“One of my bestest memories I got. Clean and sober. Man. I was just a kid, back then.”

He’s unshaven, hair greasy and mussed, wearing blue scrubs, the unwritten signature of a detox patient at Gibson Center for Behavioral Change. He’s talking about my Star Wars t-shirt. His face lights up when he sees it.

Maybe he’s Luke Skywalker for a second. Or he’s just a kid again, sitting in a darkened theater, feeling something good.

I smile, nod, wave, and keep walking.

His face is still with me.

I’m working here at Gibson as a NIDA Transportation Coordinator and Participant Tracker because I needed a job. I’m not like other staff who feel a calling into mental health, or were once struggling with substance use issues. Me? I had a clean driving record, was older than most applicants, and was willing to go wherever the research team needed me. My dream job? Full-time storyteller or novelist. For the moment, I choose to walk these halls. That’s enough to put me face-to-face with people carrying things I can only imagine.

People come here carrying the emotional weight of substance use disorder and mental illness. Sometimes both. They suffer through withdrawal, check into detox, and have conversations with staff that don’t always make sense. Whatever brought them here is the same thing eating them alive. They’re just trying to get free of it.

And I walk past them.

Not all of them. Not every time. But certainly more than I should. I tell myself I’m busy. I convince myself there is somewhere I have to be. What I don’t tell myself, but should, is that I’ve just played the priest in the Good Samaritan story. My robes are clean, sandals dry, but my gaze? Fixed somewhere ahead, not looking down at the beaten man.

Self-righteousness doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up. A perfect excuse to keep walking.

In a treatment facility like Gibson, it’s easy to get caught up in secondhand trauma. This is a place where damaged people say and do things that hurt others, even from arm’s length. You overhear them talking, watch the destructive patterns play out, and somewhere along the way, you build walls without realizing it. Working in research means I see the same participants for months, watching some recover, watching others slip back. Their speech patterns, their negative self-talk, and their harsh criticisms accumulate. It adds up. It affects everyone here. Me included.

The smile, nod, wave. It’s not always arrogance. Sometimes it’s armor.

I walk the same hallway expecting to see him. He’s gone. His time in detox is over. Did he move to a different treatment facility? Did he go back to his old life, his old habits? Or was this his way out? I don’t know. I never caught his name. A man who lit up over a Star Wars t-shirt, who remembered being clean and sober as a kid, and I can’t even ask about him because I never stopped long enough to learn who he was.

Not seeing him again cracked something open. Patients here, research participants too, are more than numbers for a mental health treatment facility. More than data points to be tracked. These are human beings, made in God’s image. And somewhere between the secondhand trauma and the self-protection, I forgot that. Maybe I chose to forget. Secondhand trauma is a monster, but it’s not an excuse. Not for this.

Not everyone walks past. Some stop. The ones who do wear a small gold medal around their neck and carry a smile for everyone they meet. Catholic, maybe, a favorite patron saint worn close to the skin. Whatever it is, they look at strangers differently than I do. There’s something in the way they see our patients, not just a person, but an image. God staring back at them through someone who doesn’t quite make sense today. A belief like that, held tightly, changes the way you move through a room.

I’m not there yet. But I know what I’m working toward.

Today, it starts with the next person who catches my eye.

I think I might need one of those medals.