We're all problem solvers

Dora flew off to Egypt for her friend’s wedding, and as part of the pre-trip information donwload, we watched a Caspian Report video on the geopolitics of Egypt and read through a Twitter thread on Egypt’s geography. For those of you in the know, videos about geopolitics feature prominently in the Dora/Saurya mythos. On our very first date I insisted that Dora watch a 35-minute video about the geopolitics of Southeast Asia, and we got through about 15 minutes of it before I realized I was being very weird. We then went our separate ways but I followed up with an insistent text message to watch the video because it was, indeed, very good.

The video about Egypt was a real thinker though - 99% of Egypt’s population lives just on 3% of its land. The Nile, while large and useful for irrigation is not navigable in many parts. 103 million people crowded into the area of Belgium, who all have to import food and transport it inland over land routes sounds crazy to me. The problems that a coutnry like Egypt has are simply not solvable by the type of techniques used in places like Europe. Despite proximity to Europe and the ability to purchase European services, Egypt has had a tough time countering its intransigent geography.

This applies to people too - some people are working with a lot fewer arrows in the quiver - a lot fewer chances to hit the target of success. Others are working with a handicap, even if they have lots of arrows. Others still don’t even have a bow.

I recently stopped volunteering for Samaritans and it gave me a chance to reflect on all of the things I’ve learned from the experience. I always was the type of person who wanted to get to know someone’s struggles, sometimes to the point of defining people by their struggles rather than their successes. This was a pathology I had to get over at some point. Samaritans helped me turn that into a healthy skill - my job was to be present and listen to people who were going through a lot. While I can’t and won’t share the specifics of the calls, the experience as a whole changed me. I’m very glad for that.

My original motivation for signing up for Samaritans was a bit complicated. I’ve struggled with suicidal thoughts in my own life. I joke when I’m very bored that I want to die, and that’s mostly a joke now. When I was younger, however, the world didn’t make sense to me and I knew some part of me really just didn’t belong in the world - the pre-modern moral code that I talked about in previous blog posts is a good example. In December of 2016, I entered into one of the worst periods in my life where I dated a person who was not only incredibly emotionally volatile, but also frequently suicidal. My actions were controlled and constrained by that person’s threats of violence against me or themselves. I came out of that situation emotionally damaged in ways that I still reckon with today. One of them was that a part of me realized all of that person’s threats to harm themselves were not real surfacing of internal pain. Rather, they were attempts to control me through my Good Samaritan nature.

I realized that, like any power, my giving nature, my desire to be there for others and help them had a real drawback to it. I had to get training to help me manage this urge, to help me contain it and give me boundaries such that it doesn’t consume my whole being.

For that, Samaritans was fantastic. The rules, structure and training they gave me made me very comfortable talking to people in the depths of emotional despair, ready to take their own life.

It also sent me down an entirely new path. Like any public-facing service, Samaritans received a fair amount of abusive behavior. People would call the line to try to have phone sex, prank or simply scream and threaten us volunteers. That was a minority of interactions, but still modifies the tone of what we were doing.

The really radicalizing thing was to hear the loneliness of so many different people in so many different walks of life. Samaritans is an organization that exists to serve the needs of people who have been already failed by the social and healthcare systems in their world. But far from being a curative, we are mere witnesses to people who are slowly falling further away from a life of flourishing. At some point, I could no longer handle that. The despair that people expressed on the phone was downstream of compounded despair in their lives and the lives of those around them. I had trouble staying in the moment, talking to people about the issues that plagued them that day like not being able to afford a $200 healthcare expense. I kept feeling an inchoate rage towards a system that allows such things to stand between health and debilitating illness.

I walked away from Samaritans appreciating the constraints that the organization works under. Similarly, I deeply appreciate the constraints that the average person in America faces. For some time, with the fire of youth, we can overcome constraints. But as we get older, the energy fades and the weight of those constraints buckles our spine. From the outside, we seem decrepit and broken. But really, we’re just alone.