I don’t know who needs to hear this but I wish someone had drilled it into me sooner:

[elizafox@social.treehouse.systems]

I don’t know who needs to hear this but I wish someone had drilled it into me sooner:

Empathy isn’t obligation.

If someone is looking for a saviour, you’re not obligated to save them. Don’t set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.

If someone is unwilling to do the bare minimum to help themselves, that’s a good baseline for how you’re going to be treated. Even if they’re unable… yes, it sucks, but if they have no energy for themselves, you will wind up having your energy drained. Even if you hate yourself, you do not want your energy drained.

Never enter a situation where you become someone’s unpaid caretaker, physical or emotional. You will regret it. You will lose agency. You will hear every variant of “how dare you be tired or have a need, *I* need something.” People get paid to do this for a living, and for a reason: the job sucks.

[gaditb@icosahedron.website]

@Elizafox It's worryingly common to conflate an active empathy of "recognize need and therefore take action",
with a passive empathy(?) of "recognize personhood and situation and therefore need",
and to frame not doing the one as implying not doing the other or to discuss the cost and impact of doing the other as if it's the one,

and those aren't symmetric directions but I think they're related in structure and I think (less confidently) they're related in practicing either makes it easier to go both ways and I think they both scare me.