emotional complexity that most people still don’t fully understand.
That complexity hasn’t gone away. It lives in the quieter spaces now: the tone of someone’s voice, the subtle distance in their eyes, the way some have stepped back, or stepped away, or stopped trying to explain what it felt like to be there.
This reflection is written for them—and for anyone willing to listen without asking for performance. It’s not a psychological breakdown of symptoms or disorders. It’s a human account of what it means to be present for something overwhelming, and to keep going long after the rest of the world has moved on.
What follows isn’t an answer. It’s an attempt to see clearly.
Through the Storm, They Kept Working
In the early days of the pandemic, the headlines were filled with numbers. Infection rates, hospitalizations, ventilator shortages. Charts, curves, projections. But those numbers never captured the texture of what was happening inside hospital walls. There was no metric for what it meant to walk into a room knowing you might be the last face someone sees. No headline for how often protocols changed mid-shift. No graph to measure the emotional recalibration it took to do your job while the world outside argued about whether it was even real.
The story most people never saw was this: while elected officials gave press conferences, while neighbors debated masks and mandates, healthcare workers were adapting on the fly. They were showing up with whatever tools they had. They were trying to explain the unexplainable to families who weren’t allowed to visit. They were watching colleagues get sick. They were holding the weight of uncertainty—not just about medicine, but about the systems that were supposed to support them.
The experience wasn’t cinematic. It wasn’t a war zone. It was far stranger. Some days were chaos. Others were eerily quiet, the kind of quiet that sinks into your body. There were moments of real teamwork, and moments of deep alienation. There were sudden code blues, and long hours of waiting. There was gratitude, fear, boredom, dread, and the dull ache of repetition—because the patients just kept coming, and no one knew when it would end.
And through all of it, the job remained the same: care for the next person. Don’t get sick. Don’t make a mistake. Keep moving. What made it harder wasn’t just the volume or the pressure, it was the disorientation. The knowledge that even when you were doing everything right, people still died. That leadership didn’t always know what it was doing. That the people making decisions often weren’t the ones holding the consequences in their hands.
And layered on top of all that was the noise: the public messaging that changed week to week. The politicized statements that minimized risk. The infuriating soundbite culture that reduced complex science to slogans. Healthcare workers weren’t just treating illness, they were navigating chaos in communication. And every misstep in public policy landed on their doorstep.
There was never time to process what was happening. There was only time to adapt. So they did. They learned how to turn operating rooms into overflow ICUs. They reused equipment never meant to be reused. They worked with reduced staffing, inconsistent PPE, delayed testing, broken supply chains, and incomplete information. Not because they were asked. Because there was no one else.
And then they went home, where they were told they were lucky to still have a job.
What they endured wasn’t one long disaster. It was a thousand small disorientations layered into a single truth: we don’t know what’s coming next, but you’re expected to stay ready for it anyway.
And they did.
The Politics Made Everything Heavier
The virus was biological. But the pressure? The confusion? The betrayal? That came from something else.
As the pandemic unfolded, science wasn’t the only thing evolving—so was the messaging, the policies, and the politics surrounding it. Guidelines shifted weekly. What was required in one facility was forbidden in another. Leadership hesitated, contradicted itself, and often left the most difficult decisions to those with the least power to make them. Meanwhile, public discourse dissolved into accusation and noise. Healthcare workers were left holding the line while everyone else fought about where it should be drawn.
There was no playbook for what happened. But there could have been clarity. There could have been consistency. There could have been leadership that told the truth, even when it was incomplete. Instead, providers often found themselves in the crossfire between institutional silence and public outrage—forced to follow policies that didn’t make sense, defend measures they didn’t create, and enforce restrictions that felt ethically unbearable.
And then came the public backlash. While they were still managing emergency after emergency, the national conversation shifted. What had been praise turned into skepticism. Social media filled with conspiracy theories. Talk show hosts declared the crisis exaggerated. Protesters marched against the very precautions meant to prevent more deaths. Healthcare workers weren’t just tired. They were stunned—trying to understand how, after all they’d done, they were now being cast as part of the problem.
The emotional toll wasn’t just about fear or exhaustion. It was about disconnect. The growing distance between what they were living and what the world seemed willing to believe. Between what they knew to be true and what others insisted was fake. That gap created more than frustration. It created a kind of internal rupture: If they don’t believe us now, will they ever?
And behind that question was something even heavier: Why did we have to do this alone?
The politics didn’t just complicate their jobs—it infiltrated their relationships, their reputations, their trust in the systems they once believed were flawed but functional. Some began to feel like pawns. Others felt used. Many stopped trying to explain anything at all.
Because how do you describe what it’s like to watch a patient die alone while people outside are shouting that hospitals are empty?
How do you justify going to work in unsafe conditions because your administration has a press release to protect?
How do you process grief while watching the news twist the story you just lived?
These weren’t abstract frustrations. They were emotional weight. And they made the burden heavier than it ever needed to be.
They could have endured the crisis. What broke many wasn’t the virus—it was the sense that no one outside the walls wanted to face it with them.
What Got Muted So They Could Keep Going
There’s a tendency, after any crisis, to look for who broke. To look for who left, who collapsed, who couldn’t cope. But the more common story—the one we rarely name—isn’t about breakdown. It’s about what people learned to silence in themselves in order to keep showing up.
For many healthcare workers, the most profound shifts didn’t happen in emergency rooms. They happened quietly, internally, in the emotional spaces they had to put away just to function. There was no room for full grief, no time for reflective sorrow, no space to ask if they were okay. The task was clear: keep moving, keep treating, keep responding.
So they muted things. Not permanently, not by choice. But out of necessity.
Some muted their fear. Some muted their compassion. Some muted their sense of time, or fatigue, or even meaning. Not because they didn’t feel—but because they couldn’t afford to. The emotional volume had to be turned down for survival. You can’t feel everything and still do what the moment requires.
That kind of internal adjustment is often misunderstood. From the outside, it can look like coldness, or detachment, or burnout. But inside, it’s something more complex. It’s emotional conservation—the human system adapting to prolonged exposure without reprieve. Not a flaw. Not pathology. A form of wisdom, even, in the middle of prolonged demand.
The trouble is, once you’ve muted something for long enough, it doesn’t always come back when you want it to.
Some providers noticed that after the worst was over, they couldn’t cry anymore. Or they couldn’t connect in the ways they used to. Some said they felt like they were behind glass—going through motions, doing their job, but far away from the version of themselves they remembered.
And for many, that wasn’t frightening—it was confusing. Because there hadn’t been a single breaking point. There hadn’t been a dramatic moment of trauma. Just hundreds of days where emotions got shelved so that the work could get done. It didn’t feel like collapse. It felt like endurance. Which made the disorientation later even harder to explain.
What got muted wasn’t just emotion. It was belief. Belief in systems. Belief in leadership. Belief that if you gave everything, it would be seen. That if you stayed steady, someone would catch you when it was over. But for many, the catching never came. The “after” felt hollow. And the self they brought to the work didn’t return in full.
They didn’t fall apart. They adapted. And then they paid the quiet price of that adaptation—often without words for it.
Not every shift needs to be treated. Not every silence needs to be undone. But it’s worth knowing this: sometimes what looks like distance is what kept someone from disappearing. Sometimes the muted parts are still in there, waiting for enough safety to return.
And sometimes they won’t. And that, too, has to be okay.
What They Deserve Isn’t Applause—It’s Understanding
The world is full of language about heroes. We love the narrative. We love the image of the strong, selfless professional, standing tall in the storm, immune to fear, untouched by doubt. But the truth is, most of the people who showed up during the worst of the pandemic didn’t feel like heroes. They felt tired. Determined, but frayed. Grounded, but alone. Some days, they felt like they were holding the whole thing together with tape and willpower.
And yet they kept going.
Not because they were invincible. Because they knew someone had to be steady when everything else was unraveling. Because they were trained to act in crisis. Because people needed them. Because that’s what they do.
But now, as the urgency fades and the world moves on, many are left with the residue. Not of one dramatic moment, but of months and years spent holding steady under pressure while being politicized, dismissed, or quietly forgotten. And what they need most now is not applause. It’s permission—to be wherever they are in their process. To feel what they feel without having to justify it. To change without being asked to explain.
That kind of permission doesn’t come from policy. It comes from us.
It comes from the way we choose to stop asking why they seem different—and instead start wondering what they lived through. It comes from recognizing that some people are still catching up to emotions they couldn’t afford to feel at the time. It comes from letting go of our expectations that everything should be “back to normal” by now.
Because some things won’t go back. Not because people are broken. But because they were present. And presence changes people.
To anyone who was there: what you lived through matters. Even if no one asks about it anymore. Even if you’re not sure how to talk about it. Even if you don’t want to talk about it at all.
And to those who weren’t: there’s still time to see it clearly. Not to apologize. Not to fix. But to witness. To understand that some of the people who carried the most have the least left to give right now. And that’s not weakness. That’s the math of endurance.
What they deserve is not to be turned into symbols. What they deserve is space, respect, and truth. The quiet kind. The kind that says: We didn’t forget. We see you. And we’re listening.