Mal Tries: Volunteering

on shame, ego, and overwhelm...but also kittens

I haven’t volunteered at the animal shelter since my cat died. 

For a few months, at the start of the year, I was really good about it. I spent hours cuddling kittens and walking sweet, shut-down Pitbulls through the winter woods.

In June, my beloved cat got hit by a car and I finally understood why losing a pet can be like losing a close family member, an old friend, a limb. I was hysterical, then totally silent, unable to eat, throwing up scotch in a plastic bag in my best friend’s Honda Fit, weeping at the sight of his collar dangling from the bookshelf, unyoked.

I couldn’t go back to care for other cats when I could barely look at a stray without bursting into embarrassingly dramatic tears. It seemed like a recipe for suffering. 

Pictured: the neighborhood kitties that triggered many tears.

                             

For years, I’ve made a list on each birthday. (I know, me and the lists.) It usually contains 10-15 experiences I’d like to have, goals I’d like to reach, and a place or two I’d like to see. Let’s face it, I’m another white girl who is manifesting, honey. 

For the past, oh, seven years, I’ve written “volunteer consistently” on each list. While 75% of the list gets crossed out year after year, from the dream vacation with Grant to the newest essay that I want published, it’s rare that this one does. This year, I’ve stuck the list to the side of the fridge where it contains such titillating goals as “get a new tattoo.” You can’t always dream big. Sometimes you gotta give yourself an easy win. But there it is, once again: 8. Volunteer consistently. 

It’s December and I’ve got nine months to make good on volunteering. I could go back to my brief stint packing boxes of free produce for immigrants on the east side. I could return to equine therapy and lead horses quietly from pasture to paddock, holding the ankles of autistic youth, while they learn that an animal can be a trusted friend, that a horse can hear your heartbeat from four feet away. I could once again make a bi-monthly drop-off to the free food fridge in Midtown, gathering canned coconut milk and boxes of raisins from the back of my pantry, three pears and a lemon from the bottom of the fridge. 

To what degree does volunteering consistently require that I find something I like and stick with it? And how do we determine the moral value of each activity? Why do some causes seem more valuable than others, and what does this say about optics and my ego’s desire to do something good for others, and let them know that I did? 

I’m grappling with how much I should expect myself to care about, and what my responsibility to others and to myself truly is. As a child, learning for the first time of the Holocaust, or Jim Crow, or what really happened to Native Americans, I felt so assured that I would always be a voice to the voiceless, that should anything as bad ever happen again, I would know what was right and what was wrong, and I would do what was right.

I lost that thread, like many of us do, as I aged into the reality that suffering is everywhere, and that I cannot help everyone. Life hardened me, but I needed to be hardened in order to survive my life and the world it was lived in. When I moved to New York at seventeen, I could barely make it through an afternoon of errands, or running down 7th Avenue to class without crying, without needing to go back to my studio apartment to hide from the reality of pain. A man with no arms or legs would scoot down the subway car on a skateboard, asking for money. It wrecked me, seeing the injustice of the world so closely and so graphically for the first time. 

By the end of my first semester, I knew what a dead body smelled like. I nannied for a young, disabled black child in Crown Heights, and began to understand what a day in his life looked like. We took the bus and crossed police lines to get to his apartment. We hid in the living room from the mice in the kitchen. One night, while he slept on the pull-out couch, I stood by the window, kitchen knife in hand, listening to someone on the street rifle through the trash cans on the other side of the ground floor windows, and—I kid you not—press his face to the window and quack. 

I’m not saying anything new here, but it feels like there is another tragedy at every moment– ones from the past I’m expected to know about and understand, ones happening now I’m expected to engage with, and future tragedies that I must try to prevent. It’s a lot of pressure, and I’m nervous to address it. How much of my desire to disengage from the news cycle and the Instagram activists I once made the choice to follow is a reflection of my own privilege, and how much of it is healthy self-preservation? One friend who has become an Internet activist, and a popular one to boot, told me it was my privilege. Honestly, babe, only white people say this kind of thing.

Oof. I think there’s truth to what he’s saying. There is certainly some degree to which I do not want to “bear witness” to one more awful thing. Wasn’t it better when, in New York, I learned to harden and to avoid? Would it actually have been a healthier choice to allow myself to crumble in the face of suffering? Would dropping out of school or spending my spare time volunteering have been a better choice? I think what I did was right: I went to class every day. I worked three jobs to put myself through school, to make sure I could afford lunch at the Pret A Manger attached to the Empire State Building where I attended class. I tried to stamp down my budding eating disorder and went to therapy for the first time. I tried to survive New York City. And I did. But I wouldn’t have had I followed my first instinct — an instinct rooted in the bewilderment of a child who realizes, viscerally, that life is not fair, and that they don’t know how to contend with the pain of others.

The world, for me, sometimes feels like my first walks through New York. There is always something graphic and troubling that could divert my attention. But I find that the more I expect myself to care about everything, the more I care about nothing. If there is something new to be outraged by every day, another shooting, another war, another child abused or hungry, another terrifying report about the climate’s future or systemic racism, then how will I ever catch my breath long enough to actually help? Is there an argument to be made for sticking your head in the proverbial sand? 

I am rendered ineffectual by overwhelm. I expect myself and others to be informed on everything. Lately, I’ve practiced saying: You know what? I don’t really know anything about this topic. I’d love to learn from you. Then I shut up and listen. It’s been one of my most radical actions, believe it or not, to contend with the fact that many of my beliefs and opinions, when assessed candidly and honestly, stem from ideology, not from information. 

The other day, I shared an Instagram link to a yoga class I planned to attend. Proceeds from the class were donated to a humanitarian organization helping children in Gaza. I shared the link inviting local friends to join me for class or to donate to the cause. Not five minutes later, I got a message from an old acquaintance saying, “You should do something for Jewish people. They are suffering too.” I didn’t disagree. She’s Jewish, and this is a painful time, among so many others, to be a Jewish person.  I care for this person, for their family, and for their experience. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help, or that my understanding of the Palestinian’s fight for liberation means that I don’t give a damn about the suffering of the Jewish people. Regardless of Israel’s geopolitical power, I’m wary of oppressor vs. oppressed language, and the way it can so easily pit human suffering against itself. I’m concerned that our eagerness to address the suffering of one group means that we disregard the suffering of another, especially a group of people who have suffered as much as the Jews. What struck me was the almost immediate feeling of failure I felt upon receiving that DM. I had donated my money and time to a cause that I felt was, politically, pretty safe, in that there wasn’t necessarily a “side,” just Jesus Christ, these poor kids. Within five minutes of sharing this and inviting others to join me, I was being told it wasn’t enough. Do something else. Do more. 

It can be defeating. It can be overwhelming. It can feel like the only way to be a good person anymore is to be constantly talking about how to make the world a better place, discussing tragedies, or pushing on family and friends to change their points of view. I can’t sacrifice my own happiness or peace because someone on the other side of the world is suffering. I can’t fix it all. And the burden we are placing on ourselves and each other, especially in the leftist space, to know about everything and to somehow care about everything, is unattainable and worrisome. You can never be a good enough leftist, I’m learning. I’m nervous about the shift away from attempting to understand one another, or assuming one another’s good intentions. I’m nervous about the policing of language, and the shaming I see happening when someone doesn’t get it just right. 

Is there a possibility that the overwhelm and the anxiety and the constant stimulation is a tool to keep us oppressed and ineffectual, even as we consider ourselves more and more radicalized? When I’m overstimulated, the dog and the cat clamoring for my attention, a podcast and an alarm sounding in the background, the kitchen sink dripping and the refrigerator humming, I completely shut down. Is the key to being a force for good in the world to stop caring so much about it? 

Still, I question: Is my own privilege blinding? Am I selfish for skimming past social media posts with images of war and violence? Or am I preserving my own humanity by refusing to be unnecessarily traumatized and fighting against the notion that, in order to care about the suffering of a stranger, I have to first witness gore or graphic pain? 

I’ve always been highly sensitive. I don’t watch horror films and I’m uncomfortable with the gratuitous use of violence in media. I recognize how these tropes can be used as tools and how horror flicks or retellings of war can provide powerful insights into the cultural psyche. What are we afraid of? What are we proud of? Yet, I’ve determined it isn’t healthy for me to engage with this kind of media. It leaves me sleepless, anxious, and emotionally exhausted. 

“No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless,” said Dorothy Day. “There is too much work to do.” I don’t want to despair, and I don’t want to disengage. I must ask myself: What am I doing for others? And is it enough?

In some ways, it’s the same question I asked myself last month. Am I doing enough? Am I doing too little? And where does shame and anxiety come into play against healthy self-reflection and accountability?

The choice to step back from volunteering at the animal shelter was one of self-preservation, born out of a traumatic loss. I feel ready to return, but newly unsure if this small action is “enough,” and whether this inner prompting is coming from a sense of shame or a healthy desire to do more, a sense that there are more pressing tasks, and so much in the balance.

The conclusion, of course, is action, rather than so much thought. The conclusion is try. So on Tuesday morning, I drove to the animal shelter, thinking about Matthew 25:40, a Bible verse that was hammered into my brain very early in life. “Whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”  

I held a small kitten and thought of how well-socialized animals can become great sources of comfort and joy. How the more a young animal is exposed to touch and noise, the more likely they are to be friendly, cuddly, and to feel safe in many contexts, with many people. I thought of the kitten I adopted after Fig passed. How a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend found his litter underneath their porch, and enlisted their pals as fosters. How they bottle fed him and let him scamper around their living room, into their beds and their bathrooms, and how that love led to the gift I received: a kitten so affectionate and so loving that it felt like a balm, like a gift from God to ease my suffering, and to help me muddle through the grief of losing Fig. 

I don’t know those people’s names or their faces. We will likely never meet, and they will likely never know that their small effort to care for a creature in need wound up helping me, in a time when I struggled to get out of bed or to find joy in any moment of the day.

Research shows that in order to build up any new habit, we need to enjoy it. I didn’t start a movement practice until I discovered yoga and loved it. The same goes for volunteering. Yes, we set out to do something for someone else, but ultimately, the reason we keep returning to the task at hand is motivated by self-interest. That’s not something to be ashamed of. It’s the hack that keeps us coming back, and if the goal is to keep coming back, we have to find causes that create that joy. 

Sitting in that room today, surrounded by the stink of five litter boxes and several layers of dust and hair, I felt content. I laughed at those cats and their attempts to win my attention, ran my hand across their arched backs, cooed and petted and played. It might not be much, but it doesn’t have to be. My inner struggle to determine whether I should be doing more led me right back to doing something now. 

It’s essential that we ask ourselves, “Am I doing enough for others?” But the slippery slope of shame must be evaluated too. It doesn’t motivate us, it maligns us. I’m proud of myself for returning to the animal shelter. It’s a loving thing to do, even if it isn’t changing the world. And from that place of consistent effort, and from that place of love, I am far better equipped to look for more ways to help.

In fact, after writing my way through these questions, I feel ready to take on more. I started a book on the history of the Palestinian liberation movement borrowed from my activist friend, dipped my toe tentatively into the news of what’s happening in the Congo, and wrote condolence cards to several sets of friends who are going through heavy loss. I couldn’t do any of that while locked in the room of self-doubt.