“Ask for what you need” is a terrible social system

A society of people advocating for their own needs will leave everyone starving

When I was very little, younger than 10, my mother took me to the store to buy a present. It was a visiting gift, to be taken to the home of the person hosting us.

There, she taught me why we bring gifts when we visit. Romania, where I’m from, was an economically struggling country. So, she said, “When people host us, they use up important resources for it. Each person visiting should participate in replenishing some of those resources.”

The things that we brought over were typically food, usually treats that we would never buy for ourselves. Cakes or cookies, expensive chocolates, the kind of stuff you didn’t just buy to eat. She continued, “When someone visits you, you open what they brought, and you serve half for both of you to eat. They probably brought you something they can never afford to buy for themselves. People will usually buy you what they, themselves, wish they could eat. They likely stared at it the entire car ride over. So let them have some, and that also saves you from serving up the things in your pantry.”

We bought the gift. It was a roll cake we had indeed never bought for ourselves. When we arrived, the mother of the family we were visiting took the cake into the kitchen, and just like my mom said, brought half of it back out, sliced into enough pieces that each of us could have two.

There were rules for being offered food, too. If I was visiting someone’s house and they asked whether I wanted something to eat, I was supposed to say no. This wasn’t really a refusal. It was a way of communicating, I’m not starving. I have food at home. If you’re only offering because you’re obligated to offer, you don’t need to use up your food on me if you don’t have any to give.

The host, in turn, was supposed to insist. And so you would say no again. And they would insist again.

The ritual could go on for an absurd amount of time, but there was information being exchanged underneath it. My repeated refusal was saying, Please don’t feed me if feeding me will mean that you won’t have enough for yourself tomorrow. Their repeated insistence was saying, I really do have enough. Feeding you doesn’t come at great sacrifice to myself.

If the host eventually accepted your refusal, you understood that meant that they actually did not have enough. You didn’t embarrass them by pointing it out. And maybe the next time you visited, you brought something more substantial as your visiting gift. Something you knew they would have to open and serve while you were there, allowing everyone to eat without requiring them to empty their own pantry. If you wanted to be particularly kind, you could bring the food over and then suddenly remember that you had somewhere else to be, and leave. Now they could keep all of it.

The rules reversed when someone came to your house. You didn’t assume that, because your guest said no, they weren’t hungry. They might be saying no because they knew that you might not have enough. So you offered, they refused, and you insisted. You communicated to them, without either of you having to discuss the contents of your pantries, that there was enough food there and they were safe to eat some of it.

You might ask yourselves, “Why not just say all of these things out loud? Why do this song and dance when you both understood the meaning underneath it?”

The purpose of the song and dance was the preservation of dignity. It was to allow those in need to maintain a level of social equality to everyone else, to reduce feelings of indebtedness. The point was to not focus on the giving or the taking, or the poverty underneath it. I didn’t yet understand this as a child. The song and dance confused me, but I did it because I was taught to, and so was everyone else.

The same rules extended beyond food. I was at a playground with two girls, the two of them had known each other before I joined in, and they started talking and joking about things I didn’t know about. I couldn’t participate, so I stood awkwardly beside them.

Their mothers were watching, and noticed. Without any prompting from me, each mother pulled her daughter aside to opposing ends of the playground, and quietly spoke to her. I don’t remember what either mother said, I just remember the girls coming back, and the social dynamic changing. They started asking me questions, and began including me. We started playing, and got along the rest of the evening.

No one had accused the girls of doing anything malicious. That wasn’t really the point. You didn’t have to have done something maliciously to be scolded as a child in Romania. They were simply the two people who possessed more of the social resources in that moment, those resources being familiarity, memories, and inside jokes. I was the person standing beside them who had less. And so their mothers taught them that it was partly their responsibility to notice that imbalance and correct it.

We were all being taught the same lesson, over and over again, applied to different resources: If someone comes to your house, notice that they might be hungry. If you go to someone else’s house, notice that feeding you will cost them something. If someone brings you a luxury they can’t afford for themselves, notice that, and let them partake. If three people are standing together, notice if only two of them possess the needed context, and include the third.

The rules of Romanian etiquette were simple: when existing in a community space, don’t focus first and foremost on how to extract something from the space, pay attention to the needs of the people around you. When meeting a need of your own, try, where you can, to also meet the need of the person nearest to you at the same time.

This way, if you’re all focusing on each other’s needs, everyone gets at least a little bit of something. You were taught to assume at all times that everyone around you lacked something, so you noticed. And because everyone was supposed to be noticing everyone else, ideally no one had to announce every deprivation before someone responded to it. Resources, whether physical or emotional, could be divided more evenly, replenished when used, and made to last significantly longer.

When we immigrated to Canada, I learned very quickly that these rules didn’t apply here.

I was in college, during my brief two-year attempt at journalism school. The lecture hall had desks, but no permanent chairs. At the far end of the room, hundreds of chairs were stacked up, and every morning we were expected to grab one and bring it to whichever desk we’d chosen.

During a break between classes, a group of students came into the room to put posters up on the walls. One of them needed something to stand on, so they grabbed my chair. When I came back and saw someone standing on it, it bothered me. If a chair was in front of a desk, I thought, it meant someone brought it there to use. I approached and asked why they had taken my chair. They looked completely befuddled by the question. I was befuddled by the fact that they had taken my chair.

“There’s like a thousand chairs over there,” one of them said. “Just go get another one. Or grab the one beside you.” The one beside me being the chair someone else had grabbed and brought to their desk.

To them, this solved the problem completely. There was no shortage of chairs. They needed one, so they took the nearest one available. If I needed a chair afterward, I could do exactly the same thing.

But I had been taught to think about the interaction from the opposite direction. If I took someone else’s chair, I had created a problem for that person. The fact that solving the problem was very easy didn’t erase the fact that I had created it. Why would I make them walk across the lecture hall when I was the person who needed a chair?

I ran into the same confusion around food. I would go to someone’s house, and their family would eventually sit down for dinner.

“Do you want a plate?”

“No, thank you!”

“Okay!”

And then they would eat.

It took me a few attempts to recognize that this wasn’t just a fluke happening at one single person’s house. I kept thinking we were doing the first step of the song and dance I’d learned to do. I said no because that was what you said. I was communicating, You don’t have to feed me if feeding me would be difficult for you. I was waiting for the host to communicate back, No, really. We have enough.

Eventually, I understood that things worked differently here. If you were hungry, you were supposed to say that you were hungry. If you wanted something, you were supposed to ask for it. Nobody was expected to decode your refusal.

I learned this in a much more painful way when I was sixteen, the year we came to Canada. A friend’s mother invited me to go out with them. At some point, she bought her daughter an ice cream. She expected me to go up and buy myself one, too. When she realized that perhaps my parents hadn’t given me any spending money, she asked if I wanted her to buy one for me, as well.

But at that point, I couldn’t accept it. Because the poverty had been pointed at.
The entire purpose of the ridiculous song and dance I’d grown up with was to prevent exactly this moment. Nobody had to say, I know you can’t afford this, do you want me to do you the favour of buying it for you? Nobody had to admit, Yes, I can’t afford this, please buy it for me. The giving happened sideways. You insisted too much, you happened to bring too much food, you suddenly remembered you had somewhere else to be. Everyone understood what happened, but nobody had to be reduced to the person who had something, and the person who didn’t.

At sixteen, I was already struggling socially. Being intellectually disabled while adapting to a new culture, being too poor to participate in most things, knowing nothing about North American pop culture, I was being severely bullied. And I was desperate to blend in. This friend was the only person who would talk to me, and I wanted her to view me as an equal.

So I lied. I pretended that I did have the money and that I just didn’t want ice cream. At that point, I’d never had a soft serve ice cream in my life, I wanted one desperately.

That was, I think, the first of many times where I came to understand what all of that seemingly unnecessary etiquette was meant to do. I finally understood the song and dance.

I still remember the first time someone came to my house without bringing anything, then walked to my kitchen and opened my refrigerator. I think I short-circuited, I literally could not physically comprehend it.

Where I came from, arriving empty-handed was in itself questionable. But looking through someone else’s food felt ???? unimaginable. The contents of their refrigerator revealed, what we considered to be, extremely sensitive and personal information. They told you how much money the family had, whether they had enough to get through the week, what they could afford to replace. You did not inspect someone else’s resources and then decide for yourself which of them you were entitled to consume.

What I didn’t realize at the time, though, was that North America had its own methods of hidden communication. Opening the fridge communicated, We are close enough that I don’t need to be formally hosted. If I need something, I’ll find it. You don’t have to take care of me. I often did not realize that, by opening my fridge, people meant to communicate to me that they felt close to me. That they felt comfort in my presence, that they liked being around me.

In general, North Americans communicate friendship through displays of comfort. I feel close enough to you to make decisions for myself within your space. I consider you a good enough friend to know that you won’t judge me if I make myself at home. This was a good thing. But I took it as if I’d been stabbed in the liver.

In the beginning, I lost many friendships to this miscommunication.

But I did figure out soon enough that the rules of Canadian socializing were very different from what I was used to. In more than one situation, I was laughed at by peers, who teased me for being helpless. “Why do you wait for other people to do shit for you? Just take what you need, stop being a deer in headlights.”

And slowly, I learned to. North America requires much less guessing, and that has advantages that I’ll speak on in a moment. But it also meant that if I wanted something, I had to become willing to reveal that I wanted it. If you’re hungry at someone’s house, you ask for food. If there are chairs stacked up, you grab whichever one is nearest to you. If someone asks whether you want something to eat, you answer the question they actually asked instead of trying to determine what answer would inconvenience them least. If you need help, you say that you need help. If someone tells you that they don’t want something, you believe them.

The assumption is that, if everyone looks out for themselves, things balance out by virtue of everyone having the same power of taking. Sure, someone taking my chair because it was closest to them inconvenienced me. But I was meant to balance out that inconvenience by, myself, taking the chair closest to me on another day.

In the beginning, figuring out these rules felt thrillingly empowering. There’s a sort of freedom that comes from only focusing on yourself, only having to be responsible for communicating your own needs, and from trusting that everyone around you will do the same. Visiting someone’s house isn’t an elaborate routine of endless logistics and refusals and interpretations and subtext, someone visiting your house doesn’t require you to spend the entire evening monitoring their comfort. You can just ask. They can just answer. You can trust the question and you can trust the answer, they both mean exactly what each person is expressing. For someone like me, who had been taught since childhood to always keep my awareness on in social settings, this change was welcomed.

To add to that feeling, there were of course flaws in the system of Romanian etiquette.

Many people lost sight of the purpose behind these rules. We often did them to the detriment of ourselves and others. There were moments where an extremely sick friend needed my mother to go help them in one way or another. Upon arriving at their home, my mom would find that they had cleaned it for her arrival, despite being extremely sick. In other moments where friends were so sick that they physically could not clean, they just didn’t ask for help. My mom often had to figure out that they needed help, and break the horrendous social rule of showing up uninvited. In this way, both of them had broken a social rule, and it erased the shame for them both, enough that the friend could accept my mother’s help without formally hosting her.

The extreme focus on the needs of others caused us to struggle heavily with asking for help for ourselves. The people making fun of me, in some ways, were right. I was being helpless. Out of the million social skills I had been taught, I had not been taught to say, “I’m hungry.” Things like asking a friend to come over and help you clean your home were difficult, because imposing in that way had been programmed into all of us as a horrible thing to do. At the core of it all, that was the greatest sin: imposing.

In Canada, I had been set free from the fear of imposing. Everyone imposed. People came to your house and opened your fridge, they saw the last slice on the table and took it, they needed your help and they asked for it. I could trust the people around me to take care of themselves, and had the space to focus on my own needs without any limits placed on how great those needs could be. It felt freeing.

Eventually, though, that freedom had consequences.

I began noticing an ever growing pattern in community spaces - there weren’t enough resources to go around. Not physical resources, no, the resources that we didn’t have enough of were emotional.

In every community space, each person entering it would immediately seek to extract something from it. Someone might enter a group and begin spilling their entire traumatic history within the first two hours. Someone might enter and immediately seek comfort for every discomforting thing that happened in their day. They might immediately start seeking reassurance for their body image issues from people they were meeting for the very first time. They would do this without ever, once, asking about the day of anyone else. Without ever asking about the wellbeing of the person giving them that comfort. The idea being that, if those people needed the comfort, they would just say so. They would also just start talking about their problems.

The issue with that system, though, is that “take what you need” only works if the resource is unlimited. If ten people are drinking from the same well, you cannot leave it up to each individual person to decide how much water they should take based only on how thirsty each person is. Because what will inevitably end up happening is that, the water will simply all go to whomever is least inhibited about reaching in the well the most often. The water gets distributed according to who asks for it first, and who asks for it most frequently. If the same person visits the well ten times, no one is there to say, “Some water should go to others.”

Just like water in a well, emotional resources are finite, despite what we might think. In a given week, we each only have so much attention, empathy, or comfort to give. There’s only so much emotional labour we can reasonably perform without burning ourselves out. Under the Romanian system, you would get to decide how to distribute your emotional labour, because it would be your job to assess the needs around you. But under “take what you need,” the owner of the well doesn’t really get to decide how to distribute the water. They can only announce, eventually, that the well is empty.

Without an awareness of others, we don’t pay attention to how much we’re taking, whether we’re draining the whole well. We assume that if someone has something left to give, they will give it, and if they don’t, they will tell us to stop. But this only accounts for ourselves, and the giver. It doesn’t account for anyone else, because we haven’t been taught to account for anyone else in that way. When taking emotional labour from someone, North Americans aren’t taught to think, “Will this person now have the capacity to also show up for their other friends, or their family, for the rest of the day? Should I stop here, even though they haven’t told me to stop yet?” We’re taught to rely on the giver to make those determinations and set those boundaries.

But in this way, we’ve yet again created a problem for someone else. We’re expecting them to be the ones to face the discomfort of interrupting a struggling person and telling them, “No more.” We punish their act of kindness with the expectation of even more labour, of giving them a problem to solve. “Set and enforce your own boundaries,” this is the equivalent of taking someone’s chair as a favour to ourselves, and telling them to just grab the nearest other one. Punishing kindness with further discomfort to the person we’re receiving help from. Even the labour of turning someone away takes water out of the well.

The problem is not that everyone takes too much, because most people don’t. Most of us are getting by with our emotional needs left unmet. The problem is that a system like this requires everyone to not take too much in order not to fail. If one person out of ten takes half of what is available, the remaining nine are now dividing the other half between them. And often the people most concerned with fairness will respond to that scarcity by taking even less, while the person who was never watching the water level continues drinking according to their own thirst. They might even come back to partake in the distribution of the other half. As a result, to nine out of ten people, it feels like there’s nothing to take. And because they can’t take, they in turn have nothing to give. Their own well never fills up. More and more wells become empty.

And eventually, the well goes dry. Not just one well, everyone’s well. Hell, the whole river dries up. So, more often than not, when looking in a North American’s well, there’s nothing to take. It’s all gone. We’ve all learned how to help ourselves, and there’s nothing left for us to help ourselves to.

This is the part of the “take what you need” system that I think North America neglects. Taking is a skill, and an important one. It’s a skill that I needed to learn, and truthfully, I’ve benefited greatly from learning it. I actually think that it’s a skill that Romanian culture needs to teach more of, because I believe it would balance out the existing issues in our social system. But it cannot be the only social skill that we teach. We also have to notice what other people need, to replenish what we use, and often to voluntarily take less than what is available to us because we understand that not everything comes in abudance.

This is why American therapy focuses so much on boundary setting. It seeks to teach people to protect themselves under a system where everyone will seek to take, and the expectation is placed on each individual person to learn to do the labour of saying no. This is also why American therapy is so difficult for immigrants, and so difficult to apply to immigrant families. It seeks to solve a problem in a way that simply isn’t applicable to immigrant communities. Yes, everyone in any culture should be able to say no. But boundary setting looks extremely different outside of English colonized cultures. Completely different methodologies and therapies are needed in those environments.

Over time, I’ve found kinship with other cultures who, similarly, experienced a culture shock coming to Canada, switching from knowing how to give to learning how to take. We all had to learn to adapt to this because, otherwise, our needs went unmet. We kept anticipating the needs of others, then were mocked for expecting the same.

The underlying pattern that I’ve picked up on is that the cultures that are taught how to give rather than how to take are also the cultures that have, within the last three generations, experienced national scarcity and poverty.

The ability to move through life assuming that everyone around you is fine unless they tell you otherwise is a massive luxury. It’s also a luxury to be able to simply just take, to simply ask for what you want and to expect to be given it. These are habits that are formed when there are enough resources to reasonably go around. Poverty forces you to become aware of other people, because without awareness, resources dry up very quickly.

There are people in Canada who know what poverty is. I would know, I lived in a Canadian homeless shelter for three years between the ages of 17 and 20. There is poverty in Canada. North America has also definitively gone through periods of severe scarcity in its history. But there isn’t a recent cultural awareness of poverty.

Most people you go to school with don’t know what it means to have to learn to make your own lye soap in your backyard, to feel the same glee over receiving a pack of store-bought bar soap from a visitor as you would if you’d received a tablet (I’ve replaced this word a million times. It started with ‘Labubu’ and I quickly realized I don’t actually know what gifts people like to receive.) They don’t know what it’s like to be forced to network with the neighbourhood aunties so that they may reveal to you where they source their toothpaste.

Even at my absolute lowest, heroin addicted and sleeping on the sidewalk, I could walk into a Canadian dollar store with a five dollar bill and feed myself for several meals. I could go to a food bank and find a box of cereal. And this contributed to the respect and appreciation that I hold in me for North America. There are broken systems that led to my homelessness to begin with, but at least I did not die.

Romania has somewhat recovered from that extreme state of poverty. Most Romanian Gen Z living outside of rural villages also doesn’t know what it means to do any of the above. But they were taught by parents and grandparents who do, there’s a recent memory of it. My own mother remembers what it was like to line up for six hours to receive a rationed carton of eggs and formula for my oldest brother, only to be told that there was none left.

Romania is not a perfect country. The elephant in the room being that my family left it. We came to Canada for a reason.

My gratitude for all that Canada has given me has caused me to, for some time, withhold any cultural critique that I may have of it. The “Go back to your country” stereotype is a cliche, but it does happen. And as an immigrant, you almost internalize it. “I came here for a reason. I should be grateful. If I liked it in Romania so much, I should go back. If I don’t want to go back, I need to shut up and adapt.”

I worried that benefiting from a system which was set up by people who operate differently from my culture did mean that I should respect that system. After all, doing things differently is what led to the establishment of the systems that I benefit from. I wouldn’t want things to go awry in the same way they’ve gone awry in the place I fled, and to prevent that, surely I should trust the systems in the place where things have not yet gone wrong in that same way.

But these days, things have started to go wrong. Things are going wrong all around me, and I worry about the fact that a future is in store where the world we’ve come to associate with comfort is going to experience the same type of cultural poverty that has led to the establishment of these rules in other places. And I worry that, when it happens, no one here will be prepared. No one will know how to share, how to divide, how to ration resources, how to make the most of what we have as a group rather than as individuals.

But even if that grim future doesn’t come, and North Americas might never have to experience cultural starvation within recent generations, I feel that future has already arrived in the social and emotional sense.

Everyone around me is starved for kindness, empathy, and socialization. But it doesn’t matter how many times I take someone and bring them into my social circles, because no one knows how to integrate themselves and each other. The person that I bring in immediately seeks to extract from the circle, seeks someone out to therapize them or share their trauma with. And on the flip side, the social circle makes no efforts to integrate them. They make inside jokes with each other and ask each other questions that the new person can’t participate in. Someone might strike up a brief conversation with that person, realize getting to know them is about to take effort, and will switch to talking to someone they’re more familiar with.

In this way, no one knows what to do. Everyone is just managing their own experience in the room. A lonely person tries to get enough connection to stop feeling lonely, a tired person conserves their energy by talking to a person they already know, a distressed person seeks someone willing to comfort them, an uncomfortable person leaves. Each individual decision makes complete sense when considering the circumstances of the person making it.

But collectively, we’ve created a community in which no one is taking responsibility for the community itself. No one’s been taught any rules, everyone is fending for themselves. And as a result, what has ended up happening is that we’ve run out of resources. We’ve used up our cups, we have nothing left to give. We’re starved, and no one is replenishing our emotional pantries when they visit. They visit, they open our fridge, they take that they need, they leave.

This particular kind of loneliness has been the hardest parts of immigrating for me. Many Romanians who go through the arduous, colossal task of immigrating here, do return to Romania. In spite of the absolute gargantuan sacrifice that it takes to arrive, the social starvation does not feel worth the economic benefits of being here. They would rather worry about where their next meal will come from than continue attempting to socialize in this setting. They’ve discovered that there are forms of poverty that a stable job cannot solve.

My family didn’t have that option, and increasingly, I don’t think returning would be the answer for me anyway. That’s because I don’t believe that these ways of building community are mystical cultural qualities that someone either grows up possessing, or lacks forever. They were taught to me, and I believe that they can be taught again.

My greatest passion since coming to Canada has been community-building. I love setting up community spaces where I teach others the rules that I’ve been taught, and where I have the ability to ensure that everyone in attendance is willing to contribute to applying them. I like setting up spaces with rules for noticing, for replenishing, for not immediately seeking to extract from the space when we enter it, and for maintaining that space by noticing the people around ourselves.

I’ve come to find that these types of community spaces are especially helpful to my autistic friends, who find comfort in that guidance. It made me realize how much comfort I found myself in that guidance as an autistic person, and how lost I felt without it in a system where everyone fends for themselves. And, despite pushback from people who enter these spaces and feel offended by the limitations being placed on their ability to extract, most people have greatly appreciated them. These spaces thrive under the guidance, and so do the people within them.

So, I do believe that there’s room for North Americans to learn. I don’t think the solution is to abandon the people from whom I’ve benefited so much from in other ways. That act, in itself, goes against the very values of community that I’ve been speaking of.

I keep hoping that there’s a way to teach the people around me that the answer for social starvation is not finding people with fuller pantries. Maybe it’s learning, together, to bring something when we visit.

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If you enjoyed this article, and you’re curious about how you can come to participate in future community spaces that I set up, consider become a paying subscriber!

In the coming months, my goal is to create support group Discord servers with social rules in place, which will be available to my paying subscribers. I’m currently in contact with a few mental health professionals who are helping me learn about the support group process, so that I can set things up as ethically as I possibly can. I’m also seeking a diverse moderator team who is willing and able to challenge my perspectives and opinions, that I might be able to collaborate with when setting up these spaces. Romanian cultural rules lack the knowledge of other cultural experiences, and may not be applicable to every type of person whom I want the space to be accessible for. So I’m in the process of cultivating these considerations.

Additionally, I simply just don’t have enough paying subscribers to make these spaces feel full and engaging for the people in attendance just yet. So I’m primarily waiting to build my platform to a place where I can feel fairly certain that the community will feel full, active, and thriving enough to the people choosing to join!

These spaces will come as soon as I can line up these ducks! My hope is to reach these goals in the next few months, so that I can make it happen sooner rather than later.