Why Volunteering is Empathy in Action

An edited version of this writing is published at https://pride.kindness.sg/volunteer-singapore-valuable-lesson/

Volunteering was never a predominant feature for a large part of my life. However, I was generous in my giving outside of work. I would donate to charities, tithe to the church, get a dopamine hit in my system, and revert back to my startup life.

That all changed early last year when I experienced the worst heartbreak in my life. I deployed every self-care modality I could in my toolkit to heal. Nothing seemed to work. I experienced anxiety, depression and was in a lot of physical, mental and psychological pain for many months. Out of desperation, I turned to volunteering. My initial thought was: there must be other people out there who are having it worse off than me. Let me help them instead to take my mind off my own suffering.

I started volunteering for many causes. Working in soup kitchens at 4AM, cleaning up beaches, spreading cheer at migrant worker dorms. Immersing myself in these activities helped me connect with more vulnerable populations in society, and I felt a sense of goodwill giving back. However, 6 months into volunteering, I did not experience any significant transformation in my mindset, and the symptoms of depression, anxiety and deep grieving were still present.

I continued to search for a cause I could commit to and support. In November 2019, I found a volunteer carer program at a local hospice, run by a Catholic charity. I immediately enrolled and went through the carer training. There were different volunteer tracks, from van escorts, day care therapy, wheelchair assistance to ward care. I opted for ward care which had the most hours of training, based on the mentality that whatever I do in life, I should always do the most.

On my first day of ward duty, I accompanied a senior volunteer and a staff nurse for 4 hours as part of my training. During my shift, I witnessed a wide range of human emotions from grief, confusion, rage, acceptance to joy. For the first time in a very long time, I felt the patients’ emotions take precedence over my own as I followed the nurse on her rounds.

First we saw an elderly female patient. She was bedridden and in need of teeth cleaning. The nurse asked me to get the oral sponge swab ready. I prepared the swab, wet the tip of the sponge and passed it to the nurse, who explained to the patient that teeth cleaning was about to commence.

“I’m going to bite you!” She shrieked at the nurse.

“People clean your teeth and you want to bite? Come, show your teeth, please,” the nurse responded. The patient grimaced and co-operated. “Yes, very good… just a little bit more, yes… OK, all clean now, dear,” the nurse declared.

“I’m going to bite you.” The patient continued muttering under her breath.

We went into the next shared ward which had about 10 beds. A strong smell of feces wafted in the air. An elderly male patient was sitting up in his bed, with a dazed, catatonic look in his eyes. He said, “I pooped my pants.” He paused. “I pooped my pants,” he repeated.

“I’ll let the nurse know. Please hold on sir,” I said, and promptly rushed to get a male nurse to assist with the cleaning and diaper changing.

“Girl, over here, please,” another nurse said, gesturing to me as I emerged from the ward. “Help me clean this patient.”

The patient was an elderly, large, > 6 ft terminally ill cancer patient who was a remnant of his once healthy, athletic self. He had a very bad case of bed sores from being bedridden. It took two of us to turn him around to help clean his body, change his diaper, bed sheets, hospital gown, and put paraffin gauze on some of his wounds. I dashed back and forth from the patient’s bed to the biohazard bins to throw dirty linen sheets and to the cupboards to get fresh sheets, gowns and other medical supplies.

The patient’s wife slept through the entire cleaning process, and thanked us wearily when she woke up. “I was up till 5AM,” she whispered. “Thank you for your help.”

“You’re welcome,” the nurse responded kindly. Turning to me, she said, “OK girl, make sure you disinfect, wash your hands, and replace your gown.”

After sanitizing, I stepped out of the ward, and was asked to provide wheelchair assistance to a youthful-looking woman, about my age. She later revealed she had multiple tumors growing in her brain. The chemotherapy had shrunk her frame and caused most of her hair to drop. However, there was something peaceful about being in her presence, in a way I could not quite define. She was very present with her diagnosis, and very gracious towards me even as I accidentally bonked her wheelchair against the moving lift doors. I wheeled her out into the hospice gardens, lush with greenery planted by the patients and volunteers.

“What a beautiful day,” she said softly, as she admired the plants around her. I would never forget the way she inhaled the fresh air, and closed her eyes as she felt the wave of a cool breeze on her face.

I felt the same breeze too, but it was the last time I experienced the breeze as I used to — as just a cooling wind. In that very moment, and from that moment onwards, my experience in feeling a breeze had completely changed. It was an experiential understanding that I went through, and it transformed the way I viewed my own mortality and life experiences. It is difficult to describe experiential understanding as this experienced truth is unique, and pertains only to you. This is why it is possible for radical transformation to occur, for changed behavior to happen, when a catalysing event is felt at the very depth of your own mind and body.

I see this with spiritual transformation within the church, where glazed-eyes, born again Christians would talk fervently about their encounter with God — how it miraculously cured them of their addictions, diseases, difficult situations. I do not deny that God can work miracles. However, not all journeys of faith are the same. I have been going to church for the past 19 years of my life. I have never heard God speak audibly to me, never really experienced the life-changing, radical moment that enabled other brothers and sisters in Christ to go into missions work, and never experienced the evangelical fervor that fuel the Christian apologetics and preachers. My spiritual journey was one of ups and downs, dry spells, weepiness, comfort, guilt, joy, shame, redemption, and everything in between.

Even as I kept the faith for almost two decades, I never made peace with my inner critic, or my unconscious attachment for performative marketing. I was constantly striving to project a certain image of success for external validation, ingrained from childhood conditioning. I thought I was never a good enough Christian, so I kept myself in a shame loop and constantly guilt-tripped myself in church. I had put in 100 hours of Vipassana meditation practice for 10 days at yearly retreats, and that enabled me to sit with my reactivity for years whilst repressing it. Negative emotions were deemed by my mind as inconvenient and were repressed in my psyche to achieve peak performance at work. I had to always be high-functioning in most of my working life, where I work to scale startups. This was my default state of being. To be vulnerable meant weakness. That bled into my romantic relationships, and it blew up the more invulnerable I got.

In the months following my breakup, living in a haze of horrible pain and torment, I realized I needed to course correct. This was no way to live my life. It was at rock bottom that I also realized throughout my life, I’ve never unlocked empathy for myself. I’ve never unlocked what it meant to have compassion for myself and to truly love others. Love, empathy, and compassion are universal values that are deeply rooted in our evolutionary history and pro-social human psyche. Love, empathy and compassion are my values. The moments I reacted in fear, self-preservation, and invulnerability meant that I was out of alignment with who I was. I just had to align my actions with my value system to stay nourished within my sense of self, and to create real change in my life.

In volunteering at a hospice, I unlocked all three of my life values and could experience empathy, love, and compassion, and demonstrate that through my actions. I learnt how to live my values of love, empathy and compassion through a simple act of kindness: pushing the wheelchair of a brave young woman ready to face death, as we enjoyed the cool breeze and nature that surrounded us on that beautiful day.

I am so grateful to this young woman who taught me how to live.

Sending my love and light to all of you. May we continue to do the work on ourselves, to experience real peace, love and happiness.