By: Amisha Singh, DDS, EdD

One of my earliest memories of the COVID-19 pandemic is not of masks or empty grocery store shelves. It is of sitting on the couch in my living room, watching the world change on a television screen while holding my three-month-old daughter in my arms. My two little boys were curled up beside me, blissfully unaware of the uncertainty unfolding around us, simply happy that their mother was home. As headlines flashed across the screen and the questions multiplied faster than the answers, I remember feeling something unfamiliar: helplessness.

During those early days, one quote seemed to appear everywhere. Friends shared it on social media. News anchors repeated it. It surfaced again and again as people searched for something steady to hold onto amid the fear.

Fred Rogers once recalled advice his mother gave him whenever frightening things happened in the world:

“Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” 

I have thought about those words often in the years since.

“Dentistry is, at its heart, a profession of helpers.”

We dedicate our lives to alleviating pain, restoring function, rebuilding confidence and serving others in moments of vulnerability.

Every day we walk into our practices asking a simple question: How can I help?

We help patients through fear. We mentor students and young colleagues. We answer questions after hours. We stay late to squeeze in the emergency patient. We coach our teams through difficult seasons. We volunteer in our communities. We serve on committees. We advocate for our profession. We pour
ourselves into our spouses, our children, our parents, our friends, our communities.

Helping is not simply what we do; for many of us, it becomes who we are. Throughout my winding career path, service has been the constant thread. It has quietly guided every major decision I have made, often before I could articulate why. It has led me to extraordinary mentors, lifelong friendships, unexpected
opportunities, and work that has stretched both my mind and my heart. Time and again, whenever I have followed the impulse to serve, dentistry has opened doors I never knew existed. For me, it is one of the most beautiful parts of this profession. It is how I found purpose, but more than that, it is how I found myself.

Yet somewhere along the way, service can become something more than what we do. If we are not careful, the very impulse that draws us into this profession
can quietly begin to define us.

Seamlessly and silently, helping others takes on a life of its own. The people around us come to depend on us. Leaders become indispensable. Parenthood becomes our identity. Our teams and colleagues begin to rely on us because they know we will say yes. Patients trust us because we are committed. Organizations hand us one more responsibility because we always deliver.

Eventually, almost without noticing, we stop asking a question that may be one of the most important questions of our lives.

“Who am I when nobody needs me?”

For years, I would have answered that question without another thought.

I am a dentist.
A leader.
An educator.
A mother.
A volunteer.
A mentor.

Each of those identities is deeply meaningful to me. Each represents work that I love. Yet over time I have learned that identities built primarily around usefulness are remarkably fragile. They depend on someone else needing something from us. They depend on us producing. And then, without knowing it, we can define ourselves only by our contributions. Our worth becomes centered on our accomplishments. Achieving becomes living.

When usefulness becomes identity, rest begins to feel uncomfortable. It may feel like we must earn the rest we receive and the cost becomes exhaustion. We
tell ourselves we are simply driven. But sometimes, that life is driven by a small fear… We are afraid that if we stop producing, we might stop mattering.

I suspect many of us entered dentistry because we genuinely wanted to serve. Yet somewhere between our white coat ceremonies and the lives we have built, service can quietly become performance. We begin measuring ourselves not by who we are becoming, but by how much we are accomplishing. Productivity becomes a proxy for worth. Achievement becomes a language through which we seek love, belonging, and validation, from ourselves and the world around us. Achievement temporarily convinces us of something we yearn to believe is true: that we are enough.

The dangerous part is that achievement works, at least for a little while.

Through the busyness of our lives, the patient that thanks us, the promotions, the awards, the titles, the publications, the committee meetings… we rely on the milestones to bring us joy and define our fulfillment. Each one offers a brief surge of satisfaction before the finish line quietly moves again. Because there is always another summit, another goal, another credential. One day, we pause and we try to remember when we last celebrated a win. We realize, in awe, that although we have been living the life we prayed for, we did not stop striving and the striving got exhausting. We realize that we keep seeking yet another opportunity to prove that we deserve to occupy the space we already stand in.

Our culture celebrates hustle and busyness almost as moral virtues. We wear exhaustion as a badge of honor. We glorify calendars packed so tightly that there is no white space left to breathe. Even rest has become something we believe must be earned.

“I’ll slow down after this deliverable.”
“I’ll take care of myself once things settle.”
“I’ll finally take that trip after this busy season ends.”

But there is always another season. We somehow always find another reason to postpone ourselves.

The irony is that Mr. Rogers never simply told us to be the helpers. He told us to look for them. I think this is because he understood something profound:

“Even helpers need other helpers.”

For much of my life, I found purpose in being the person others could depend on. Accepting help felt strangely uncomfortable, almost as though receiving somehow diminished the satisfaction of giving. I am slowly learning the opposite is true. Receiving is not the absence of generosity; it is what makes generosity sustainable.

Perhaps the greatest act of courage is not adding one more responsibility to our already full lives. Perhaps it is believing that we remain worthy on the days when we contribute nothing at all. Perhaps it is daring to believe that our worth is innate and does not need to be earned through accomplishment.

Dentistry will always need helpers. Our communities will always need leaders. Our families will always need our love.

But before we are dentists, leaders, parents, or professionals, we are human beings, not human doings. The measure of our life was never meant to be found solely in what we accomplish. It is found in who we become while accomplishing it.

So may we continue to help generously, lead courageously and serve wholeheartedly.

May we never forget that our greatest contribution to this world will not ultimately be everything we do. It will be the person we become while doing it.