Blood dripped onto her white Reeboks, the same kind I had in my closet a few dozen blocks away in the West Village, clean, tucked neatly beside the bed I’d made that morning. Her shoes were streaked with red and grime. I couldn’t stop staring. It was my first night volunteering for SAVI, the Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program at Mount Sinai Hospital, and before I’d even found the words to introduce myself, I realized: those shoes could be mine.
The fact of violence that was necessary for us to meet. This was my first lesson in proximity. How that one act collapsed the distance between who I was as a volunteer with my name clipped to my shirt, vital checklist in hand to protect her dignity and who I was as a witness to the moment when her home was no longer her haven. The marks on her body mirroring the lines of separation all around us between safety and vulnerability, privilege and fear, her life and mine.
I thought I already understood trauma. As a psychology major in undergrad, I’d been tested on my knowledge of how memory is encoded in the hippocampus and how cortisol keeps the body in a state of fight-or-flight hyperarousal like a five alarm fire to help you escape the threat. But no theory could’ve prepared me for the words over the phone that night when I got the referral, “Stay with her until she is stable,” or for the sounds of her sobbing behind the curtain pulled across the room for her privacy.
I didn’t know what to say. Sometimes there are no words.
It dawned on me that maybe words aren’t what people need in those initial hours after they’ve met harm. Maybe it actually starts in the quiet, with someone there holding the stillness for you when everything you’ve ever been and ever hoped to become is unraveling inside of you.
Social work is full of these moments where safety and suffering, privilege and violence collide. It’s not about being a hero, it’s about staying where others left wounds.
The image of those shoes have followed me since that night. When I’m in line and hear people complaining about rent hikes that make life here unmanageable, when I’m walking down the street and witness people in need of a warm bed, a shower, a meal, I remember the bloody, white Reeboks and how it could’ve been me. Still could be. Which goes to show that because safety isn’t guaranteed, empathy must be, and that means it's up to me to show up wherever I can in the moment.
This realization has been the game changer for me. There’s nothing that I don’t approach differently because of it, my classes, my friends, strangers on the subway. Trauma, I now see, isn’t tied to a specific demographic or qualified by doctor’s diagnosis, it's a string of distinct moments of violation when you lose something that wasn’t theirs to take. Trauma is also linked to whatever will numb that knowledge, too often ending in addiction, isolation, and violence.
Today, as a social work student aiming for a career as a clinical psychologist, I owe my success to the young woman I met that night who gave me the gift of true vision. I know why I’m here now, and I know just what to do. The names and circumstances may change but my purpose is the same: be the one who stays through someone else’s hardest day. Because it’s not about saving people, it’s about helping them flip on the light switch so they can see the way out.
When people find out I worked with SAVI, the question that often follows is “Was it depressing?” I quickly tell them no, but what I really want to say is that SAVI proved how one life can echo inside another, the reason why an ordinary pair of shoes proves there is no such thing as “me” and “you,” only us.