An inappropriately personal blog post

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?