the trouble with altruism as a core value

[flamingsword]

The trouble with altruism as a core value is that I want to help everyone. But sometimes people need to be helped in ways that I am still bad at or disabled from doing. I also have trouble with avoiding having expectations of reciprocity that people will help me in the ways that I ask for. Or even that they may be able to.

I think I have this background assumption that people fall into one of two categories: "Bad At People" or "Good At People", because other people seem to have a superpower that I don't have and have been trying to emulate for the past thirty years. But now I need to consciously re-write the assumptions there. Often, people are good at some categories of social skills and not others, so assuming that even people who are much better at social interaction than me are universally competent is not doing us any favors. (I think J's social mastery warped my expectations for human behavioral possibility. When you've met people who can meet a DC 25 skill check, the baseline for "average" gets set higher than the actual human norms.)

So now I get to use trying to align my values with my life for figuring out whether or not I reach out to someone to help them, or help them by leaving them alone, or help both of us, possibly by admitting that this friendship is damaging to me and possibly also to her, and just letting go. Did I mention that I am remarkably bad at letting things go? But I don't get better without practice. So let's do a Sea Of Doubt exercise on this. I am:

45% in favor of trying to get back together

I have been helpful to her before
we are both working to better ourselves
I believe in our power to have different problems next time

35% in favor of letting her break it off

respecting her decisions is important and competent
I'm in a rough spot right now; dealing with the hurt and anxiety of this is bad for me

20% in favor of giving us a time to try to talk this over, maybe Thanksgiving

it gives us time to miss each other
it gives us time to grow past the mistakes that ended the friendship
doesn't disrespect her decision to halt the friendship

So I have no idea what I'm going to do yet, and need to maybe find some dice or something. Here, for reading this far you get a link to Walpurgisnacht by Faun. Pagan music you can shake your butt to.

Comments

[flamingsword]

A friend has suggested that I might want to dig into what is behind this particular abandonment issue before I try to repair this friendship. Sounds exhausting and painful, which of course means that I'm going to do it. Because losing friends isn't hard enough, I feel the need to jump into something punishingly difficult while I'm already going to be suffering. Might as well get all the unpleasantness over with at once, right?

Does anybody else do this to themselves?