A simple question with a not so simple, and not so happy answer. · 4:19am Feb 1st, 2018
I propose a question, to any that will answer.
What does it mean to care?
When someone says "I care about you", what do they really mean. I know I've said it, not really thinking about the implications behind those words.
Is it just that you care about the answer to the questions you have?
Is it that you care about the person because of what they can do for you or give you?
Or, is it because you truly do care about them, not for any other reason than because they are who they are?
If you do truly care about them for who they are, how far would you go?
What would you do for them, to show that you care, to help them get over an issue they can't do alone?
Would you stay up 'till 3:00 in the morning(when you have work/school at 7) messaging them, just to make sure that they didn't have any un-asked or un-answered questions, or to make sure that they felt safe/okay enough to fall asleep?
Would you go over to their house to make them feel better? What if it was 1 mile away? 3 miles? 10 miles? Does it have a limit?
What if they were just outside the limit? How far is 'just outside'? Think of the difference between a heap and a pile. If you don't draw the line, there is no line to tell you if you passed it. But yet, could you really tell someone that "I can't help you" when it is entirely within your power to help them?
No, not with a clean concience, so you just hope and pray they don't ask too much, because now that you've said you'd "help however I can" or "I care about you" or even "please, let us help you". You can't go back, it's like a pact, it should not be broken, you would not have made it in the first place if you did not believe it to be true in some degree.
And you can't preface it or add something to the end of it, else it loose the point of the gesture and have it do more harm than good to the one you want to help.
Here lies the paradox, I call it "The Paradox of Hurt". If you say you care, that would mean you're trying to help, but to give indication on how much you care negates the feeling of helpfulness you want to create, and to not say you care? Well, it's a very tough thing to work around when you really do care, but don't want to dissapoint anyone with limits you didn't know you had.
So I ask of you this, not hoping for response of your answer, but for you to ask these questions of yourself, to find out how far you would go if you really do care about someone. And in these questions, you may find that you didn't really care as much as you thought you did.
---This post was brought to you by ineffective drugs, a migraine, general illness, and lack of trust in anything.
This is the kind of thing I have thought about a lot. I've told a couple people I loved them, and their response was "careful with the L word". At the time, I thought it was true. I thought I'd do almost anything for them. Without going into any details, I'll just say it didn't stay that way. It's not always easy to really mean what you say, I guess. And it can be even harder to mean what someone else thinks you mean.
I'm also the kind of dork who used to imagine stuff like my school's superintendent going outside and determining whether to call it a snow day or not, and wondering when just one more snowflake would change his mind from no to yes. The common metaphor is the straw that broke the camel's back. The problem is, it's not as simple as one bit of straw or one snowflake. It becomes much more nuanced. Taken literally, if adding a bit of straw is going to break a camel's back, then adding nothing and simply waiting a small amount of time would do the same, or a tiny shift in posture, or a convenient gust of wind. Anyway, I'm just saying this to say that I don't think there is simply a "just outside the limit" of how far someone would go for someone else. It's more like a scale that slides between "would always go that far" and "would never go that far" with the middle being things like "would go that far if it's not raining" and "wouldn't go that far if I don't know the area". And the closer to the middle, the more nuanced it would be. Maybe whether your nose itches would be the deciding factor. The difference between a heap and a pile might just be which word sounds better at the time. Definite boundaries aren't always obvious.
Anyway, I think that was kind of beside the point of the post as a whole. I've had some people say "you can tell me anything". Great. But then I told them some things they apparently didn't want to hear. So I guess I couldn't tell them "anything". Do I wish they hadn't said "you can tell me anything"? On the one hand, it sucked feeling lied to (although I wouldn't say they lied, just were wrong). On the other hand, I learned something about them, and got a better idea of their boundaries.
I know this blog is kind of old, but resonated with me, so I figured I'd throw my thoughts here. I hope you've found some more satisfying answers for yourself, in the time since you posted it.