Social services

You're so good at what you do.
You even work beyond the hours that are required of you. Time. Efficiency.
You have all of this quantifiable data about how you help people. And you feel great.
But hold on, someone comes along, saying that this job is actually not about you. It's about the clients. Someone comes along and says, 'Oh yea, food stamps are important. But there's something else there that makes them need the food stamps in the first place." You help. But you let them know you are their helper. Without you they could do nothing. These people are disgusting to you. Oh yes they are. These persons with God-given talents and dignity are the ungrateful scum of the earth to you. Why they don't respond to your many calls? You hypothesize: It's because they're lazy. It's because they are ungrateful.

These people are survivors.
Their supposedly disgusting bathrooms are part your imagination and part a reflection of the sexual abuse that happened from the ages of 5-7. Their inability to get up in the morning is not laziness and cannot be explained away with "they just don't want to." It's a reflection of the fact that their mother never got up to take care of them, never made them the breakfasts that you got to enjoy. When you were thinking about Barbie Dolls and your greatest worry was whether you were going to get the toy you wanted at Christmas, they were in bed worrying about whether daddy was going to come wake them from their slumber by slapping them across the face when he came home drunk. You think you are such an expert on their lives? You've been working with "people like them" for a period of a year maybe, maybe two, for the last 5 years or so. They--they have been living their difficult lives for 20 + years. They are experts on themselves. Have you ever thought to ask them, Why? Why are you in shelter? Why are you here instead of in college? Why are you with that abusive boyfriend instead of with a man who will love you? Why are you in shelter instead of living in an apartment like mine? What is the difference between you and I?
You don't ask because you assume the answers to these questions. And they all culminate in theories of laziness and "because they don't want to."
But you're so good at what you do. You manage their lives like they could never imagine managing their own.
But that's part of the system, isn't it? Let's keep tossing them left overs of fish, while never teaching them that they have the potential to fishermen. That they have the potential to be fisherwomen.