As Long as I've Known Anything (Part 1)
Notes on purpose, sacrifice, and "Human Giver Syndrome"
This essay first appeared in the Winter 2025 print edition of the Santa Clara Review, one of the oldest literary publications in the Western United States. It’s a long one, so I’m running the essay in two parts.
Also, the student described here is a composite character. I always change names and identifying details to protect students’ privacy.
As always, thanks for reading. -Adam
“I had a breakdown three weeks ago,” Grace says, “and each morning I dread stepping back into the classroom.” She only has two weeks remaining in a masters program that will credential her to be a 5th grade public school teacher, but the end cannot come soon enough.
“I have accepted that I won’t be a 5th grade teacher, and I know that’s the right decision for me,” Grace says, “but…”
She doesn’t finish the sentence, but I have a pretty good guess at what she can’t bring herself to say. She feels like she failed. She feels like she’s not good enough. She feels like she’s letting down the children, the school system, and a society that’s failing. She feels selfish.
I’m a professor of ethics and education, so I’ve had dozens of conversations like this with students over the years. I’ve had dozens of conversations like this with myself, too.
Grace doesn’t sound like a failure to me—she just sounds like a human being. But I can’t say that out loud yet. The conversation needs more time.
I first met Grace when she was a senior enrolled in my ethics class during her final semester on campus. She had already secured a job for the following fall—a consulting position at J.P. Morgan Chase. This is one of the most highly coveted positions among students, and it indicated Grace’s ability to outwork and outthink almost anyone on the planet. It also lined her up to be very, very rich, in the decades ahead, as long as she stayed on the right path. We made a connection that spring talking in class and over afternoon cups of coffee about the promises of microfinance as a tool for social change, the moral hazard of accumulated wealth, and her “side” interest in education reform.
Nine months later Grace called to tell me that she hated financial consulting and had submitted her resignation. Three months later she called to tell me that she was beginning a masters of education in teaching program, hoping to become a middle school teacher. Eighteen months after that is today. We sit face to face across a picnic table with cups of coffee warming our hands, talking about her future.
I love teaching first-year students during their first semester of college. They’re hopeful, raw, and energetic. They also have very little sense of what to expect from a college class, so I can go almost anywhere and they’ll go with me. They aren’t weighed down by expectations.
This is one of my favorite passages to read out loud during those first few weeks of a new semester. It is from Ann Patchett’s nonfiction essay collection, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Try to read it like a first-year student, without much expectation.
“I was always going to be a writer. I’ve known this for as long as I’ve known anything. It was an accepted fact in my family by the time I had entered the first grade, which makes no sense, as I was late to both read and write. … Knowing that I wanted to write made my existence feel purposeful and gave me a sense of priorities as I was growing up.” (Ann Patchett, 2014)
Patchett is the international bestselling fiction author of Bel Canto, Commonwealth, and The Dutch House, among many other titles. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Patchett is, in fact, a writer, just as she said she was always going to be.
I ask students in the room to think about how they would complete a paragraph like this about their own lives and futures. I’ll ask you, too. What were you always going to be? What has given your existence a feeling of purpose and a sense of priorities?
Then, I read my version of Patchett’s declaration out loud.
“I was always going to be an NBA player. I’ve known this for as long as I’ve known anything. It was an accepted fact in my family by the time I had entered the first grade, which makes no sense, as I was late to both dribbling and behind-the-back passing. … Knowing that I wanted to hoop made my existence feel purposeful and gave me a sense of priorities as I was growing up.”
That paragraph is absolutely true. The students think I’m being silly when I read it, given the distance between the intensity of commitment I’m describing and the white, mid-40s male with plantar fasciitis and a receding hairline that stands before them. But I’m not kidding. My life just hasn’t worked out the way I thought it would.
I like reading Patchett’s passage because of the sheer force and determination it announces. Whatever confidence students in the room might feel about their future, it pales in comparison to Patchett’s—her words have the effect of making everyone, including me, feel professionally indecisive. God forbid you have two options on the table instead of just the one.
I like reading my version out loud because it mocks the idea that you have to have everything figured out by the time you start first grade. It rejects the idea that your loyalties have to make sense. It invites the students to imagine that not doing what you thought you’d do can lead you to just as many interesting places as doing what you thought you’d do. I am not an NBA player, but I don’t hate where my life took me. I’m having fun.
You can be wrong about your future and still land on your feet. You can declare a major and change it, or start a career and then switch to another, and another, and another. You can fail at the thing you were born to do and still have a life worth living, nevermind what Ann Patchett says.
One year I sat on a panel at a “get to know your professors” event for first-year students. The panel was in a playful mood and we told the students in attendance that they could ask us whatever they wanted. “When you were younger,” one asked, “what did you think you would be when you grew up?”
“I want to be a professional basketball player when I grow up. I have hit some setbacks, but I’ve been told that winners never quit and quitters never win, so I’m not quitting.”
The students in the room laughed. “Did you at least walk on the team in college?,” one called from the back. “Look, I said, “I told you there have been some setbacks. But you can’t make me give up my dream, because it’s my dream.”
I’ve known this for as long as I’ve known anything.
Grace says that the earliest discomfort she felt in the classroom was from the noise. She expected 5th graders to be loud, and she wants them to participate in class, but when they all talk at the same time, she feels overwhelmed. She feels herself shutting down.
“Maybe it’s because I’m an introvert, or maybe it’s something else, but I just couldn’t take all those voices all at the same time. Last week I thought about becoming a librarian,” she says.
Next she noticed the relentless pace. If you have to implement a curriculum every day, when are you supposed to plan one? The relentlessness was made worse by the fact that the graduate classes in her master’s program asked her to think deeply about curriculum development, pedagogical strategies, and learning outcomes. Her college professors—most teaching, like me, only 2-3 hours per day—said that lesson planning was crucially important to good teaching. When, exactly, was she supposed to have time for that?
“I don’t process new information as quickly as others,” Grace says. “I need time to reflect and understand before I’m ready to move forward. Maybe I should be a professor?”
Her last worry is the one that’s hardest to describe—it’s about the other teachers. Everyone knows that public school teachers are heroes. They stay up late grading papers, buy classroom supplies with their own money, and stretch measly salaries as far as they will go. They do it for the kids.
“Am I a bad person if I can’t match that level of commitment?,” she asks. “If I was tougher I guess I’d just grit my teeth and bear it?”
Grace is trying to say that she isn’t sure how she’ll fare in a do-whatever-it-takes workplace culture. In fact, she already knows how she’ll fare—her job in financial consulting had the same culture, only with immorally high salaries instead of immorally low ones. And the pay wasn’t enough to make her stay.
Is Grace a bad teacher? Or a bad career decision maker? Or just a bad person? The answer to these questions should be no, but why can’t she shake the feeling that it’s yes?
In Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, researchers and authors Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski describe “Human Giver Syndrome” as “the contagious belief that you have a moral obligation to give every drop of your humanity in support of others, no matter the cost to you.” When someone pushes back on this way of living, Nagoski and Nagoski add, the response is often judgment or condemnation. “Many of us are taught to see a shift in goals as ‘weakness’ and ‘failure,’” they write, “where another culture would see courage, strength, and openness to new possibilities.”
Grace is trying to say that she’s contracted Human Giver Syndrome, and she’d like to seek treatment for it. She’s also trying to say that leaving the classroom feels like a moral failure. What’s going to happen to the kids?
One of the core tenets of Human Giver Syndrome is the belief that self-sacrifice is necessary for justice. This belief is deeply embedded in the Christian story of Jesus’ sacrificial death for the restoration of the world, of course, but it also is present in any number of different traditions in tension and tandem with the Christian story. (Grace, for instance, is the child of parents who migrated to the U.S. from Taiwan. Her parents impressed upon her the importance of their sacrifice for her and the expectation that she would sacrifice for her descendants. As it happens, they are also Christians.)
Grace and I talk about the ways that this belief makes it very difficult for the would-be-sacrificer to enforce boundaries on the ever-present demand for more sacrifice. If sacrifice leads to justice, how far is too far? How do you know when to stop?
“Stop thinking about boundaries as mean or wrong,” writes Nedra Glover Tawwab in Set Boundaries, Find Peace. “Start to believe that they’re a nonnegotiable part of healthy relationships.”
Grace and I talk about having a healthy relationship with work. We talk about what it means to set and keep boundaries.
We also talk about happiness. If self-sacrifice leads to justice, there is an implicit corresponding commitment to the belief that happiness is selfish, and it leads to injustice. (Antonym.com lists indiscipline, prosecution, selfishness, egoism, and nonconformity as potential opposites of self-sacrifice. Each of those attributes is essential to the cause of justice in the right context, especially nonconformity!)
“When you are cruel to yourself, contemptuous and shaming, you only increase the cruelty of the world,” Nagoski and Nagoski write in Burnout. “When you are kind and compassionate to yourself, you increase the kindness and compassion in the world.”
I tell Grace that she does not sound like a failure to me. She sounds like a human being—one who is learning how to set healthy boundaries and grow in self-compassion. She’s learning that the best work for justice is sustainable work, and self-sacrifice is rarely sustainable for long.
I am learning these things too. It takes time.