I am only one, but still I am one

When I decided to quit my banking job and forge a new path, there was one thing on my mind: my privilege. Privilege is a funny thing. We know it exists, but it's often hard to fully appreciate. As a first generation, British-born Indian who has been privately school educated, I cannot refute my privilege. If the chips had fallen slightly differently for my grandfather, or for my parents, then who knows where I would be right now. Maybe I would just be another child in a rural village in India fighting against restrictive gender social norms? Recognising this privilege is what drove me to make a wholesale change in my life. However, as I now travel around some of the world's poorest places, listening to the stories and perspectives of the world's most vulnerable people, I am struggling to balance the recognition of my privilege with the guilt of it.

Last week, I was wandering through the narrow streets of Kenya's slums, carefully navigating a path between the corrugated iron homes and street sewage, listening to stories of "flying toilets" (due to the lack of accessible latrines, bags filled with faeces are thrown away as far as they can reach), and watching malnourished children struggle to access the nutrients they need. It was a vivid reminder of how London is a bubble in the context of the rest of the world. In those moments, the overwhelming emotion is that you want to help as many people as you can. When people ask for things, you go out of your way to help them and find a solution. You find yourself making surprising decisions and breaking the boundaries you normally set with people. All of this leaves me wondering whether that is the influence of the guilt of privilege.

The problem with letting guilt drive a desire for change is that it can be endless. The scale of change required is more than a single person can create, and so it can leave you feeling helpless. It is similar to the compassion fatigue sweeping the developed world, where increased accessibility of information has meant that you need to live under a rock to avoid seeing the world's disasters. It can be emotionally exhausting and completely overwhelming. It can leave you just wanting to cry because you feel overrun with emotion. There are so many people in need and, whilst their struggles feel closer than ever, they also feel so out of reach. The natural reaction to this fatigue is to switch off and try to create some distance. To block out the world because it is all just too much. But then the guilt starts to hit from another angle: "How selfish of me to ignore the world's issues when these people are struggling so much!" So, just like that, we end up in a circle of guilt and struggling to break out of it.

So, what is the solution and how can we stay sane in a world full of so many challenges? My phone background is a quote from Edward Everett Hale which reads: "I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do." It reminds me every day that I cannot change the world, but I can make a difference. Taking on the burden of every problem is too much to ask of any single person. Hasan Minhaj recently said on an episode of The Patriot Act that we all need to pick one issue in the world that we're just not going to care about this year. One thing which we will not engage with or rile ourselves up about. By letting go of some issues, we can allow ourselves the space to focus on the "something" which we can do. It reminds me of a concept a friend told me about recently in relation to new friendships; sometimes you just have to say "my heart is fully booked". At a certain point, you have given out all of the love you can to the relationships you already have in your life such that you don't have space for more. Maybe we need to do the same with the world's problems? Our hearts only have space for a limited amount and that's okay. Our hearts get full.

Ultimately, despite the exhaustion we are all feeling these days, now is not the time to disengage and block out the world, no matter how overwhelming it is. We need to feel the emotions in our hearts, find ways to relieve that emotion through humour or companionship with friends and family, and then we need to find ways to keep the momentum for change going. If that means narrowing down our individual scope of concern, then perhaps that is what we need to do. The difficult task though is to decide what issue to let go of when everything seems so important. Maybe I should go back to my friend and find out how she decides which friends to cut out when her heart is fully booked? Hold on, was that her way of telling me that her heart is too full for me...