I'm Burned Out on Service
How can that be, you may ask? How can doing good things for others ever be a bad thing?
Because we go too far. We've given so much value to external actions in the lives of other people, we glorify how it erases and diminishes our personal needs.
I don't know if anyone else remembers the general conference talk with the story of the woman who was dying from cancer. She was experiencing fear, depression, and the heavy reality of her own death. She confided in her husband the heaviness of her load.
His response to her was "we need to find someone to serve."
I didn't find this at all valuable. It filled me with an anger that it has taken me some time to finally articulate.
He ignored her feelings, which were completely valid, and tried to replace them with the ever-present compulsion to do away with anything unpleasant or unsightly. It's an act of emotional dishonesty that exists to avoid confronting reality.
When you hold up a woman dying of cancer, in the throes of chemotherapy, and tell her to think of someone else? I don't think there's anything wrong with her. I think she was someone who was in need of service and was asking for it, and instead was told to go help someone else. I find myself looking at this and asking what is wrong with all of us. How did we get here?
How did we give casseroles and everything else on the half dozen other sign-up sheets in Relief Society this kind of mythos? Not every person, in the deepest garbage pits of the human experience, will find their burdens magically lighter by making casseroles or tying quilts.
Serving others is important. It's what keeps us from only thinking of ourselves. But if we go too far with this, leaving balance and logic by the wayside, we put ourselves into a position where it's never okay to think of ourselves and our own needs. That's not a virtue.
No one at church ever asks if there's is space in your mind or your life before they ask for your time. They just expect you to give it to them willingly, with no thought to yourself. And I've seen in my own life how irresponsible and dangerous this is. The number of times my mental health has been sent careening over the edge by something on a sign-up sheet is too high to count. I am not endless wishing well of time that leaders can draw from whenever and however they like. These are not joys to me, to be perfectly honest with you, and they never will be. They are items in the scenery of my own personal introvert hellscape.
The most meaningful service I have ever been given by someone at church was the time I confided someone close to me that I have severe and debilitating PTSD from being a sexual assault survivor, and that I wasn't okay. We were sitting on the stairs leading up to the stage, in the dark. I was crying. She said nothing. She let me cry and held me. That was all I wanted and needed.
No sign up sheet in the Church could do for me what I needed most. And this is what frustrates me to no end. Because in all the ways we count and track service, this moment counts for nothing because it can't be measured. She wasn't my visiting teacher. She wasn't in a leadership position. My need wasn't on some ward council list. But I was suffering. I needed help. And because God is good, she was there.
Service can do a lot. It can even do miracles. But it is not some snake oil cure-all for every ailment. It's no substitute for medicine and mental health treatment. And I wish we didn't talk and teach about it as if it were.
