🔊 Listen (pending)
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What’s the point of my life? When I started my job as a care worker, I didn’t think that this was a question I’d feel forced to face. But that’s where I would end up. Allow me to explain.
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[[ new intro?: I loved my job as a care worker, for most of my time there … ]]
When I was a care worker, I had the fascinating experience of empathising completely with the differently-abled people I was assisting. By providing the foresight and instincts that didn’t come naturally to them, I became an outsourced extension of their own mental capacity, and to do my job well, I had to know what they were going to do before they even knew it themselves.
and I tried to empathise completely with their feelings and intentions.
[[ ^ unclear, needs total re-work ]]
From the start, I did my best to avoid muddying the purity of their experiences with my own ideas and desires. Although, such personal or moral judgements weren’t really possible anyway: When you’re inside a person’s mind so deeply that you know what they’ll do before they even do it, there’s only a fraction of space there for knowing what someone should do in that situation, enough to make the immediate call for whether or not it’s safe. The personal ponderings of “I would, because of my reasons” are replaced with the suddenly sharp intuitions of “they should, for their own benefit”.
[[ ^ reword: “That early on, I myself couldn’t (…) – rather than “one cannot” ]]
[[ ^ also: conflicts somewhat with the rest of this piece: Either I had did have room to analyse, or I didn’t ]]
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As an aside, it’s also possible to bastardise this process: If a person forgoes their empathy in pursuit of personal pride, they may attempt to push their own “woulds” onto you, forcing themselves into who you are, pushing your own personality aside to make room for their judgements.
The eventuality of such actions would be, from their perspective, to make you more resemble who theyare, rather than who youreally are, validating their actions and making further intrusions of thought and morality even easier.
But in reality, this only leaves you hollow: the identifying fragments that make up your being are scraped out and cast aside; eroding the potential for the self confidence which comes from forming who you are on your own accord; replacing it with a need to seek external input to balance the emptiness left in their wake.
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In the end I left my role as a care worker, finding it too hard to face the slowly intensifying existential dread that came with the unanswerable question of what, exactly, their life was worth. This was not a question I could answer, because to do so meant also questioning the value of my own life, and inevitably, the value of anything.
In hindsight, the seeds of those questions were planted by someone else, after I was an unwilling participant in discussions over the costs of social care. Discussions which, as they often do, avoided contemplations on human responsibility and instincts of support, instead focusing entirely on the minor monetary losses of a single person.
After leaving my role, I abandoned those value-based judgements – which may have concluded with the decision that my life was not worth living – and I defaulted back to my preferred position of optimistic nihilism; that is, the idea that if nothing matters, then we may as well make the most of it. Further on still, I moved into something more subtle, less narrowed by the blinkers of binary thinking – although, I am still partial to the hedonistic lack of restraint afforded by such an approach.
But in that moment of my life, there was so little left of me, at the end of each day, that I couldn’t reach the parts of my mind that would usually allow me such existential freedom. Those aforementioned seeds of doubt, rotten from the start, had sprouted and taken root, infecting everything until even the competing parts of me were rotten too.
My initial objective, an empathy-driven mission to discover the core of these people, had turned into icy judgements, clouding my experiences and leaving little of me to appreciate anything. Critical thinking had become a veil, obscuring my vision of who these people truly were.
I thought that I was exploring further into other worlds, but really, I was still exploring mine, and a vanishingly small part at that. The thoughts and supposed insights, which drove me towards questioning the purpose of all reality, were mine alone, and had little to do with the people they were analysing. All paths lead back to me, all judgements made based on how these people relate to who I was, and what value I myself held.
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The weight of all my efforts also took its toll on my relationship. My partner at the time – previously engaged in the unspoken agreement that we would share who we are with each other – found me slipping away, reneging on the contract that bound us together.
I was still present in person, but by favouring theory over experience, I had discarded so much of myself that there was little left of the person they’d originally loved. I was so distracted by my own thoughts that I couldn’t see who they were anymore, and I had essentially withdrawn my invitation for them to see me.
But perhaps worst of all, the shared reality which we had built together had dissipated, our bubble burst by the emotional nonchalance of cold reason; love and closeness replaced with apathy; responsibilities replaced with resentment.
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Every person who exists has their own interpretation of reality, their own understanding of the world they inhabit. Everyone is a separate universe, and empathy is a gateway into them.
But by discarding myself excessively, in the hope of understanding just a little bit more, I’d not only left too little of myself to really experience those new realities – I’d closed the door for someone else to enjoy my universe.
I was at my happiest, in that job, before I’d fully embarked on my quest to interpret the core of the people I supported, and instead, just allowed myself to see them as they present themselves. To witness the endearing beauty of a life lived in pure expression.
Note: This started as something else, but then a message about right-wing pressure stared to come through. So now it’s a half-way piece between that, and the original idea. Very much unfinished.