Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT Strips 4316-4320 (27-31 July 2020)

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Datalore:
Man I was so anxious when May agreed to crowdfund. I relate a lot to her and it was gut wrenching to see her have to accept something she so clearly felt uncomfortable with. I come from a very "suck it up, buttercup" family where even things like financial ruin and homelessness are met with things like "What are you going to do to fix that for yourself? I don't want to hear/don't talk to me about your problems unless you're doing something about them." (With the strongly established boundary that you don't ask for handouts from others to fix your own mess, because everyone has problems and no one has room for yours too.) I'm not around my family anymore, but man has that caused a lot of challenges in adulthood, especially in the workplace. Learning not only to ask for help, but also how and when is still so friggin rocky for me. I never want to overstep and risk permanent damage to my relationships, platonic or professional or otherwise, but I have virtually 0 scale for what that even looks like. Even accepting offered help is hard for me, because I think I always expect there to be strings attached, or for peoples opinions of me to drop if I were to actually accept. Anxiety incarnate. So seeing May kind of run out of options hit so close to home and that was hard to read.

But today's strip made me want to cry, because while I've been on the fundraising side for others before, I never really connected the two and two together that this is what it could look like behind the scenes for helping 'damaged' people, too. Like, the experience of friends and family networking together and reaching out to their circles to make something happen isn't limited to just being for individuals who are chipper and sunny and know exactly how to accept help without being 'too much,' and who are all around well balanced and established and connected to communities that [seem to] have valued them their whole life). Helping someone like May doesn't have to be a begrudging act of annoying inconvenience done just because "If you don't pitch in $2-5 you're an asshole, so just do it to say you did."

Obviously this case is fiction, but I never really thought of the two worlds being the same as even possible. People care about pinnacles to their community, but nobody cares about people like me and May, and that was just my underlying assumption that I didn't even realize I had. Today's strip in particular has given me a lot to process and think about.

somnolesence:

--- Quote from: dutchrvl on 27 Jul 2020, 06:58 ---I dunno about the US/Canada, but in my family/friends environment it has become increasingly common for the bride and groom to have considerable input when it comes to their bachelor/bachelorette parties, especially when it comes to wishes like keeping it local, not doing certain things they're just not comfortable with, and/or having it on the same night as their s.o.
--- End quote ---

Yeah same for me, for my friends this year we've had joint parties since there wasn't any point splitting up the friend group when we're all happy for both and want to celebrate with both. It's primarily paid for by them and us chipping in accommodation costs for the nights at the lodge (and obviously whatever booze we want to bring with). That's been similar for others in the group, but then again we aren't particularity traditional folk, at least not for the sake of it alone.

Plus the wedding and events around it are for the people getting married, who cares what others want because they chipped in a few hundred/thousand, its not their day. At the end of the day you should just be happy for the couple and if you want to offer financial gift then that should be all it is, a gift, not buying a controlling share in a business with veto rights.

OK rant over. Just something that annoys me is controlling parents/family wanting a say in big events just because of money, comes from my mum having dealt with wedding stationary orders and the clients telling her about their troubles with in laws etc.

hedgie:

--- Quote from: Datalore on 27 Jul 2020, 10:25 ---Man I was so anxious when May agreed to crowdfund. I relate a lot to her and it was gut wrenching to see her have to accept something she so clearly felt uncomfortable with. I come from a very "suck it up, buttercup" family where even things like financial ruin and homelessness are met with things like "What are you going to do to fix that for yourself? I don't want to hear/don't talk to me about your problems unless you're doing something about them."

--- End quote ---

Aah, my family is keeping me off the streets, but it comes with a healthy side of walking on eggshells, as well as direct verbal and emotional abuse.

N.N. Marf:

--- Quote from: Datalore on 27 Jul 2020, 10:25 ---Man I was so anxious when May agreed to crowdfund. I relate a lot to her and it was gut wrenching to see her have to accept something she so clearly felt uncomfortable with. I come from a very "suck it up, buttercup" family where even things like financial ruin and homelessness are met with things like "What are you going to do to fix that for yourself? I don't want to hear/don't talk to me about your problems unless you're doing something about them." (With the strongly established boundary that you don't ask for handouts from others to fix your own mess, because everyone has problems and no one has room for yours too.) I'm not around my family anymore, but man has that caused a lot of challenges in adulthood, especially in the workplace. Learning not only to ask for help, but also how and when is still so friggin rocky for me. I never want to overstep and risk permanent damage to my relationships, platonic or professional or otherwise, but I have virtually 0 scale for what that even looks like. Even accepting offered help is hard for me, because I think I always expect there to be strings attached, or for peoples opinions of me to drop if I were to actually accept. Anxiety incarnate. So seeing May kind of run out of options hit so close to home and that was hard to read.

--- End quote ---
I'm very against asking for help---I take it quickly, easily, preferably with no take backs when it's offered (the way I see it, if they didn't really want to help, they shouldn't make the mistake of offering; if they didn't explicitly specify beforehand what exactly strings are attached, then there's no reason they should expect me to accept any strings that they think were attached.)---but sometimes, even though it might look like asking for help, it's really not. For example, at work, if I don't know how to do something, it's imperative I don't try to do it myself, because, in my experience talking to customer service, many problems are caused by a person inability to do his job fulfilling the task, i.e. reading through the company's documentation to figure out how to do it himself or working with someone who knows how to do it. Of course, if it's explicitly part of my job description, then obviously I have to do it, and not rely on someone else, but there are still edge cases that might need to be discussed with colleagues.
However, I'm not against offering help. After all, my easily accepting help makes me interested in fostering a culture of offering help.


--- Quote from: Datalore on 27 Jul 2020, 10:25 ---Obviously this case is fiction, but I never really thought of the two worlds being the same as even possible. People care about pinnacles to their community, but nobody cares about people like me and May, and that was just my underlying assumption that I didn't even realize I had. Today's strip in particular has given me a lot to process and think about.

--- End quote ---
How realistic/practical would it be for people to pitch in for the "nobodies"? I bet there's a pretty steep triage, where if your problems aren't severe enough, you'll be classed as not needing immediate attention, and subsequently never get any attention.

Datalore:

--- Quote ---How realistic/practical would it be for people to pitch in for the "nobodies"? I bet there's a pretty steep triage, where if your problems aren't severe enough, you'll be classed as not needing immediate attention, and subsequently never get any attention.
--- End quote ---

I feel like it could be feasible on the local community level, but you need local community involvement. Without some sort of community involvement most broad sweeping efforts are doomed to fall flat, because it takes more than just cash to help people in meaningful ways. They need to know there's a place for them, and that there's at least some level of investment in their success, and also them as individual persons.

Re: the severity aspect... yeah, pretty much. My mom had me out of wedlock and was ostracized from her family for a while for it. For the first three/four years of my life we lived out of her car or couch surfed. I feel like people go by likely ROI when they decide who to help. Someone who was a firefighter who volunteered in their spare time and donated every chance they could who becomes homeless will likely have a lot more support thrown their way than someone who was literally born into homelessness. I'm not criticizing that. I get it. Resources are finite, emotional bandwidth is finite, you can't help everybody. (Also, it's hard to argue against it when it feels like a selfish gesture on my part to do so.) The firefighter has proven themselves as someone who can stand on their own two feet. The young mother sleeping in parking lots has proven (at least, at a glance) that they make poor decisions to the point they destroyed their life before it'd even started, and it's not hard to write off any kids she might have with her in that situation as a social lost cause too.

It's more that this comic has forced me to reconcile with some of the ways being brought up that way's effected me so I can continue recovering from it and becoming more the person I want to be. My mom was working as a full time public school teacher and taking out loans to go to college to finish her Masters while we were homeless so she could teach university and get us on our feet long term. This was WA in the 90s, when k-12 teachers qualified for government assistance because their salaries were so low. We both collectively clawed our way out over the years, and it's only now when I'm 27 that we both feel like we might actually be okay. Even after all of that work though, there's still things like this that pop up and catch me off guard. She has her bad habits from that upbringing too. Even now when it feels like we've made it, it can sometimes feel like we're still chained back to that place by way of our biases, world views, and unchecked assumptions about ourselves. I don't condemn the system for being what it is. I just accept it and subconsciously spin a narrative in my head to give reason and meaning to it, to justify it since I don't feel like I can change it. If it has meaning, it's somehow better. "People like us don't get help because <totally valid reason>." But then things like this happen, where even though I've raised money to help other "social lost causes" and I've seen first hand how people come together to help even those cases, I still never actually made the connection that that could happen for me. Even though I have friends and found family who I believe would be there if I needed, I've just unwittingly assumed that the laws of my youth were still in place -- that if you need help, you've done something wrong and it's completely on you yourself to fix that. It was something I just never remembered until now to go back and have a think on. May's line about dreaming about what she would do if she got $25 is still very true to my own way of thinking, despite a lifetime of effort to correct those thought habits one piece at a time. I was surprised to be reminded that that's actually all I would dare hope for too if I were in her seat, even now.

I love what you said about asking for help in the work place. I still need to remember to catch myself, but when I do I try to make a point of remembering that and talking it through in my head. I'm hired to do a job, and if I need an additional piece of information to do it well, it's quicker and potentially much less damaging to ask someone who would know than it would be for me to try and scour the internet or something to cook up my own solution. Not everything is that cut and dry obviously, but baggage isn't something you just unpack once and call good. It's a process. Sometimes it takes a rando page from a webcomic to resume forward progress on an otherwise forgotten (but still present) cognitive distortion.

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