maynumeration

oh my God, nursing school.

I've gotten hopelessly sidetracked, like I do, on the issue of how to get CAMBA summer camps staffed. And I think that -- in the interest of saving face by not being there very last one to acknowledge an obvious truth about myself -- I should just admit that my heart truly may belong to CAMBA.

I also care about nursing school, of course. But I've gotten to the point in the semester where no matter what, everything I'm doing is just damage control. There's no longer enough time left to do truly well -- just to (hopefully) do well enough not to hate myself when grades come out.

And I'd rather be blogging, but I have nothing to say, really, because, apart from nursing and volunteering and working and mom-ing and wife-ing -- and being some permutation of Not Good Enough at each -- the big thing in my life is my ongoing nasty schoolyard fight to not lose my everloving mind.

Months like this, I know I'm ultimately going to end up working in community mental health or psych in some capacity. Because, while I'm relieved to no longer be mired in the kind of adolescent melodrama that glamorizes craziness as a topic for earnest Bright Eyes songs or whatever, the adult option -- to take for granted that people just come ready and able to get through the fucking day -- is kind of a Gwyneth Paltrow response to the lives that people actually live. I spend a hefty portion of my workweek interacting with people trying to find work, each with a different reason why they are looking, and I don't believe that some people just handle their internal conflicts better than others. The Vassar grad who is looking for a way to give back to community between her stint with the School for International Training and applying to NYU's public interest law program is not fighting the same struggle as the Peer Specialist working per diem in the housing center where she was a client a year ago.

I've been deeply fortunate, to have had the assistance I've had -- stable, supportive people in my life, adequate health care, an education, consistent work. And still: many, many days, I am going through the various activities to which I've committed only because having something to do is a key part of the only thing that matters, which is to keep from damaging myself in some way over how I feel.

Someone mentioned to me recently that this is not unusual. It should be, though. Not because I personally "shouldn't have to" justify to myself why I've not yet taken my life over my GPA/weight gain/inability to clean the house to my husband's (reasonable!) specifications, but because fruitless expenditures of energy and purposeless suffering are just shitty, no matter the backyard into which they fall.

And while I do think that there is an honest-to-God chemical component to why I feel the way I feel, and while I do understand that ultimately, one has to take responsibility for coping with one's own life, regardless of the unhelpful inclination to see that coping as self-indulgent and to attach a moral imperative to hurting and depriving oneself, I also think that the society we live in is emotionally dis-abling. It is very hard to be mentally healthy in a world that celebrates so much that is pyschologically and emotionally damaging. I suspect this is the case regardless of the particular brain chemistry and coping strategies one holds. I know it is the case for someone who hovers on the edge of requiring formal therapeutic intervention, as I have for most of my life.

If it is this hard for me to just keep getting through the day, when the material circumstances of my life are ones of almost dizzying privilege: what is it like for this candidate who I just turned down for an $8 an hour job because of her shoddy work history? What is it like for this patient, who is seventeen and whose parents have committed her to a nursing home? What is it like for this subway passenger, who just lurched at me and my child, apparently unsure whether she wanted to assault us or ask us for money?

And how does one make it easier, and better, for all of us? Because that narrative about individual self-sufficiency and just trying harder sounds like a intellectually lazy senior's college essay right now: a clattering of words unfettered by content or meaning. And because of that, my efforts to keep my own shit together, removed from efforts to create a world in which the keeping together of one's shit is prioritized and respected as both an individual right and a social good, are similarly meaningless.

I want to live in a world in which I don't lie awake tormented over fears of poverty or age or illness, because the poor, old, and sick aren't abandoned and shat upon. I want to live in a work in which getting a B doesn't necessitate self-harm, because people, myself included, are considered to have intrinsic value. Most of all: I want to live in a world in which my own crappy and nasty behavior towards myself isn't given such a wide berth, because nastiness and ugliness, in general, aren't excused as the occupational hazard of being so very Busy and Important and Urban.