This was agonizing and it hits really close to home. There will be times when I'll go above and beyond "to be of use" to other people, and I think I'll be doing something good because technically, I am still helping out and benefitting other people. But upon dissecting why I do stuff like that, a lot of it more geared towards "fulfilling a role". After being chatsised, scrutinized, berated, and battered down a lot in childhood, you feel obligated to render yourself palatable to others, and so you do that. And you exhaust yourself helping others because "someone has to. who else will?" In gearing so much of your energy towards others all the time, there's a part of you that wishes you had been loved and cared for in the very same way. That someone were to pick up on the pattern and recognize it in you. It feels like wanting to be there for others, less because you actually want to help them, but because you wish that someone - anyone - could have been there to comfort you the same way. The line between gestures done out of love versus those stemming from a sense of pattern and duty "because it needs to be done" blur after a while. I've been doing a bunch better in terms of that mentality, but it just reminded me of that a lot. I don't know where I'm going with the rest of this, but it was really, really good, and I cried a bunch, and the way the events of the story pan out is so interesting. I loved all of the sounds and music too!!