Stop Arriving With the Answer

I used to think helping was fairly straightforward.

Then I went to Cox’s Bazar. I thought I was going to help.

That is, after all what volunteers do.

We give up our time. We travel somewhere. We do what we can. Then we come home and people often say:

‘That’s amazing’

‘What an incredibly noble thing to do’

‘How good of you to give up your time’

But was it? We went for a week.

We got on a plane, packed our things, did what we little we could and then we left.

The people we met however didn’t.

During that week, the same friend who features rather spectacularly in my Tough Mudder – Bangladesh Edition story challenged me about something.

I was taking photos.

She looked at me and said something similar to:

“Why are you glorifying this? Don’t take pictures of them.”

‘Ouch, that’s harsh’ I thought.

And the comment has stayed with me ever since.

She was right. They weren’t there to provide us with photos, stories or a meaningful volunteering experience.

They were people living through circumstances they hadn’t chosen.

They gave us access to themselves. They spoke to us. They shared experiences with us. They allowed us glimpses into their lives at an incredibly vulnerable time.

And somehow we were the ones people celebrated for going.

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Who is the helping really for?

Have you seen that Friends episode about whether a completely selfless good deed actually exists?

If helping somebody makes us feel good, can it really be selfless?

Because helping someone can make us feel good. It can give us purpose. It can change our perspective

It’s a question that has stayed with me, because volunteering helped me.

It deeply impacted me.

But perhaps I’ve spent years asking the wrong question.

Maybe the problem isn’t that helping somebody gives us something in return.

Perhaps the real question is whether, in trying to help, we leave enough space for the person we’re helping to remain at the centre of their own experience.

I sometimes hear volunteering described as part of a journey of self-discovery.

I went there.

I helped.

I found myself.

I understand why. Experiences like that can profoundly change you.

But if somebody else’s most difficult experience becomes the backdrop to my journey of self-discovery, who is the story really about.

Because there’s a difference between:

I helped these people and I discovered something about myself.

and:

These people allowed me into their lives, and what they shared changed me.

The second forces you to contemplate deeper.

We weren’t there to decide what people needed. We were there to listen to what they told us they needed.

Being in Cox’s Bazar exposed me to complexities that can’t be captured neatly in a headline: displacement, host communities, tensions, relationships, gender violence, survival at its rawest and the messy reality that exists behind words like refugee.

But I would never presume that spending a week there meant I understood what it was like to live it.

I couldn’t walk in their shoes.

I could leave.

Perhaps what being there really taught me was how much I didn’t know.

I remember experiencing something similar in Bosnia.

I sat listening to somebody tell me about what had happened during the war when he was eleven years old.

I already knew there had been a war.

I’d seen it on TV. I’d read about it.

But hearing one person tell me what that history had looked like through his eyes was completely different.

He told me he had hidden with neighbours and family in a darkened room. How at one point, he had accidentally washed his hands with petrol (which was a commodity at the time!) rather than water, as they happened to be in identical cannisters.

How his tolerant, loving Serb neighbours seemed to develop a deep hatred almost overnight.

One neighbour who had respectfully taken his shoes off at the door.

A day later barged into their house wearing the same muddy shoes. He slammed them on kitchen the table and said:

‘This house is mine now. Leave.’

I was captivated by his stories it was like reading a book but with live audio.

It didn’t seem real. 

His experience didn’t suddenly make me understand everyone else’s.

If anything, it made me realise just how much I didn’t know.

And perhaps that is one of the greatest things another person can give us: access to a perspective that isn’t our own.

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Good intentions aren’t always enough

Then I found myself on the other side

Years later, my health changed dramatically.

And suddenly I wasn’t the person arriving to help.

I was the person others wanted to help.

What I was experiencing was visible on my skin, and because it looked familiar, people often had an identity for it.

Eczema.

Stop scratching, try this diet, try this remedy 

They had ideas about what it was, how it felt and what I should do about it.

I even had a therapist tell me, when I had excruciating nerve pain, I needed to simply walk around and build my muscular strength.

I experienced that socially, but I also felt it in medical appointments.

‘Take off your sunglasses’ one senior Doctor commanded.
Did she know they were my armour, protecting me from my vulnerabilities and what I perceived to be prying eyes?

There were many times when I didn’t feel heard.

There were times when I shut down.

There is something incredibly jarring about somebody else telling you what your feeling when you’re the person living inside it.

It taught me something I don’t think I could have understood in quite the same way before:

Don’t tell me what this is.
Ask me what it is like for me.

Because you cannot tell somebody how to experience their illness

You cannot tell somebody how to grieve.

You cannot decide how another person should respond to trauma.

And you cannot assume that because something looks familiar to you, you understand what it means to them.

Good intentions aren’t always enough

When I was at my most unwell, people cared about me.

I know they did.

But sometimes care came with assumptions.

It’ll be good for you to see people.

It’ll be good for you to talk.

It’ll be good for you to walk.

Except sometimes it wasn’t.

There were periods when I was bedbound, isolated in my room and mentally shut down.

Even replying to a message could require capacity I didn’t have.

And sometimes my silence became part of the conversation.

We’ve messaged her, but she doesn’t reply.

I understand now that the people sending those messages may have felt helpless and their intentions sincere.

But good intentions don’t create capacity in the person receiving them.

And I found myself wondering:

If helping me requires something from me that I don’t have the capacity to give, who is the helping for?

Some of the moments when I felt most supported were the moments when nobody tried to fix anything.

Sometimes it was somebody simply looking at me and saying.

‘What do you need?’

I remember having a huge setback and my dad coming into my room.

He didn’t give me advice.

He didn’t tell me what to do.

He didn’t try to make me feel better.

He just sat there.

On his phone.

There was no profound father-daughter conversation. No life-changing speech.

But I knew he was there.

I knew I wasn’t alone.

I’ve thought about that moment many times since.

My dad didn’t demand access to me.

He gave me access to him.

If I needed him, he was there.

And if I couldn’t speak, that was okay too.

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There isn’t a formula

Of course, “just take your lead from the person” sounds much less complicated.

I’ve got this wrong too.

When a friend lost her dad, I desperately wanted to be there for her. She kept telling me she was fine.

Eventually, I went to see her.

So even I didn’t completely follow her lead.

But when I got there, we just sat together.

In silence.

I couldn’t fix her grief. She didn’t need to explain herself to me or reassure me that my visit had helped.

We just sat.

And maybe that’s the difficulty.

One person might desperately need company. Another might need to close the door.

One person who is ill might need to talk. Another might not have the capacity to form the words.

And even the same person can need something completely different tomorrow.

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Being there for the long haul

That’s another thing illness taught me.

What somebody needs isn’t constant.

There were days when I needed to be left completely alone. Other days when being alone felt unbearable.

Sometimes I needed practical help. Sometimes conversation. Sometimes I just needed another prescence in the room busy on their phone.

And perhaps that’s why the long haul is harder.

Crisis is visible.

People know something has happened. They check in. They visit. They ask what they can do.

Then comes the after.

Today, outwardly I look better.

I’m moving again.
I’ve created this blog.
I’m telling stories about ballerina shoes, white-water rafting and friends disappearing into ditches.

People see glimpses of the person I used to be and understandably think.

She’s back.

But I’m not simply back.

I’m also not where I was.

I don’t think there is a back.

Sometimes I feel like a jigsaw that no longer fits together.

What happened to me changed my life. Illness wasn’t confined to my body.
I lost my job, my home, my community, my purpose and a life I thought I knew.

For a long time, that was the focal point.

Now it isn’t.

It’s still part of my story.
It just isn’t the whole story.

In my mind, I see myself riding towards something new, even though I still don’t quite know what that is. I feel caught in the middle. Between a past I didn’t want to leave, and a future I can’t quite see yet.

What happened is still there.

I don’t need to erase it, outrun it or pretend it didn’t happen.

Maybe that’s why I started this blog.

I’m not trying to get back to the person I was, although I miss and celebrate her.

I’m finding out who I am going forward.

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Remember the after

And as the visible signs of crisis become less obvious, inevitably the visits become less frequent. The check-ins become fewer.

Life moves on.

Of course it does.

Other people’s lives cannot remain suspended around what happened to me.

But mine didn’t simply restart from where it stopped.

And that makes me think differently about what happens after a difficult experience.

The event ends.
The attention moves elsewhere.
The person continues living with what came after.

A funeral happened.

A medical crisis passes.

Someone starts looking better.

A volunteer returns home.

Those aren’t equivalent experiences, and I would never deem them to be.

But they pose the same question?

What happens after everybody else thinks the moment has passed?

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learnt is this:

Don’t tell me what this is.
Ask me what it is like for me.

Don’t tell me what I need.
Ask me what I need from you today.

And if today I don’t have the capacity to answer, don’t give up on me.

Maybe helping isn’t about arriving with the answer.

Maybe it begins with accepting:

I might not know what you need.

I went to Cox’s Bazar thinking I was going there to give something.

I came home thinking more about what we received.

Their time. Their stories. Their trust. Their perspective.

My friend gave me a question that followed me home.

Years later, illness gave me another way of understanding it.

Perhaps being there for somebody isn’t always about what you can do for them.

Perhaps it’s about being willing to let go your assumption of what they need and actually see the person in front of you.

Stop arriving with the answer.

Listen to the person whose life it is.