Borrowed Capacity
On Tuesday, our staff was having a not-so-infrequent conversation that people who help people probably need to have more often.
We were frustrated.
At the community resource center, it sometimes feels as though people come to us asking us to live their lives for them. Solve their problems. Find their answers. Usually, the request seems to amount to Googling something they could have Googled themselves.
And we find ourselves shaking our heads. Did they make any effort before coming here? Have they made a phone call? Looked anything up? Tried? Why are we working harder to help them than they seem to be working to help themselves?
I think it’s important to admit that we ask these questions. People who do this work have limits. There are other people waiting. There’s only so much time, so much money, so much of ourselves available. When someone seems to hand us responsibility for their entire situation, we feel the weight of it.
But then our conversation turned. What if it were us?
If my life were coming apart, would I have the emotional reserves to work through a list of phone numbers? Would I be able to explain my situation to one more person, get one more rejection, and keep going? Or would I sit there, overwhelmed, unable to decide what to do first?
I’d like to believe I’d handle it well. I’m reasonably good at solving problems. I spend a lot of time doing it. But I’m usually doing it with enough distance to think. It’s a different proposition when the problem is where I’m going to sleep. Or whether the electricity will stay on. Or what happens to my family if I can’t figure this out.
We talked about that deer-in-the-headlights response. The possibility that someone sitting across from us might need to borrow our capacity for a while. Our ability to sort things out. Make a call. Identify the next step when everything looks like one enormous, unmanageable problem.
I find that that possibility changes the question entirely. It also brought me back to social Darwinism.
In the nineteenth century, thinkers associated with social Darwinism applied ideas about evolutionary struggle to human society. Competition supposedly sorted people according to their fitness. Wealth and power became evidence of superiority; poverty became evidence of inadequacy. In some versions of this thinking, helping people who struggled interfered with the process through which society improved.
Isn’t that a convenient explanation?… if you’re doing well. You’ve succeeded because you deserve to succeed. Someone else has failed because there’s something wrong with them. That explanation leaves very little for the successful person to examine.
The VCU Social Welfare History Project describes how opponents of poor relief argued that assistance encouraged idleness and prolonged dependency. Reading that history, one sees the root of many of our current ill-conceived social beliefs. The suspicion that helping might reward a lack of effort is not an unfamiliar thought… even to those of us doing the helping.
That doesn’t make every frustrated staff member a social Darwinist. We have legitimate questions about what works, what we can offer, and what responsibility belongs to the person asking. But I can see how easily an observation about someone’s behavior becomes a judgment about their worth.
They haven’t made the call. Therefore, they aren’t trying. Therefore, they don’t deserve our effort. But, how much do we actually know between the first sentence and the last?
Sometimes a person may be avoiding responsibility. Sometimes they may be overwhelmed. Sometimes both may be true. We’re unlikely to sort out the whole of someone’s character during a conversation at a resource desk. And I’m not sure that’s the work we’re there to do. We still have to make decisions. We can’t take over someone’s life. We can’t promise help we don’t have. We have a responsibility to the next person waiting, too. But we can ask a more useful set of questions. What have you tried? Where did you get stuck? What part can you manage today? Would it help if we made the first call together?
The same question can be asked with suspicion or curiosity. The person answering will probably notice the difference.
I keep coming back to this idea of loaning someone our capacity. It gives us a way to help without assuming that we must become permanently responsible for the outcome. We can work through the next step together and see what they’re ready to take on from there. That may be a small thing. It may even be all we have to offer at the time. But that’s ok. Many times, that’s all that’s needed.
There’s dignity in being taken seriously enough to be helped, and capable enough to participate. This is the razor’s edge we walk as community resource advocates. Loan capacity where needed while, at the same time, promoting agency and dignity.
Dependence is part of the human condition. We need each other. But our worth shouldn’t disappear when our ability to cope does. This is the basis of community. No single person is an island. We all need help from time to time. And that isn’t a bad thing.
It’s a human thing.
Basically it boils down to this: I can’t reconcile loving my neighbor with requiring them to demonstrate that they would have handled their life the way I imagine I would have handled it. Especially when my imagined performance has never been tested under their exact circumstances.
So do people deserve our help? Do we have the right to ask?
We have the responsibility to decide what we can do. That requires judgment, boundaries, and some difficult conversations. I’m much less certain that we have the knowledge to decide what suffering, or assistance, another person deserves.
Our conversation on Tuesday didn’t make the frustration disappear. We’ll probably have it again. Someone will ask us to do something that seems perfectly manageable, and we’ll wonder why they haven’t done it themselves.
I hope we remember to leave room for what we can’t see. And for the possibility that someday, sitting on the other side of that desk, I might need someone to loan me their capacity until I can find my own again.
