Close enough to see

Being close to the work changes what you notice, and what you can no longer ignore.

Care work has a way of changing how you see. Whether through organizing, pastoral care, therapeutic work, or living where you work, proximity alters what you notice first. You begin to see how decisions ripple through daily routines, how small disruptions compound, and how much invisible labor it takes just to keep people steady.

In organizing spaces, that meant standing alongside people who were already carrying far more than was visible on paper, feeling how institutional decisions pressed down on bodies and lives. In residential life, it meant living inside the same rhythms and stresses as the people you were responsible to, where care was not a role you entered and exited, but a condition of daily life.

What looks efficient or reasonable from a distance often feels far more fragile up close.

Proximity reveals how much effort goes into keeping achieving stability at all.

Living and working alongside others taught me to respect the intelligence required to maintain steadiness under pressure. Care is not only emotional. It is logistical, economic, and deeply relational. It lives in timing, coordination, restraint, and the ability to keep showing up when conditions are not fair.

In organizing work, this effort showed up in people giving more than they had because the alternative was worse. In residential life, it appeared in the quiet labor of holding space, absorbing conflict, and preventing small fractures from becoming crises. In therapeutic work, it meant sitting in living rooms and kitchens, seeing how emotional pain was inseparable from material constraint.

Up close, stability no longer looks neutral. It looks earned.

What appears efficient from a distance often rests on unequal strain and sacrifice.

Proximity makes it harder to accept surface explanations for why systems function. You begin to see who is compensating, who is absorbing disruption, and who is expected to endure conditions they did not create.

In institutional settings, efficiency often depended on people stretching themselves past what was sustainable. In care roles, smooth outcomes frequently relied on unpaid or unacknowledged labor. The same individuals were asked, again and again, to carry more so that things could continue to appear right.

Being near enough exposes the difference between something working and something extracting.

Closeness collapses the fiction of separate costs.

There was a moment when proximity stopped being conceptual for me. Standing alongside people whose livelihoods were under threat, it became impossible to pretend that harm was happening “over there.” If someone could not afford to live with dignity, that reality did not remain theirs alone. It entered the shared field of our lives.

Working this closely dissolves the comfort of separation. It becomes clear that injustice does not stay contained, and that systems depend on distance to keep responsibility diffuse. Once that distance is gone, neutrality no longer makes sense.

This is not ideology. It is what proximity makes undeniable.

Staying near the work has reshaped my sense of responsibility.

This orientation stays with me. I no longer approach work from above or outside it. I listen for where pressure is landing, who is already carrying too much, and what conditions people are being asked to survive rather than shape.

Being close has taught me to move more carefully, to design with humility, and to treat justice not as a value to be asserted, but as a condition that must be materially supported. When proximity is chosen and sustained, responsibility is no longer abstract. It becomes shared.

Proximity has not given me answers. It has made it impossible to accept solutions that require others to pay the cost alone.