Letting Go

In a moment of frustration a friend of mine recently distilled people into several types using the metaphor of a party. There's the person who has had a few too many and is out of control and throwing up, there's the person ignoring the person throwing up because it isn't their problem, and there's the person getting water for the person throwing up and cleaning up vomit. He felt he was always the person cleaning up and it was starting to wear on him a little. Obviously people and life are more complicated than that, but I'd be lying if I said that sometimes I feel like I don't know how to be anything other than the person cleaning up.

The trouble is, where do you draw the line? How many nights can you spend cleaning up after people who don't know their limits without starting to resent them (and your own cleaning-up compulsions)? One thing that we spend a fair amount of time talking about at TORCH is personal responsibility. We teach the youth that they need to be responsible for their own physical, emotional and mental health, that taking control of their lives and (reproductive) choices is important. We teach them that you can't save a person - they have to want to save themselves. In the context of reproductive justice, this sounds fairly straightforward. In the context of day-to-day life, however, I don't know how good I am at applying this.

I wish the line were clearer, that there was some marker or sign that a person is at the point where they can only grow and change if they decide that's what they want and that there's nothing I can do to help them make that change. It's something that I struggle with at TORCH and in general, learning when to stop devoting my time, energy and emotion.
Maybe that's a change I need to make.