Ye Who Are Weary, Come Home

You may find that one day you come to a certain point in your life where you have a recurring thought: People just aren't worth it. This is a dangerous thought, and you should know the second it starts to pop into your head that you've started down the path to neurosis. Still, it's a tempting thought, one that provides a noticeable measure of relief to your inner aches and anxieties. You find an indescribable joy in ignoring emails and answering machine messages, and you start forgetting birthdays and anniversaries by the dozen. Fantasies of a life alone in a cave with only a friendly yak to keep you company occur to you daily. You begin to think things that seem revolutionary to you, thoughts that you believe never occur to others. "What if I just didn't have a phone? What if I just disconnected my phone, sold my cell phone, and simply did not have any telephonic communication with the outside world whatsoever?"

This, my friends, is the dark path your dear Muskrat has been trying to keep herself from following for the past few months. I remember a time when the thought of meeting new people, going to parties, etc. was incredibly exciting. But now people, at least these days, seem to me more than anything to be exhausting. I can hardly work up the enthusiasm anymore to take on the Sisyphean task of mapping out the labyrinth of quirks, neuroses, prejudices, and pet peeves that come tied up with every new person I meet. Case-in-point: our future co-worker that I met last night, E, was obviously an incredible person, but we at the office had to spend the entire next day deciding how F (boss) was going to react to E's various facial piercings. F is not positive on facial piercings; in fact, she once rejected a person from a VISTA position because she thought the parents of our students would react badly to her nose rings and tattoos. But F has never met E in person, only over the phone, so this visual prejudice will manifest itself too late to keep E out of the classroom. It's all quite the drama, and it bores the living hell out of me. In these moments now I actually hold my palm to my chest and feel my heart beating, and I think about how it will only beat a certain number of times before I die, and how a thousand of them will probably beat before I'm done talking about a piece of sterling silver in someone's eyebrow. And I have to tell you, people, it makes me want to cry/take a nap.

Fortunately, I still recognize that my way of thinking is unhealthy, and I hope to change my attitude soon. That's the good news. The bad news is, in the meantime I'm an AmeriCorps VISTA, and the motivating center of my life is supposed to be Helping People. In one moment I scream and rage against conservatives who don't give a shit for the poor, the black, the Latino, the undereducated, the gay, the anyone who isn't already white and privileged. In the next moment, I can't even seem to find enough rage to yell at my case worker for not giving me enough food stamps. I feel like I'm ready to take what anyone will give me as long as they just leave me the hell alone for five minutes.

Yes, perhaps that's what's really bothering me: DHS. For let me assure you, there is nothing more depressing than a trip to the Rutherford Lane Texas Department of Human Services. The whole place is filled to the brim with blank-faced women holding unwashed babies and toddlers, waiting hours in an uncomfortable plastic chair for five minutes with a disillusioned, soul-numbed case worker who has 1,000 other people waiting on her to help them, meaning this is your last chance to get help unless you want to wait another month, and wait you will, because there is no listed telephone number for this office and even if you find one, you can be sure that no one will answer no matter how long you let it ring. Poverty, from the short glimpse I've had of it so far, overwhelmingly appears as a long, tortuous, bureaucratic nightmare. I won't bore you with the endless details of my run-around with DHS, but suffice it to say I've lived here almost two months and only today did my food stamps come through. No, I'm not starving, but my rent alone eats up over half of my monthly income, and I don't have a lot left over for groceries after I pay my bills and put gas in the car. My case worker had a hard time believing me, of course; I was the only white person in the entire waiting area, and there were no holes in my clothing. (For those of you who know me well, you're probably surprised to hear that, come to think of it.) When she came out to call my name, she tried to pronounce my last name as though it were a Hispanic name, even though it sounded ridiculous. When Whitey McPrivileged walked up to her instead of another breastfeeding Latina mother, she raised an eyebrow, let me tell you.

I did realize during this experience, however, that I still care about hungry people in the world. The nightmare that I've had to go through, even armed with official papers from a federally-sponsored organization, reminded me of how difficult life must be for those who have faced these challenges every day for their entire lives. And I ached for them, just as I used to do at night in my bed when I couldn't sleep because I knew people were starving all over the world and they needed me to help them. During a time when my own apathy towards other people seems insurmountable, it comforts me to know that I haven't lost my greatest gift: love. It's in there somewhere, and it may take just one moment of beauty in this tragic world to bring it all back to the surface. I'm keeping my eyes open.