Care Without Keeping Score

Alyx Hanson

Alyx Hanson

— 2 min read

The world is...a lot right now. It's an often terrifying timeline we're living in, and I've spent a lot of time in the past few months feeling deeply depressed and anxious.

A week and a half ago, I had the chance to go back to Chicago for a few days. My partner and I lived in Chicago for almost a decade; we moved back to our home state of Minnesota a few years ago. I have no regrets about returning to Minnesota—this state is deep in my bones, and is home in a way no other place is. We have some wonderful friends here, and our families are here. We know we made the right choice to be closer to them. And...I realized, when I was back in Chicago, that I don't have community in Minnesota in the same way I do in Chicago.

I had the incredible good fortune to be scooped up into a queer tabletop role playing game community when we were living in Chicago. Those friends remain some of my favorite humans on the planet. They did so much to teach me what community care looks like. They've taught me that care doesn't need to be a burden on either end of it.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

I have lived my whole life in the Midwest, and we have this weird cultural quirk here where we are famously "nice," but often keep people at arm's length. We don't let people do nice things for us, because we don't want to owe them anything. I grew up, for a host of reasons, believing it was my job to take care of everyone around me—self-sacrifice was, in my mind, the highest virtue—and that I should not need anyone to take care of me, and that it was, in fact, selfish to want that. I would give and give and give until I was burned out and resentful, and I was incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of anyone caring for me in return (largely, I think, because I didn't see a lot of models of care without burnout, and I didn't want the people I loved to burn out). Care, both giving and receiving it, felt burdensome.

But it doesn't need to be that way. There doesn't need to be this weird sense of "you did something kind for me, and now I'm in your debt." There can be reciprocity in relationships without keeping score. We give according to our means and each other's needs.

I saw a beautiful old Tumblr post floating around in the last few weeks that has captured this sort of care really well:

Tumblr post from queerspacepunk that reads: I want to be asked to come over and help put my friend's kids to bed as casually as they might text their spouse and ask them to pick up milk on the way home. I want to stop and pick up milk for another friend because I know their spouse hates the grocery store. I want to buy fruit that I don't like because it's on special and I know people who do. I want to pass lemons over the fence and take my neighbours' bins out when they forget. I want group chats instead of rideshare apps, calls in the middle of the night because someone's at the hospital, lonely or hungry or both. I want to do the dishes in other people's houses, extra servings wrapped in tinfoil and tea towels so it's still warm when you drop it off, a basked of other people's mending by my couch. I want to be surrounded by reminders that 'imposing' on each other is what we were born to do.

'imposing' on each other is what we were born to do.

This is the kind of community and care that is, in my mind, our only hope of making it through the horrors that abound in our world today. This is the kind of community I want to build wherever I find myself. It's an uphill struggle against the dominant cultural narrative that we should all be looking out for ourselves rather than each other. But In the end, I think, it's how we survive.

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