What drives me to help is not abundance, but experience. I don’t help because I have plenty. I help because I know what it feels like not to have enough, and what it does to a person over time.
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For most of my life, “enough” has never really been a stable feeling. It has always been something I had to manage, stretch, and survive through. Even as a young person living alone after losing my grandma, I learned very quickly what it means to struggle with basic needs. There were times when I didn’t have enough money for clothes or slippers, things others might consider small or ordinary. But for me, they were not always guaranteed. They were things I had to think carefully about, or sometimes go without entirely.
When I reached out for help, especially to my father, the responses I received were often frustrating. Not because I expected luxury or comfort, but because I hoped for understanding or relief, even in small ways. Over time, I stopped asking. I learned to figure things out on my own, to endure quietly, and to keep moving forward even when things were not enough. That experience shaped something permanent in me, the understanding that survival often depends on self-reliance, even when it is exhausting.
Even now, I still don’t fully know what it feels like to live without financial worry. That feeling of complete ease or security has not been part of my life. Instead, I continue to manage, adjust, and calculate what I can and cannot afford. In that sense, nothing has dramatically changed. But something else has grown alongside it and that is awareness.
Because I have lived through scarcity, I notice it easily in others. I recognize it in small things like hesitation before buying something, quiet acceptance of “I can’t afford that,” or the way people try to hide their need. And when I see someone who is in a situation I understand, or someone I feel is struggling in a way I once did, I don’t ignore it.
Even when I don’t have much myself, I still find ways to help. Not because it is easy, and not because I have solved my own struggles, but because I remember what it means to need help and not always receive it. There is a kind of empathy that doesn’t come from having excess, but from having lived through lack.
Helping, for me, is not about status or validation. It is not about being the most generous person in the room. It is a quiet decision shaped by memory. If I can make someone else’s situation slightly less heavy, even for a moment, then I do it, not because I have plenty, but because I understand what it feels like when nothing feels like enough.
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