Being a Bleeding Heart
When people say someone is a bleeding heart, it is often meant derisively - that the person is a soft touch, easily swayed by feelings, manipulated by cute faces and less guided by logic. Lately, I have taken to calling myself a bleeding heart because, once a week, I volunteer looking after rabbits who have been rescued, but are still waiting for adoption. Every week, I walk in and want to take them home - to give the shy ones a chance at a low stim environment, to give the active ones space to run around, to give the sassy ones a stage to be their diva selves. So yes, I am easily wooed by a cute face and a sob story, and yes, I often leave a little heartbroken every time.
My partner told me that bunny-huggers were a known thing in the ecology world, people who are focused on saving the "charismatic mega-fauna" (think pandas and polar bears) as opposed to fish or insects. Again, people swayed by big emotions and cute eyes instead of logic and larger systems thinking.
There is something different though, about sitting with a bunny instead of a large predator creature. Instead of identifying with the fierceness of a bear protecting her young, it is trying to find empathy with a creature who is easily startled by any noise and can die from grooming themselves. Bunnies are prey creatures, beings who while cute and fuzzy, embody deeply uncomfortable truths: they a vulnerable and fundamentally depending on networks. Two things many humans struggle to sit with.
Every week, I watch as people come in to visit with the bunnies for all sorts of reasons, and thus visit in all sorts of ways: Instagram influencers who just want a photo or video op, kids who get dressed in all of the bunny themed clothing they can find to visit their favorite cute creature, adults on a quirky date, care groups who are having a field trip, adults just looking for some quiet time.
I love people watching here, since I no-longer work in a public library. Sometimes it is hard, when folks forget that, as the visitor orientation says, "bunnies have big sensitive ears," and talk loudly, or when parents just totally ignore their kids, or adults ask questions about caring for bunnies that make me want to cry ("can you pick them up by their ears?"). The humans want one experience and the bunnies need another. It is painful to watch the quiet bunnies get overlooked, the white bunny with red eyes get ignored because he is "scary," and the seniors get passed over for babies. This is where my bleeding heart tendencies come out. I want to love all of the unloved or less-loved ones.
Then there are the visitors who are willing to sit quietly, move slowly, to actually listen to what the bunny is communicating. Sometimes these visitors are kids who get quietly excited when a bunny finally sticks their head out after a few minutes, or the adults who sit on the ground and watch the bunnies without forcing an interaction, or the teens who do a small full body wiggle when a bunny climbs on top of them. Often, these people either already know how to behave around nervous creatures, or are willing to observe the bunnies and respond accordingly.
It is a skill, to learn how to sit with creatures that can be very different from oneself and/or embody things that are the most frightening. To learn how to observe, to see that there are other people in the room with them, to watch how bunnies hide from noise but come out for food or a favorite person, to see how social bunnies and less social bunnies move their heads to say what they want from a human, that there are layers of information and understanding.
As a trained librarian, I sometimes wonder where to file this, what to name it - this experience without clear words. Then I wonder if I am a librarian. I have no library to curate, no physical third-space to offer. Instead, I am a bleeding heart, a bunny hugger wooed by fuzzy ears and big eyes. There is still a duty though - a duty of care. Maybe I am not a librarian, but a caretaker. A caretaker of this little corner of a network/web/weaving that connects all these threads, these wordless experiences.
A heart without blood dies, so a bleeding heart means that there is still some life left in it. Some care left to take. I don't have encyclopedias of answers, but I want to help craft questions and sit with people while we work through something or even just sit in difficult things. I learn so much about myself and others when I do this - I want turn around and pass those notes along, so that the next person doesn't have to start by staring at a blank page.
Lately, this has looked like: helping a friend sort through their house via video chat, being a firm accountability buddy who checks-in on another friend's to-do list progress to help with their ADHD, reading through forms, email management, finding legal copies of academic books online, etc. It is terrifying to admit that one needs help, especially if that help looks like getting support for doing "normal" tasks adults are just expected to do. I can't cook my own food, but I can hold space and break projects down into manageable pieces.
If you want to chat about this, feel free to reply to this email :) I am at the beginning of formalizing this, so I am experimenting with formatting and open to new projects.
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