Dear Robin: Social Work at the End of the World

28 Jun, 2026

This is an archived post from Substack from June 4, 2025.

Dear Robin is a three-part series of epistolary essays addressed to my incredible self-directed studies supervisor as a way of processing, decompressing, and reimagining the role of social work.

Dear Robin,

I feel as though I am writing to you from the end of the world, and I can only imagine how Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake-Simpson must’ve felt when they embarked on their own letter-writing journeys in the midst of the pandemic. Of course, my world is not ending. In many ways, it is only opening up into new beginnings. We talked today about sustaining hope, and doing so by orienting ourselves in time and place, among cycles of rising and falling empires and the legacy of those who came before and those who will come after. The more we know, the more we can zoom out of the silos of our own despair and see the incredible ways we’ve able to sustain ourselves.

Still, a part of me is fixated on all the ways we’re barreling toward disaster, yet are unable—perhaps unknowing or unwilling—to resist the mythologies that entice us into the system (Andrewism has a great video ranking the most insidious of such mythologies). I know that you know this, but as social workers, we seem to have been relegated the task of holding the emotional responsibility of fundamental care for all people in a world where every aspect of care is commodified. You asked me the other day what social work looks like to me, and I wish I could glimpse inside my brain two years ago to see how I connected the threads when I was yearning for something different. I still remember getting my acceptance in early May: I remember taking myself to my favourite park by the water and sitting down on a log overlooking the vast expanse of fallen trees on the marsh as I contemplated all the ways my life could change. I don’t think I thought too much about what social work would entail—only that it was an opportunity to start fresh—to be somewhere and someone different and to maybe (finally) find a community of like-minded folks I’d been aching for. In my present state, it’s hard to imagine all the things I didn’t question. In the grand scheme of social work, does a counsellor working within the vacuum of a grand institution, for example, stand equal to a network of community care in the aftermath of disaster? It’s disconcerting that I was not living in a world that knew to ask a question like that.

There’s a lot to puzzle together, and I have just spent the last few months agonizing over the pieces of my life that make up my own positionality. I’ve been wondering, as you know, how to expand my own imagination for a world where—to borrow wholeness as illustrated by Pauline Alexis Gumbs¹—“We walk. We drink tea. We are still when we need to be. No one is impatient with someone else’s stillness. No one feels guilty for sitting still. Everybody is always learning how to grow.” Perhaps facilitating a world like that is the simplest definition of social work, and yet the things I’ve seen this year make it feel impossible. Robin Wall Kimmerer² believes that at our core, we are more prone to being Empathetic Mutualist Humans rather than Adam Smith’s Rational Economic Man, therefore emphasizing our capacity for reciprocity in gift economies. At the same time, carceral logics seem to rule with an iron fist, and it feels impossible—unsustainable, in moments of despair—to dream.

In Abolish Social Work, Rasmussen³ says that, “Professional social work in most of its manifestations has always been proximate to capitalism, whiteness, ableism, cisheteropatriarchy, and carceral notions of power, justice, and human development.” By carceral notions, I think immediately of Shanspeare’s essay on carceral logics as a way of policing pop culture, and the illustration of the panopticon and the viewer as a meta-observer. She discusses the panoptic structure of the prison as a way of surveilling both the prisoners and the guards, and the self-policing ways both parties learn: “The fate of the prisoner becomes the fate of the imprisoned.”

The purpose of surveillance seems to be to engage in modern versions of the witch hunts: to correct behaviours we personally deem uncomfortable, or simply punish individuals we don’t like. The thing we don’t talk enough about is the emotional labour of constant vigilance. Who do you think carries the most? The prisoner, the guard, or the third party looking in on these morbid experiments with supposed neutrality? I think too about the things we don’t see—layers of emotional labour flattened into whatever narrative suits the status quo. What does it take for a racialized guard, for example, to exact their power on prisoners who look like them?

I think often about missing narratives, and how easy it is to assume positionality of words like “guard” and “prisoner”—perhaps “social worker”—and what those who wear the labels deserve. Is it punishment or is it dignity? In speaking about gender-based violence, for example, Richie, Kanuha, and Martensen (2021)⁴, discusses the power of the State in upholding such decisions by monopolizing both service and funding, thus perpetuating violence by feeding the cycles created by the domestic violence service industry. In other words, “prisoner” does not have to be defined as one who has broken the law—it can simply be one who has been deemed punishable by the state. Is upholding the violence of the state the job of the social worker? Or is it just that institutional social work trains us to maintain laser focus on the individual, so we may easily pretend we don’t see the burning around us?

I attended a conference the other day that claimed to use narrative therapy to tackle resistance against oppression and dehumanization. From the start, I just couldn’t explain this full-body discomfort as I listened in. All of these white therapists were tuned into what I perceived to be token racialized speakers, who seemed to sell the kinds of stories these white therapists wanted to hear: the oppression of women in Iran, the violence of men and boys in South Africa—packaged pain sold to white saviours by abstracting the role of Western imperialism in the destabilization of cultures. Is this how mainstream practices define care?

An hour later, I left. Was this conference well-intentioned, or have they co-opted the language of activists to weaken our movements? More importantly, what if I someday found myself in spaces like this and I couldn’t leave? I’ve felt many times over in this program that I’ve had to extract my own stories just to fight for the humanity of my communities, and I’ve seen my friends do the same. Where is the reciprocity?

I have so many questions, Robin, and I can’t believe how tired I am before my career here has even begun. I feel like my own assessment of Frodo, and the martyrdom that comes with yearning for the power to shape a better world. “This cycle of self-destruction weakens our movements. But it also flies in the face of what we are fighting for: a world where people are not treated as disposable or ground down in the name of their productivity,” Hayes and Kaba (2023)⁵ says—it’s just too soon to feel this way. I read Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s chapter on hyper-accountability⁶ and it resonated with me deeply—I was recently called out on a date how much I like to fix everyone’s problems but my own. Intellectually, I am aware that selflessness eventually circles back into selfishness when you are giving up the last dying embers of your energy. In practice, however, doesn’t someone have to do the work? Showing up is just what you do, right? Isn’t that what mutualism and community is about?

We may have talked about this when we were brainstorming a concise topic for this whole endeavour—the reason I wanted to talk about community is because of the community I found here. It has been exhausting, but it has been so full of love, and the things I give, I’ve felt returned, especially during the darkest hours. Being a part of something bigger has been a beautiful experience—finding queer family that can love you unconditionally is beyond my wildest dreams. And I didn’t even have to be helpful to earn it! That kind of reciprocity makes you want to find all the other instances of reciprocity around you, and it gives you time to heal, breathe, and reassess, much like Leah describes in her own journey.

The other day, I finally decided to change the bulb in my taillight, but I couldn’t pry my light off my car. I went to a close-by auto shop, and the mechanic got my bulb replaced in two minutes. I asked him where I should pay, and he said, “Don’t worry about it.” I told him his labour matters, and he laughed and said, “I get paid hourly. Enjoy the rest of your day.” Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about the economic web of relationships and social capital—one free gesture lends itself to more economic power down the line. While I agreed with the elevation of social capital over financial capital, the interaction also made me think about what we could do for each other if we all had our needs met: if we didn’t need to make sure every minute is productive and valuable to us as individuals. We’d fix a hell of a lot more than burnt-out bulbs on a taillight.

The creation of this kind of mutualistic healing feels like it should be the core of what social work is, but as I’ve been flipping through job postings recently, I find myself cautious of what social work pretends to be and what it really is. I am wary of jobs that see people as problems to be fixed, and jobs that require a specific set of skills, expertise, and way of being to do it. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha uses the word “crazy-making” in her writing, and I really like the way it reframes how institutions make me feel sometimes. Rather than ruminating on how crazy I feel in the way I think and the way I want to show up, it’s the way that these institutions are structured that feel crazy-making. The crazy-making parts are the ick in my body I can’t explain, the process of trying to explain things that have been deeply normalized, and the way alternative ways of seeing and being are resisted—labelled blue sky, naive, useless, sensitive, uncomfortable, etc.

I had a brief conversation with N the other day about how we would practice if we felt like we could be our whole selves and all of our identities without fear of retribution. It feels like there is no map for this, and all we can do is play defensively—seek the minimum comfort of not causing harm on the day to day. We should be community brokers without worrying about being community breakers. As you said, our walls can be so high, and it’s so easy to lose sight of the people beyond them. A friend once told me that boundaries should be more like a garden fence—you can see through it and you can open the gate. The important thing is protecting the flowers inside and letting in the people who won’t trample all over them.

I think we can do better than giant stone walls, Robin.