journal_vol49no3 - 137

Well-Being Experiences of Resident Assistants
Sources of Well-Being Disruption
Within my first theme, I found two main sources of well-being disruption for RAs with
minoritized identities. One was the role itself: RAs are routinely exposed to traumas
that most are not sufficiently trained to handle or process. The second was supervisors
who held uneven identity-based expectations for RAs' job performances that led to RAs
with these kinds of supervisors feeling additional emotional tolls.
Structure of the RA role. How RA roles were designed as well as the expectation to
informally counsel residents were the primary sources that disrupted the well-being of
RAs with minoritized identities in ways that produced mental and physical exhaustion.
As Emere expressed it, " If you work nine to five, you come home and you can leave
the job. But coming home to the residence hall as an RA is coming home to my job.
That was rough. " Joziah agreed, saying, " I'm always on the job, so being gay hasn't ever
really been at the forefront of my mind. " Between programming, consoling residents
during emotional life events, attending meetings and trainings, decorating the area,
and responding to duty incidents, all RAs in the study recognized the heavy time commitment
and varied emotional demands of these tasks.
The communities that RAs oversaw ranged between 32 and 90 residents and were
almost always defined by the institution according to residents' sex assigned at birth.
RAs in these communities described their maintenance of the well-being of others as
being akin to manual labor-or, as Angelina put it, carrying " the weight of 32 people. "
Shouldering this burden meant ignoring her own well-being in order to support residents
at a moment's notice:
I had a family fight, plus a bad exam. It was a bad week. My bad week happened to be
everyone's bad week. I was on the phone fighting with my mom or dad and I was crying
and someone knocked on my door. So, I'm trying to make it look like I wasn't crying. Then,
[the resident] came in and she was crying, and I felt like I was barely holding on. I was just
crying myself and I have to automatically strap in and take care of this resident. It's just
very heavy, and I mean [residents] go through horrible things.
Responding to residents' needs was challenging not only because it was unpredictable,
but also because it involved listening to and maintaining confidence about
the traumas and hardships they encountered. This meant that RAs with minoritized
identities, like Angelina, sometimes set aside their own lives to put residents first. For
some RAs, residents' crises meant carrying this weight beyond a conversation or an
incident. As Emere explained,
It's all interconnected, taking on residents' emotional baggage. . . . You know what you're
supposed to do on paper [with resident crisis], but it's not something you can just drop.
In class the next day, I'm wondering how they're doing. . . . Until the very last day where
I moved out, I was talking to residents about hardships they were going through. . . . For a
while, I wasn't even sure I wanted to come back [as an RA].
134 The Journal of College and University Student Housing

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