The great thing about being a rare and totally sporadic blogger is that you have approximately 2500 half-written blog posts wandering around your hard drive at any given time. I found this one recently, originally written in October 2010, and was surprised to see how little my world view (and sense of self) had changed. Definitely inappropriately personal, but also definitely important to share.
Why do we work in social entrepreneurship? Why give up all the money, fame and glory of
the private sector to slave away in a thankless industry with no financial
rewards and rarely a faint feeling of accomplishment? I think I might be getting closer to an
answer for myself, personally.
I feel. Maybe in a stronger way than the “average” person.
In this capitalist society that I love we’re trained that we need to harness
our emotions, that over-expression is bad, that it represents a lack of the
all-important quality of control. This simplifies things – it allows us to look
at situations objectively, remove ourselves from hard decisions, let employees
go more easily. I can do it to some extent, I can be a “professional”, but
there’s a limit to it. More than the people I see around me, I feel.
I have strong emotions. I am impassioned. I get happy easily
and angry more easily. I have all those emotions smart achievers in control are
supposed to be able to bury – jealousy, greed, sadness, mania, idealism. A
classmate joked the other day that he needed the name of my dealer because I
was so zanily enthusiastic that I must be on drugs. That’s the good side. The
bad side is what’s cost me relationships, made me break down in tears during
performance evaluations, put me into screaming matches with good friends. It’s
sent me to therapy. It’s made it harder for me to get over breakups, severed friendships,
and family deaths. It’s kept me up at night worrying about poverty and natural
disaster thousands of miles away. It’s what has led me to this field of work,
and it won’t let go.
I work in this field because I have to. I can’t read the
headlines of the paper and sigh at the state of the world and finish my coffee
and go on with my day like normal people. Those headlines eat away at me. There’s
only a certain extent to which I can detach from them. There’s only a certain
amount of inequality and injustice and unfairness I can stand, without feeling
compelled to fix it. I remember when I was in fourth grade and I learned about
the Holocaust, and I thought my grandparents were bad people for having been
alive when it was happening and not having put a stop to it. If only the world
were so simple. And it’s not like I’m out saving North Koreans or Darfur
refugees every day of my life. But I can’t detach so much that I can do work
that makes NO difference. I did it for two years, I tried, and I just couldn’t
do it anymore.
Maybe the people who are actually out there on the front
lines, finding foster homes for battered kids or marching into the line of fire
or physically feeding the malnourished, will turn their noses up at these statements.
I can’t claim that I’m doing everything in my power, the way they can. But I
think I’m a little closer to understanding myself, to understanding what
compels me to work in this field of “social good” as opposed to the regular
business life. I think I’m a little closer to understanding how my personal
life, with all its ups and downs*, ties into my professional path, my other
activities, and my insecurities. It’s all related, somehow, and I think I’m
getting one step closer to knitting it all together.
* I could probably smooth out all of said ups and downs with
a little daily pill. But would that make my life better off? This is something
I struggle with sometimes. Would I rather feel less, have less pain and
heartache, have more stability… but know that I’m not really “feeling” life to
the fullest? Will this tendency to be more emotional and more passionate than
others lead me to greatness, or drive me off a cliff?
Posts
