Recently, as my depression has eased up and I have more spoons, I've been thinking I want to help people more than I do. Problem is, most volunteer things I've found want you to either talk to people or carry heavy things. The latter I can't really do until little man is out of arms, and the former I could do from time to time but would eat ridiculous proportion of ny available spoons if I were doing it a couple hours straight every week like they seem to want. I guess Im just asking if anyone with more experience than me knows of good ways to help? I recognize this is probably a really dumb thing to be asking but yeah.
(Uh and it just occurred to me that this would have probably been supposed to go in the advice area instead. Can I request it be moved if you get a sec, @seebs ?)
Well, the question is, what resources do you have to use? That is, what kind of things do you want to do? What talents or abilities do you want to donate?
Some of the less people-intensive things I've heard of include making clothes for donation (or trawling secondhand stores and then dropping a few bags off at a shelter), or volunteering in the kitchen side of a soup kitchen (I've done this a few times - peeling potatoes is way less spoon-intensive than talking to people)... EDIT: I suspect if you can spare the spoons to talk to the people running the show at any particular organization you happen to like, they will be sympathetic to wanting to stay a little more low-key and might have ideas. Also I'm pretty sure they'd like to have anyone helping any way they can. :)
Right now would be a good time for knitters to start making scarves and such to leave tied to trees next winter for people to take if needed. One could have a supply built up.
dunno if these would be available options where you are, or even if it's the sort of volunteering you're interested in, but i've volunteered at my local library, which mostly consisted of me shelving stuff (sometimes going through shelves to re-org things, or dusting), and my county's park system takes volunteers to weed gardens and do trail maintenance and such in the parks, which might not work for you physically although it didn't necessarily require lifting heavy stuff (from what i remember, a team would get together at the place/time the higher ups decided they'd be doing maintenance, then you'd grab a tool and trim branches or dig up stumps or whatever was needed, and you could pick what task you wanted to work on so if one thing wasn't physically reasonable for you but another was you could do that thing instead. they were pretty chill about it.) neither of these required talking to people, aside from initial okay-who's-doing-what talk. after that, for the parks stuff you could be as sociable or not as you liked (again, aside from "hey don't trip over that, hey you have a shovel could you get that stump?, etc"). for the library work, i think i actually wasn't supposed to do stuff for/with the people coming in? like, i wasn't trained as a librarian so i wasn't supposed to people at people, i was literally just there to be the reshelving fairy while the librarian attended to the actual librarianing. :P though i occasionally still offered a book rec, because i am a nerd and it wasn't *that* strict of a rule. (mostly i just couldn't check things out for people because i wasn't trained in how to.)
My local humane society / pet rescue sometimes has paperwork jobs, which might be a possibility. Basically, "type up this handwritten chart"; not the most interesting thing ever, but useful. I mostly volunteer by gardening / wildlife restoration, too. It's prescribed burn season, yay, setting things on fire! :D
Thank you all! This is exactly the kind o thing I was looking for, and couldn't figure out how to ask. Will look into applying some of these ideas. <3 to you all for being awesome.
