“Get to” vs. “Have to”…

One day I was wearing the uniform and the next day I wasn’t.

In June 2024, I left the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office because my leadership values and those of then-Sheriff Christina Corpus were too far apart to reconcile. So I made the hardest decision of my career: I took off the badge.

I had worn a uniform for over thirty years and I assumed that what I’d miss most would be the obvious things: the role, the responsibility, the work itself. I was wrong.

What I missed was quieter than that. I missed the sense of duty and the camaraderie of people who run toward the very thing everyone else runs from. Most of all, I missed the calling that pulled me into this profession in the first place. It’s the reason almost every one of us signed up, long before the reports and the politics and the exhaustion: to help people. To keep a community, and my own family, safe.

I hadn’t just left a job. I’d left a part of myself.

Then things changed. Sheriff Corpus was removed from office, the newly appointed Sheriff Ken Binder asked me to return as undersheriff, and I put the uniform back on. The work was exactly as hard as I remembered, but I wasn’t the same.

For most of my career, if I’m being honest, there were plenty of mornings I woke up thinking, I have to go to work. I have to lead. I have to carry this. Now I wake up thinking something else entirely. I get to.

I get to wear this uniform. I get to lead these people. I get to be part of something that keeps a community safe.

Two small words, have to and get to, describe the same alarm clock, the same long shifts, the same hard calls. But they come from opposite places. One is a burden to survive. The other is a privilege to honor. The distance between them is the distance between burning out and being pulled forward.

One is a burden to survive. The other is a privilege to honor. The distance between them is the distance between burning out and being pulled forward.

I think that’s where a lot of us end up without ever meaning to. Somewhere along the way, the weight of the work buries the reason we chose it. The calling gets crowded out by the caseload, and “help people” quietly becomes “get through the shift.” None of it happens on purpose. It just accumulates, one hard day at a time, until the thing that once gave us purpose starts to feel like something we merely endure.

I won’t pretend the shift back holds itself up on its own. Some days still grind, and “get to” becomes a discipline, a reminder I have to give myself. But I’m surrounded by people at this office who have gone all in on the culture we’re building together, and on the hardest days, all it takes is a glance at the badge, or the patch on my shoulder, to remember. This is a privilege. And it’s temporary.

That’s the part I couldn’t see until I lost it. Every badge is temporary, every uniform comes off eventually, and the title you carry belongs to the role rather than to you. One day, you hand it back…ideally on your own terms but oftentimes not. Which is exactly what makes it a privilege to carry at all.

So here’s the invitation…and it costs nothing. If you are worn down by this work, if the thing that once felt like a calling has started to feel like a weight, this is for you. It doesn’t matter whether you answer the calls, staff the desk that holds the whole place together, carry the stripes, or sit in one of the big chairs. The next time you hear yourself say you have to, try trading it for two better words. The work doesn’t get any easier, but you get to remember why you started.

I don’t have to go to work tomorrow…I get to.

-Chris Hsiung