Rachel Bean
13 min readMar 5, 2021

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Is it Long Covid or is it my career?

I actually think I originally had COVID in January 2020. In Minnesota, people were only just starting to talk about the devastating virus out of China in January 2020. I myself fell into the thinking that people were overblowing the impact of a novel flu-like virus because of xenophobia. Either way, an unusually fierce but otherwise mostly unremarkable flu knocked my partner and me on our asses for over a week. I missed 5 days of work in a row- something I hadn’t even done when I had mono in 2011. We missed a concert scheduled for my birthday (which probably would have been one of the last we would have attended anyway) because we were too sick to go. But ultimately, I went back to work the following week without thinking much of it. No hospital stays were required, no panic about isolation or quarantine happened, it was just a normal week. It wasn’t until months later that this run-of-the-mill flu would seem more important.

I first started full-time in my field of homeless/social services fresh out of college in June 2008 at a food shelf that served the suburban area I grew up in. I was hired as a temporary “case manager” to replace a woman preparing to go on maternity leave. Case manager, actually, is a deceptively simple term for the job I was hired for. For $14/hour (an amount of money I had never made per hour before), it was my singular job to review applications for people asking for emergency financial assistance to pay their rent, their utility bills, their mortgages. People would fill out a paper application, submit it, and then be scheduled to meet with this case manager where she would decide if they got the money they needed to head off whatever emergency they were facing. This woman (I literally don’t remember her name) lasted about 3 days into my onboarding before her baby came and she never returned to her job. With no training and almost zero oversight, I, somehow, suddenly had both the power and the responsibility to distribute initially $20,000 and then ultimately $40,000 PER MONTH in emergency financial assistance to people in crisis. It was my sole responsibility to review their application and see if their story was evocative enough to merit me choosing them for assistance. My very first client was a woman who had worked in the hallways at my high school; I remembered her and her kids who were classmates with my siblings. She had been sick and needed help paying her mortgage; it was 2008 and the housing bubble had just burst. I approved her request.

On May 1st, 2020, I had the opportunity to get a COVID test through my job. I had recently started a new position at a residential harm reduction building for men who use alcohol daily and we shared a campus with a large homeless shelter. The building next door had a “cluster” of COVID positives onsite which triggered a public health response and mass testing. Around 10:30am on a Friday, I got a message from my brand-new supervisor that went something like: “if you go now, you can get a COVID test as there are extras. Totally up to you.” There was a novelty about the whole thing: I was about to participate in this unprecedented thing during an unprecedented time. I stealthily snapped some pictures of the public health staff in their full hazmat suits- documenting my life for the record; got a swab stuck up into my brain; and went back to work, eyes watering. The following night, while I was covering a shift at my second job in a homeless shelter, I got the automated test result in my email: my COVID swab was positive.

At the same time I started working at the food shelf, I was working part-time, three to four nights a week at a homeless shelter (the same shelter mentioned in the last paragraph, actually) in Minneapolis. I started as a volunteer in 2007, then was an unpaid intern, and became staff in the fall of 2008. On Mondays, this shelter would host a lottery process whereby men who were seeking shelter would hope the bingo ball associated with their name would be drawn for one of the handful of available beds. During the time I worked there (from 2008 to 2016), I was paid between $12 and $13.50/hour.

Juxtaposed against my suburban food shelf experience, the shelter quickly became my professional and political incubator. I had started in the helping field from a misplaced desire to expand my world. I grew up in a mostly white, homogenous, largely wealthy white suburb: indeed the food shelf was primarily operated by rich white women volunteers who had never had to work in their lives. Inner city homelessness, then, was an exotic departure. I remember secretly delighting in the fact that my parents thought my new role as an overnight volunteer at a shelter was unsafe. Much the way they thought me spending a semester in an African country was unsafe.

Working at the shelter fundamentally changed my orientation to the world. Where the food shelf had been based on charity- rich folks giving canned foods and a pile of judgment to the poor folks in the neighboring town- the shelter was based on dignity and community in a way that I had never experienced before. Homelessness, to me, even then, was such an egregious failing of developed society, that I immersed myself in that work. I loved it. In 2010, I finally left the food shelf for the job I still think, to this day, was my dream job: working as a street outreach worker with people who slept outside. I was paid $35,000/year for that job.

In May 2020, with my only symptom being shortness of breath (something I had attributed to pandemic anxiety and mask-wearing) I was still considered asymptomatic. I completed 10 days of isolation at home and went back to work. Around 25 residents at my job tested positive for COVID in May. George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis Police on May 25th and the city went up in flames. On May 28th, in response to a militarized occupation of the city, I was part of a group of people that negotiated a take over of a nearly vacant hotel to get nearly 200 unsheltered people off the streets. We called it the Sanctuary Hotel for the 10 days we occupied it. My aunt died in mid-June. Needless to say, I had already forgotten about my unremarkable experience with COVID.

The fact that I ended up being quite good at the work of caring about homeless folks was sort of a secondary discovery. It turns out that part of me was made for this work. The fire in my belly for justice, the rapport-building skills, the deescalation and crisis skills, the practical and logistical skills. I excel in this work. I was a really good outreach worker and I continued to work at the shelter in the evenings; people still talk about my natural talents in these roles. I was also well-suited to the toxic sludge of social service/NPIC life because I was accustomed to putting my own needs aside in order to help someone else. Can you work an extra shift? Yes. Can you work for way less than you deserve? Yes, I’m not here to get rich. Can you work at any hours of the day and night or in dangerously understaffed settings? Of course, with pleasure, I don’t need to sleep or rest. With an eerie similarity to some of my “friendships” over the years (a story for another time), social service work made me feel indispensable. It feels good to be needed, you know?

My first boss on the outreach team where I worked from 2010–2013 used to single me out in staff meetings- for jokes about my upbringing, for making mistakes, for anything. When I, crying during individual supervision like I usually did, asked him why he always was shaming me in public, he told me that I reminded him too much of his wife and of his own boss. His tone almost suggested it was my fault for being too like his wife or his boss. He was later promoted to director (where he later told a woman colleague that he couldn’t process what she was saying to him because he was “too distracted by how tight [her] pants [were]”) and my coworker became my supervisor. That new supervisor asked me to help him out by being the “point person” for the team when he was unavailable and I happily agreed. The agency even started the process of creating an “assistant team lead” role for me and asked me to write up my job description over the weekend and get it back to them right away so they could move forward quickly. A few days later, I was told that actually they had gotten ahead of themselves and there would be no change to my title or compensation despite my continuing to serve in that point person role. The interpersonal dynamics between me, my supervisor, and now-director (my former boss) got to be so toxic, I resigned from the best job I’ve ever had (and ever would have) in the summer of 2013 and went to Central America for 3 months thinking that would ease the burgeoning burnout.

It wasn’t until around July 2020 that I really started noticing what I would come to understand as some combination of Long Covid and post-viral fatigue. I started wearing a pulse oximeter when things like walking to the kitchen sink would leave me breathless and spike my heart rate. I missed 2 days of work after walking my dog one July afternoon because I got so sick afterward. I was having shortness of breath, heart palpitations, tachycardia, changes in taste, smell, and appetite. Even the smallest exertions required recovery time and made me sweaty- like, really sweaty. Every single entry I wrote in my journal (not all that many) during the month of July references my fatigue.

With each new job there was a honeymoon period. New rhythms, new settings, new clients to care about, new organizational messes to learn. Of course, after a few months or maybe a year, the honeymoon period would wear off and the problems of the industry would rear their heads. Shitty managers, shitty work conditions obscured by martyrdom and “lack of resources”, shitty models of intervention that really didn’t help the people we said we were helping. So, around 2.5 years into any given job, I’d find myself looking for greener pastures. Perhaps at a new organization things would be better. Perhaps in a new role, I could have more influence in changing the status quo. Perhaps if I just took a couple months off to travel, I’d come back feeling refreshed. The honeymoon period would start over with each new item on my resume.

From 2014–2016, after a few months of traveling in Central America, theoretically refreshed, I returned to the same two agencies I had been working at before I left. I was recruited as the team lead for a winter-only shelter for men in North Minneapolis. In this role I had the opportunity to write the shelter rules, hire and train all the staff, run staff meetings, and try to provide as much dignity and advocacy as possible when 50 men sleep on mats on the floor of a church gymnasium. I thought this might finally be the chance I was looking for to become more influential in the work of homeless services but, in reality, all a team lead does is cover shifts when staff don’t show up so the manager doesn’t have to. Usually they were overnight shifts and usually they were shifts I covered after already doing my full day’s worth of work. I was paid $38,000/year for this role.

An entry in my journal from October 14, 2020 reads “well, I think a lovely evening drinking with my brothers brought on a relapse of symptoms. I’ve been off work Monday and Tuesday this week and I’m feeling like crap today. I wish I had started keeping a symptom log earlier in this process because it feels silly to try and start one nearly 6 months in”. It continues with a list of symptoms: short of breath, chest pain/pressure, shaky hands, flushed face/itchy face skin, fever feelings/chills despite no fever, brain fog, palpitations (“not racing heart but pounding heart”), muscle weakness/heavy limbs, headache (“dehydration? COVID?”), fatigue (“as usual”).

Despite this list of symptoms, no doctor or test had/has found anything materially wrong with me. Blood work was normal. The Zio patch heart monitor I wore for 2 weeks was normal. I took myself to the ER thinking I had deep vein thrombosis due to swelling in my ankles and a severe calf cramp that lasted almost 10 days. The CT scan and the ultrasounds the ER staff did were normal. Every additional COVID test I got was “not detected”. With a litany of normal tests, it becomes increasingly more difficult not to start questioning your own sanity. Am I actually sick? Am I making it up? Is it psychosomatic? Do I really even actually feel that bad?

In May 2016, I left the team lead shelter job and moved with my soon-to-be spouse to St. Louis. A new city, a new state, a new partner, a new job. I was hired by a youth organization for a job with a title of “street outreach worker”. The job actually entailed running a drop-in center for foster care and homeless youth and consisted of things like preparing snacks, helping youth get supplies, creating programming, deescalating conflict between youth, and washing dishes. I was paid approximately $14/hour. From the day I started the job, I knew it would not be my favorite or best job but I didn’t expect how quickly things would start to unravel. After I objected to the metal detectors they decided to install that summer, I started getting frozen out of staff meetings under the guise of “someone has to watch the drop-in center while we meet, we’ll catch you up later”. By the fall I was looking for new work. I started calling my mom on my commute home asking her to talk me out of quitting. That December a coworker who was a former US Marshall singled me out and dumped a bunch of homophobia on me and told me he’d complain about me if I didn’t change the way I was acting. I submitted my letter of resignation on January 23rd, 2017, six months to the day I started.

Working in homeless services has always been a driving factor of my personal consciousness raising. With so much injustice in the world, at least I could contribute to the fight in my professional realm. Going to battle against institutions on behalf of my highly marginalized clients was like chasing a high: rental companies, court rooms, hospitals, jails, police, and even USCIS. All of them participating in violence against my clients. All of them fodder for my rage. This fight response made me an excellent advocate and made me a thorn in the side of most of the agencies I worked for. One former supervisor used to joke with me that if I were to start coming to the change-making meetings, nothing would ever get done because I wouldn’t stop complaining. Another supervisor gave me the sage but frustrating advice that you can’t just always have a critique about what isn’t working if you’re not going to bring some solutions to the table. I know that I have exhausted every single boss I’ve ever had because I will not shut up about the myriad problems, at every level, our industry creates and maintains. What can I say, I’m a Cap sun, Virgo moon, Scorpio rising.

At every job, I’d holler and push and challenge and accommodate and nothing would ever change. Once, in 2018, I even quit a job I had mostly loved in solidarity with a coworker who was wrongfully terminated. The executive director solicited a meeting with me on my way out to discuss my concerns regarding trans/homo-phobia directed at clients and staff, abuse of power, or, alternatively, negligence, understaffed teams and overworked team members, and more. The pattern of my career is clear. I’d try to raise up or disrupt the oppressive practices at a particular job, try to exert my will to bend the moral universe toward justice where I could, and ultimately would be defeated by the powers that be. Burnout never came from the client work, always from the agency dynamics, but it was still burnout.

Despite a decade of rotating through jobs in social services and leaving when I could no longer tolerate the bullshit, I actually thought my most recent job would finally be the departure from this pattern. In March of 2020, I finished a grueling and health-destroying graduate social work program and in April I took a job I was overqualified for but that afforded me a simple 9–5 schedule, a liveable wage for the first time in my life, and an 8 minute commute home. I thought striking this work-life balance while also working with a population I cared about would do the trick. Would interrupt the pattern of honeymoon and then crash and burn. That job, however, came hand in hand with COVID on top of all the normal bullshit you find at a non-profit social service agency in this town. I lasted about 9 months before collapsing: on January 6th, 2021, I literally shit my pants at work and finally admitted defeat. It happened 51 weeks after my unusually fierce but otherwise unremarkable flu.

Today, March 4st, 2021, I am 5 weeks into short-term disability leave. A couple weeks ago, I met with the Long Covid doctor who referred me to about 8 different specialists. I had an MRI of my brain (it was normal). I have appointments with neurology, neuropsychology, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and the sleep center coming in the next few weeks. Ostensibly all my symptoms are due to Long Covid, or, perhaps, post-viral ME/CFS and if I just rest long enough, I’ll eventually return to “normal” and be able to go back to work.

A question echoes in my head: is it the Long Covid or my career that finally disabled me? Because while my collapse was absolutely about Long Covid and post-viral fatigue and chronic illness, it is also inextricably linked to the psychological warfare of social service work. I have been fighting upstream in this work for so long that my body entirely quit on me. Fighting this hard inside an utterly bullshit set of constructs has eroded my immune system such that my body rejects any amount of exertion. Literally. This is the impact of the honeymoon-burnout cycle that plagues the non-profit social service industry on my body.

Tonight, I did a really casual search for “social work” across a couple of job boards just to see how it felt. I started to cry.

//i can be found ranting on Twitter @colocha_rachel. you can see my dogs and my houseplants on Instagram @colocha_rachel.

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