Accepting our Roles

In the last discussion board I talked a lot about finding my role as a “helper” this past semester. I rediscovered this innate joy of interacting with others and sharing compassion with them. But was “helper” the only role that I was playing? Though my weekly routine at the soup kitchen started as a requirement, something kept me coming back for more. At the time, I was not quite sure what this feeling was. Even after my attendance was no longer needed, I felt that missing a Thursday would be to break some piece of myself. I had never made a vow to never miss one of these “God’s family dinners,” but that was the feeling I perceived. After reading How Can I Help?, I think perhaps what I felt inside was due to my own helplessness. Dass writes, “Maybe some of us help out as a way of compensating for a deeper sense of helplessness; we don’t have to face our own quite so much when we’re busy treating some else’s” (126). I couldn’t agree more with this sentence; I have always been the fixer of problems, even when engulfed in my own. Looking back at this past semester, I think that my connection to the Thursday afternoon fellowship at University Baptist Church stems from my entrance into my own helping prison.

Chapter five of How Can I Help? talks much about the roles of the “helped” and the “helper,” and how often the people fulfilling these roles feel restricted to them. Last semester, for the first time in my life I really saw what I was like to be the helpless, dependant on someone else damn near completely. Within two weeks of moving down to Austin last August, I was diagnosed with an advanced state of liver disease. Suddenly I was forced to interrupt the new chapter of my life and return home each week for tests or doctor’s appointments. On one weekend in October, I was admitted into the hospital in Fort Worth for a liver biopsy that would determine the amount of damage my liver had sustained over the past eighteen years. I was plugged into blood pressure, oxygen, and blood sugar monitors. My heart and lungs had patches on them with wires running into various computers. I was given an IV and the slightest anesthesia for when the surgery was actually performed. It wore off very quickly, and I experienced a very severe state of pain as my side and right shoulder began to spasm and burn. I regard this experience as the weakest I have ever been. My reaction to the surgery was so poor that I had to be administered a lot of painkillers and fluids (of what, I did not know) through my IV. Throughout this experience I was very dependant on my parents for physical and emotion support. None of my friends knew of what ailed me. I felt ashamed to talk to them about it for whatever reason. But once I did mention it to them over Thanksgiving break, I felt a great burden lifted from my chest; “I gave them my shame and my anger and my fear. I felt it was the truth. And if it was the truth, then how could I be helpless?” (144) I began to see many of my emotions about my situation were unnecessary. Dass writes, “You don’t suffer from the truth. The truth sets you free” (144).

I have done a lot over the past several months to try and come to grips with what I’ve been going through. I contemplated dropping out of school for treatment until my chances for success dropped from 70% to 30%. At that point there was really nothing I could do. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice a year of my life – the duration of the treatment – for those statistics. I wanted to live. So I just threw myself into my schoolwork and into pledgeship to make the most out of what I was already committed to. And I surprised myself with how well I succeeded in these ventures despite what was wracking my brain each night when I laid down to sleep. I possessed extraordinary emotional and mental strength, for “as punishing as [helplessness] can be, people also have a chance to see what strengths can emerge in its face” (135). What I was capable of accomplishing, despite the setbacks, was amazing to me. It was my “moment of illusion which leaves us breathless” (Bump 135). So as I resigned to the role of the “helped,” other possibilities emerged in front of me. I could also be the “helper” without disregarding my current status as the “helped.” Dass argues in the conclusion of chapter five that the task is to cut down the roles of “helper” and “helped” in order to not be restrained by either. While becoming the helped is entering into the helping prison, often it is the best place to start to achieve the liberation Dass talks about. I didn’t need to deny that I needed help. But I did realize, through my service at University Baptist Church, that what really helped cut down the boundaries of these helper / helped roles was to “allow [myself] to open to the fullness of our humanity” (140). As I helped others, I saw again how I was capable of being helped, which greatly relieved my burden and let me return to my original task of service.