▸ Column · Contemporary boardroom Metropolis — a church food pantry across town from LexCorp Tower
LEX LUTHOR replies.
Replied to by Lex Luthor, with a rebuttal from Superman.
The letter
Three years ago, inside about six weeks, I lost my job, my apartment, and what felt like my last shot at finishing nursing school — and ended up sleeping on a cot in my brother-in-law's garage. Eighteen months of overnight gas-station shifts and a regrettable number of roller-grill hot dogs later, I just earned my RN and signed a lease on a one-bedroom that is, embarrassingly, entirely mine. I want to give back to the church food pantry that kept me fed through the worst of it — actually show up and be useful, not just mail a check. How do I approach the volunteers without making it weird, or turning my thank-you into a whole performance they have to manage?
Lex Luthor replies
Well. That's certainly one way to nearly ruin a perfectly good comeback, darling — by treating it as a debt you owe instead of a thing you did.
Look at what you're actually anxious about. Not the canned beans. The performance. You're afraid of arriving as The Grateful Rescued, narrating your hot-dog years while some exhausted volunteer nods and waits for the monologue to end. (You're right to fear it. It would be insufferable.) But it'd be insufferable for one reason: it makes you the protagonist of an evening that isn't about you.
So don't. The pantry doesn't need your gratitude. It needs an RN who can lift forty pounds and take a blood pressure without flinching. Today: find their volunteer schedule — the recurring shift, not the one-off photo opportunity — and put your name down for a standing slot. Show up early. Say nothing about the garage. Work.
If, three months in, someone asks how you found the place, then you get a sentence. One. The rest lives in the labor, where it belongs.
You clawed your way back without a single soul swooping in to save you. Don't hand that credit away now by calling it a miracle.
— Lex Luthor
Superman weighs in
Lex, only you could tell someone to hide the best part. Friend — those volunteers hand out groceries for years and almost never learn whether it took. You walking in and saying "you fed me, I made it, I'm an RN now" isn't a performance. It's the thing that gets somebody out of bed for the next winter. Tell whoever runs the place. Plainly. Then pick up a box. And for the record — somebody did show up for you. A whole room of them, every week. That's not a debt you talked yourself out of. That's how it's supposed to work.
— Superman
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