Resilience / A reflection by Stephen Combs
The Dirt is Part of the Process
The hardest parts of public information work are rarely taught in a classroom. They can also become the roots of lasting resilience.
Take a moment. Read the story.Nobody warns you about the dirt when you take the job.
The classes teach you how to answer questions on the fly. How to use bridging statements to stay on message. How to write a news release in AP style and stand in front of a camera without looking like you would rather be anywhere else on earth.
What they do not teach you is what happens when the public decides you are the villain.
Not because you did anything wrong. Not because the facts support it. But because social media hands anyone with a grievance and a keyboard the same megaphone as everyone else, and sometimes that megaphone gets aimed directly at you. Faceless. Relentless. Personal. From people who have never met you, know nothing about the care behind every word you have ever written, and have no idea that the person they are eviscerating online spent their morning in quiet reflection trying to get it exactly right for them.
They do not know about the journal on your desk before the sun comes up. They do not know that the statement they are tearing apart was rewritten four times because you were trying to honor the people who needed to hear it. They do not know that you carry the weight of every story you have ever told, long after the news cycle has moved on.
They just throw the dirt.
And you absorb it. Because the job requires it. Because you represent something larger than yourself. Because responding in kind would betray everything you stand for. And because the people you serve, the ones who never comment, never share, never send a single word of acknowledgment, are still counting on you to show up tomorrow exactly the same way you showed up today.
Nobody warns you about the gut punches either.
The calls you hoped would never come but prepared for anyway. The moments where the weight of what you are about to say to a grieving community settles on your chest before you ever open your mouth. The days when compassion fatigue stops being a clinical term and starts being the feeling you are driving home with at the end of a shift.
If you have not trained for those moments, they can be a knockout blow.
But here is what nobody tells you about dirt.
An acorn does not grow in spite of it. It grows because of it. Every handful thrown its way becomes part of the foundation. The roots push deeper not when conditions are comfortable but when they are hard. The dirt is not the enemy of the oak tree. The dirt is exactly what the oak tree needs to become what it was always meant to be.
And when the storm comes, because it always does, the oak does not survive because it was sheltered. It survives because the roots went down deep and wide through every hard season that came before it.
That is what a long career in public information actually looks like.
Not a highlight reel. Not a crisis communications trophy case. A root system. Built through mornings nobody saw and nights nobody acknowledged. Built through gut punches absorbed with grace and vitriol met with professionalism. Built through the dirt thrown by strangers and the storms weathered quietly on behalf of people who will never know your name or the love behind the storyteller.
The classes will teach you the craft. Experience will teach you the rest.
Train for the worst days. Protect your roots. Let the dirt do its work.
Be the oak tree!