The Mirror and the Lighthouse: On Organizational Fatigue, Visibility, and Finding My Way Back to Myself

Photo by Inga Gezalian on Unsplash

Other folks’ worst days were the center of my parents’ law enforcement careers.

I don’t remember choosing service. Helping, volunteering, and showing up was handed to me before I was old enough to hand it back, or even know what to do with it.

By high school, my father had me beside him on a teen emotional support line in Garden Grove, fielding calls from strangers who just needed someone to hold them for a moment. I was fourteen, maybe fifteen. I couldn’t have escaped service if I had tried.

As an adult, it kept going.

Volunteering, boards, soup kitchens, and subcommittees and on and on. Meals on Wheels. Covenant House Hollywood. The Shower of Hope. The LA Bi+ Task Force, to name a few.

With Meals on Wheels, I could watch the transformation happen in real time. No food, then… food. But the need in the city of L.A. was an invisible ocean, and my small hands were the size they were.

Many nights, the math of it all made me sad and helpless. I was holding other people’s reality while trying to understand and, later, protect my own.

Then there’s the part I have stopped being polite about. You raise money in hotel ballrooms, surrounded by evening gowns, tuxes, and carefully arranged dinner plates, for homeless youth while the actual work (using the money to elevate the cause) stays strangled by bureaucracy.

Somewhere in that machine, people can stop being people. The youth become the pitch. The hungry become line items. Sometimes I wondered whether the machinery around suffering had become more protected than the people it claimed to serve. That’s a lot for a sensitive soul.

The last couple of years in LGBTQ advocacy for Bi+ demographics showed me the same math from another angle. Growing up as a bisexual teen in the early 2000s wasn’t for the faint of heart, and in many ways, I’m happy I survived.

So my initial reason for getting involved was to help people like me. But then came hours of meetings about things that felt almost rudimentary. Another ocean of need, but only a thimble of motion. Something is better than nothing, I know that. And just because you can’t see the impact, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. I know that, too! But these spaces are chock-full of hierarchy, ego, credit, and too many people who want to own the community instead of reflecting it.

What I’ve been circling since the top of the year is the difference between visibility and embodiment. We’ve all seen the photograph with the starving child, the plate of rice and soup handed over while a camera shutter clicks, the award, the step-and-repeat backdrop. And then there’s breathing the service, doing it quietly with no one watching. Those are not the same acts.

Granted, I just received two Communicator awards for my storytelling platform Embracing All of Me, which I hope will increase its visibility and bring more attention to the topics we discuss. So I know photos and accolades are part of the game we’re playing. Maybe it’s the game itself that makes me sick sometimes. Or maybe it’s how easily the game drifts from the mission until we forget why we were there in the first place.

That quieter kind of “direct service” is the one I recognize myself most deeply in. Art. We make the thing in private and release it, and the impact is whatever it is. Someone walks past a mirror and something in them has shifted, and no one had to be photographed receiving help for it to count.

I remember writing articles and essays during the pandemic and publishing them into the void only to be emailed randomly from someone saying, “Omg! I never thought I’d read these words.” Those messages remind me that I’m not wasting my energy, or my voice.

I am not discounting non-profit work. Lighthouses are real, and people find each other inside them. So here’s the discipline I’m giving myself instead: I will keep my unpaid volunteer commitments short and bounded, in and out before the politics or pretentious egos can entrench me.

I want to use these institutions and organizations for what they are genuinely good at and stop asking them for what they cannot give. That is strategy, not retreat. You start at the mission and end up a gatekeeper, fluent in Zoom meetings and grant applications and meeting notes, growing a little further from the actual work every year. If the organization can help me reach more folks, great. If a job, great. If a platform or grant, great. Reach and transformation is the goal. I will not trade my life’s purpose for the minutes.

When I close my eyes and ask if any of this work would have served me as a teenager, sometimes the answer is yes, and most times it would have never reached the periphery of my reality. That’s a problem.

So I am pouring the weight of this energy back into myself, into my goals, into what I can build as an artist and a social entrepreneur, and yes, into being a person who might one day need these organizations rather than only carry them. I am choosing the mirror. And with the lighthouse, we can achieve more together as long as we work within our strengths and are honest about our motivations, but also our limitations.