I believed compassion could lead to change. Then I learned its limits and felt burned out

I was at a luncheon get together when single of the attendees described george vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as safe, welcoming and misunderstood. 

As someone who has worked in this neighbourhood for 11 years, I nodded courteously while staring at my hands because that isn't the whole picture.

I’ve seen incredible kindness here. 

People sharing everything they have with one another. On more than one occasion, I have witnessed someone fall from their wheelchair in the middle of an intersection or onto the uneven pavement of the sidewalk and half a dozen people immediately rush over to help them. 

Many of the people helping were visibly struggling themselves — they had open wounds, walkers or canes — but they still strained together to lift the person off the ground. I’ve seen overdoses reversed by people who were themselves struggling to survive. 

But also, just days before my lunch meeting, police tape stretched across that same block near Main and Hastings streets after a senior died from a violent assault.  

When the lunch ended, I stepped outside and stood for a moment on the sidewalk, trying to reconcile these two versions of the neighbourhood. I didn’t know how to say that both things were true: that the neighbourhood could be full of kindness and still be frightening. That warmth and danger could exist on the same stretch of sidewalk.

I didn't always feel like that.

I started volunteering in 2015 with a small charity in Vancouver that helps people prepare for job interviews by providing them clothes and haircutting services. The goal was the small practical things that can make the next step possible for those experiencing unemployment. 

I didn’t expect that volunteer role to become my life’s work or that one day I would be leading the organization as its executive director. For a long time, I believed compassion could help someone move toward a different future. That if you showed up consistently, people would feel it. That stability could grow from something as simple as someone not giving up on you. 

But there were moments that slowly changed how I understood what compassion can — and cannot — do.

One winter morning, a man who had lived outside in the alley behind my work’s building for years finally agreed to go to a shelter. Outreach workers had tried for so long to convince him, and that day, he finally said yes. 

They began talking about how he would have a bed in the shelter and could sleep somewhere warm without having to keep one eye open.

Soon, other outreach workers and advocates from another organization also gathered around him. People who cared deeply and had seen the system fail others. They warned him about losing his belongings, about violence and theft inside shelters, about how vulnerable people could be preyed upon there. Someone told him they could help him get a new tent.

I watched his shoulders sink as he nodded, the decision slipping away. It happened quietly, almost gently. I remember feeling like I had just watched a door close that might not open again for years. No one meant harm. Everyone was trying to protect him. That was what made it so difficult to accept.

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The moment that unsettled me most came later.

A woman began appearing outside my workplace with what looked like a badly broken ankle, twisted so severely it made people turn away. She couldn’t walk. She crawled.

All week she dragged herself along the pavement, collapsing every few feet. Sometimes she was conscious. Sometimes not. Whenever she lost consciousness, someone would call 911.

Paramedics, firefighters and sometimes police would arrive and try to convince her to go to the hospital. Each time she refused. She said the hospital was dangerous, that she didn’t feel safe there.

The first responders tried everything they could, talking to her gently, explaining the risks, even discussing whether they could take her to the hospital against her will. But she kept saying no.

By the end of the week, everyone looked worn down, not from work, but from helplessness.

I went home that night with a hollow feeling in my chest. I kept seeing her crawling, her body refusing to co-operate with her will to stay where she felt safe.

When I came back the next morning, she was gone. No one knew where she had gone or what happened next.

I stood there staring at the empty stretch of sidewalk, realizing how many stories in the Downtown Eastside don’t have endings you get to witness, only absences you carry with you.

Moments like that accumulate quietly in this line of work. People often assume burnout happens when you stop caring. What they don’t understand is that sometimes it happens because you never stopped.

For more than a decade, this work was my identity. Burnout arrived more quietly than I expected. I started noticing it in small ways, walking home exhausted but unable to sleep, carrying the stories of people I couldn’t help long after the work day ended. Even moments of success sometimes felt fragile, overshadowed by the knowledge of how easily things could unravel.

I stayed because I loved the people — their humour, their stubbornness, their refusal to disappear even when the world seemed determined to forget them.

I still believe in compassion. But I understand now that compassion alone cannot fix everything.

Sometimes the bravest thing isn’t trying to save everyone. It’s learning how to carry what you witnessed without letting it erase you.

And some days, that still feels like the hardest part.

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Freelance contributor

Sarah Beley is the executive director of Working Gear, a Vancouver charity that helps people overcome barriers to employment.

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