#and yeah!!! seeing that amount of need is honestly reallt hard emotionally! but my emotions are MY responsibility. not everyone else's.

[praise-the-lord-im-dead]

Re: the shelter post, something interesting I've noticed in conversations about very poor or unhoused people is this sort of...weird reactivity that people don't seem to realize they're operating on?

Like there's a cycle of:

see person who needs help > feel intense shame and pity > try to stop feeling the unpleasant things by reasoning that the person will surely receive help elsewhere/they are secretly rich and begging for extra cash/they somehow deserve their situation, etc. So you get people reasoning that there's a ton of shelters with empty rooms for no reason other than people on the street actually like being on the street. Or people critiquing the high grade of cardboard someone's 'please help' sign is written on, or saying that they have a suspiciously expensive backpack, or reasoning that, well, they weren't actually asking for gas money, surely it was for drugs or alcohol.

Essentially, this takes the feelings of shame and pity and makes them unnecessary, but also someone else's fault.

I feel like it's a lot healthier to deal with the inevitable emotional reaction to seeing people in desperate straights as what it is: an emotional reaction that's good, and natural, but ultimately no one's fault and also not going to be of much help in actually fixing anything.

Then you can move on to dealing with reality, where people are complicated and weird and usually need more help than we can hope to provide--but when and where we can be of some help, we can do it without acting entirely out of suspicion, paranoia, and blame.