Whom to Help
You need a demonstrated history of coming correct in order for me to want to hold you when you pop off.
How do we know whom to help or when?
It's the biggest question for those of us who wish to be intentional about compassion.
If someone is popping off within a year of us knowing each other, that is not my business, it’s a signal of misalignment, and I adjust my understanding of our closeness to account for the distance required. Within one year, I am learning who this person is and whether they can be a generative and contributive member of my life and community. Someone popping off with judgment and drama, with a crisis born of irresponsibility, with conflict or criticism of me or my loved ones belongs far away from me.
If someone who I've known for years to be a valuable, present, potent contributor to my life and our community pops off, whatever the crisis, I will fly across the world to support them. If someone I know to be historically stable is in a crisis, even one which seems to be born of their personal irresponsibility, I rush to resource them, because I KNOW this can only be a result of nutrient-deprivation. I know it is not their practice to go to crisis to be rescued, to join community only so that there are resources to prevail on when they are unwilling to resource themselves.
If I've known them since childhood to be unwilling to resource themselves, that longterm link does not compel loyalty from me to resource them, even if we are blood related, even if their crisis appears acute. My relatives with a history of complaining, criticizing and blaming others for the scarcity they experience do not have access to my loyalty or my resources, because they are not generative members of my community. I feel compassion for them and deeply wish them well, and I can do so because I don’t take harm from them.
Energy vampires rely on the vast number of people who give their loyalty early or operate on loyalty of kinship or loyalty driven by the moral impulse to rescue and help. They cannot come correct for an entire year consecutively, and possibly not even from the first meeting.
But they are the friend of your friend, the person you've had lots of fun nights out with, the VERY good dick you're attached to taking. They seem to be on hard times.
They tug loyalty that wants to go toward fun experiences, loyalty as a principle of moral rightness, and my real loyalty belongs to alignment, to demonstrably generative connections which have played out over time and distance. My loyalty is to the experience of life I want to have, and I trust that desire to be holistic. I trust my own tendency to adore serving those who are integral parts of my life and community.
And I trust anyone on hard times to life and to themselves.
