Useful
I have been very frustrated lately. I have been ill for more than a week, and unable to do the things I usually do. I can't babysit, fulfill my religious duties, or earn my keep in the house. I dreamt last night that I couldn't pay rent, and that I was being kicked out. (There's no real fear of that, I promise).
I have been functionally unemployed (read: self-employed) for several years now, living on student loans and the generosity of others. Not only do I feel pressure to earn money to survive, but I have a desperate emotional need to feel and be useful.
These feelings usually make me look around myself for a need I can fill, but everyone's needs seem to be met by others much more suitable. I don't have the social connections to people that would make my ministering to them natural and beneficial. All my connections seem so awkward and disjointed that if I tried to be useful, I would only be tolerated, for my own sake.
I don't have money: I am in need. There are many worthy charities that ask me if I can give, and I can't. I am consistently pestered by Red Cross vampires, but I don't have a car anymore, and I live in a place that doesn't have public transportation, unless you want to travel between the University and walmart. I can't be useful in those ways either.
I apply for freelance work constantly. I am explicit about the ways I could be very useful to those who are seeking the help of a freelancer, but nobody agrees. It's just the same as not getting an interview for a job, but on a slightly smaller scale. The constant rejection is the world saying, "we don't need you, and we don't want you."
They're respectively wrong and right. They might not want me, but they do need me. My particular use is not to fill a pre-existing need. The world needs many things that it doesn't think it needs. This is the role of the arts and humanities - to fulfill a need that contemporary thought denies exists. We fight social climate change. We bring light and beauty into the world. We bring patterns of thought and a broadening of experience. We bring imagination.
Maybe you don't think these things are necessary. If you think this, you are wrong. Maybe the world doesn't need me, but the world needs people like me. Everyone needs the fictive, the imaginative, the creative. These things create the future, embellish the present, and remain in time the bones of the past.
So this pressure to be useful, maybe it's the pressure to argue and prove my utility to nonbelievers. Maybe this is wasted energy that I could be using to become what I am designed for, if I could convince myself that I am not responsible to you, or anyone else. I am responsible only to my creator.
I have been functionally unemployed (read: self-employed) for several years now, living on student loans and the generosity of others. Not only do I feel pressure to earn money to survive, but I have a desperate emotional need to feel and be useful.
These feelings usually make me look around myself for a need I can fill, but everyone's needs seem to be met by others much more suitable. I don't have the social connections to people that would make my ministering to them natural and beneficial. All my connections seem so awkward and disjointed that if I tried to be useful, I would only be tolerated, for my own sake.
I don't have money: I am in need. There are many worthy charities that ask me if I can give, and I can't. I am consistently pestered by Red Cross vampires, but I don't have a car anymore, and I live in a place that doesn't have public transportation, unless you want to travel between the University and walmart. I can't be useful in those ways either.
I apply for freelance work constantly. I am explicit about the ways I could be very useful to those who are seeking the help of a freelancer, but nobody agrees. It's just the same as not getting an interview for a job, but on a slightly smaller scale. The constant rejection is the world saying, "we don't need you, and we don't want you."
They're respectively wrong and right. They might not want me, but they do need me. My particular use is not to fill a pre-existing need. The world needs many things that it doesn't think it needs. This is the role of the arts and humanities - to fulfill a need that contemporary thought denies exists. We fight social climate change. We bring light and beauty into the world. We bring patterns of thought and a broadening of experience. We bring imagination.
Maybe you don't think these things are necessary. If you think this, you are wrong. Maybe the world doesn't need me, but the world needs people like me. Everyone needs the fictive, the imaginative, the creative. These things create the future, embellish the present, and remain in time the bones of the past.
So this pressure to be useful, maybe it's the pressure to argue and prove my utility to nonbelievers. Maybe this is wasted energy that I could be using to become what I am designed for, if I could convince myself that I am not responsible to you, or anyone else. I am responsible only to my creator.
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| Collage made from pieces of a book I hated |
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