Self Care as a Communications Professional

Life isn’t always commercial shoots and beer on tap.

During my advertising education, there wasn’t a lot of talk about managing difficult issues on the job.

Don’t get me wrong, they told us all about the long hours, the stress of selling ideas, and the constant critique you receive as a creative. All of that was par for the course, not matter if you were good at it or not.

But we didn’t talk about the hard topics you encounter and how to manage your personal feelings and health.

Case and point: in my current job, I support an account manager on work for a law firm. We handle a lot of the PR and digital advertising for the firm and their cases. Recently, the firm filed a case involving a teenager who committed suicide.

Mental health has always been an important topic for me and something I’ve personally struggled with.

As part of my job, I helped write the press release for the story and drafted emails to go out to the local news stations, attaching portraits of the teenager.

Externally, I did everything on time and to the best of my abilities. Internally, it was an emotional struggle for me every day we worked on PR for the case.

Here was a kid who had so much potential, but who had experienced so much negativity that they felt the only solution was to take their life. Just thinking about what they must have been feeling is devastating, and something I’ve felt about myself in the past.

We didn’t know how much coverage the story would get, but because of other facts in the case it ended up getting a lot of coverage. It was a good thing because it meant we did our jobs, but it was also hard to continue seeing the story.

During all of this, I did my best to take care of my own mental and emotional health.

It wasn’t easy, but I got through it and I did what was asked of me while still taking care of myself.

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