I know most of my posts are book related, but sometimes I need to write out a conundrum I am having in the hopes it might lead me to clarity.
A couple days ago, my husband and I went to a laundry mat,
which is something we typically don’t do but our townhouse’s communal laundry
area was out of order. So we go, and it
was a laundry mat we hadn’t been to before but it’s a little closer to home
than the others. It was in a pretty rundown building—no biggie. The lighting inside
wasn’t very good, and the place looked decayed—as long as the washers and dryers work, that’s fine.
Then a
woman approached us while we were waiting for our laundry to finish washing,
and she says, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have enough quarters to finish drying my
clothes. Could you spare a couple?”
I
pause, as the main reason I am hesitant is only because I am trying to figure
out if I have any quarters to spare and still finish my own laundry—but I
figure, if I run out, I do still have a couple bucks I could use for change. So
I take out $2 worth of quarters, enough for a proper 45 minute drying cycle,
and give them to the woman.
I didn’t
keep an eye on her, but I assume the quarters were used for laundry as the
woman didn’t immediately walk out of the laundry mat and she did, indeed, have
clothes to dry.
So why
did I actually feel bad about having done a nice thing for a stranger?
This
has been an issue I have been trying to figure out for a while. This is not the
first time I have been asked for change by a stranger, and every time it
happens I get an instant twisted feeling in my gut. It’s not that I don’t want
to help; I usually jump at the chance to help someone who needs a hand. Which
is why it bothers me so much that it actually bothers me to spare a dollar or
two to someone who may genuinely need it.
But the
more I try to remember when I started feeling this way, it reminds me of the
few times I lent change to someone who turned out NOT to need it—like the woman
on the street who said she was lost and didn’t have enough money for a taxi, so
just wanted a couple bucks to get home. So I gladly spare the five dollars,
only to ten minutes later walk into a convenience store…to see the exact same women buying toiletries with
the money I gave her.
Okay,
maybe she needed pads or something important and really didn’t have the money
to buy them. Why not just tell me that? You need pads? I’ll buy you a pack of
pads. I don’t like being caught without them either. But what made me mad, more
so than anything, was the feeling that I had been lied to. I had been conned.
Or the
time I mistakenly thought I could just walk into a bus station (by myself, foolish me) and not be accosted
by ten men all begging for money. If I were a wealthy person, or if
I knew where the closest homeless shelter/soup kitchen was, I would help everyone
I could. But when I gave one of the men a couple dollars, and then he comes
back and accuses me of giving someone
else more than I gave him so he should get more too (which, of course, I
did not)…CONNED.
So now,
it’s the knee-jerk reaction. No, $2 will not be able to allow someone to buy
alcohol or drugs, and once it’s out of my hands, it really isn’t up to me what
that person does with it. But it’s the automatic feeling that somehow, someway,
I am being deceived, I am being lied to and treated like a sucker. It’s the
feeling that I want to be a good person, that person that later on that someone
who needed the spare change would think, “I would have had a horrible day if
not for that one woman who was kind enough to give me help,” but instead I’m
being thought of as a naïve schmuck that can be taken advantage of.
So I
try to shrug it off. I mean, for every person conning for money, there are those
honest folks who truly wouldn’t ask unless they needed it. When at 7:00 the laundry
mat staff provided dinner of hot dogs and burgers for the homeless (as they do every
couple nights a week), the people there even offered for my husband and I to
join them for the dinner they were having. Even though I’m sure they knew we
were not homeless, they invited us to join them anyway. And while I am touched
by that, in a way, it made me feel even guiltier that I have been ingrained
with the knee-jerk reaction—these were decent people that truly do need a helping
hand, and even extended a hand to us even though we don’t need it.
And here I was, agitated over a few
measly quarters.
I’m just not sure how to undo the
skepticism and the distrust anymore. I can always do community service or
volunteer work to make sure that for every good deed I do, it’s truly helping
people. I wish I could just go back to being someone who could perform a kind
act without having to second guess myself, who could feel good by doing good.
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