Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

I’m the only child of divorced parents. Both of my parents require different levels of help. One is incredibly poor and trying to take care of my grandparents. The other does not have computer literacy and English isn’t their main language. I help with my attention, money, and time whenever I can, because at the end of the day, we’re all we got.

This desire to help has bled into other portions of my life. One of my best friends went through a personal crisis and had to move out the same day, and I packed everything. During the very beginning of Covid, I drove to the ER in a rental car to help a different friend. There’s a migrant mother on my corner who I pass every day, who knows that I will give whatever I can. She’s called me during work, and every time I think she’s about to get deported, but she’s just calling me to ask for groceries.

Of course, this is all at a cost to myself. I’ve worked very hard over the last few years with a therapist to learn to say no and set boundaries — and I graduated from therapy!

But the problem is that I don’t want to say no, and when I do, it’s because I know if I say yes, I will fall down a slippery slope of absorbing more responsibility that isn’t mine to hold. That feels like an insufficient reason to not help others — something I believe is important to do. Not for any particular moral/religious reason or because I worry that I’m a bad person. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about that. But I do care about the well-being of those in my orbit immensely.

My fear is that I know that I will give, give, give until I’m nothing. Any act of self-preservation feels like a slight at my own ideals, but resentment bubbles away anyhow because I’m so overextended.

Dear Beyond Boundaries,

You’ve worked hard in therapy (yay!) and have learned to say that magic word (“no”). Yet you’re not convinced in your bones that you should want to set boundaries. And I actually think you’re picking up on something real there.

To be clear, I think self-preservation is every bit as important as self-sacrifice — especially for people like me and (by the sounds of it) you, who grew up as “parentified” children focused on taking care of others’........

© Vox