Right, so it has been four months since I posted anything. If anyone was concerned, I'm not dead. Nor did I freeze to death, as likely as that might have been.
But seriously, I can't remember the last time it was above freezing in this godforsaken city.
(Remember that time I was "in love with Chicago"? Yeah...it happened.)
In truth, I haven't been updating because there hasn't been much to talk about. And the little things there were to talk about haven't been positive. I've got three or four drafts saved on Blogger that are just whine-tastic pity fests. You know, "JVC is hard, I'm not making a difference, work sucks..."
When we first moved in, one of my housemates showed us an article describing how we may feel at various times during the year: you start off excited, settle into a routine and eventually come to resent said routine. You may come to dislike your job or your community or JVC as a whole, but something will suddenly start to seem less than awesome.
I was in that boat for a really long time.
I could blame the holidays. Everyone wants everything from social services during the holiday season, and that season begins at Halloween and ends just after New Years. For a solid two months there was no reprieve from a constant stream of needs needing to be met and needs that couldn't be met, of people who actually needed help and people who just felt entitled because the help was there and it was free.
Word to the wise and sort of downtrodden: If you rely on an appointment-based food pantry for your nutrition needs, make your appointment for holiday food in September. Better yet, make it now. Because if you call in December to make an appointment for next week "just in time for the holidays," you will not get it, no matter how much you berate the JV on the other end of the phone.
I could blame the winter. I don't care that it's an emotional cop-out: seasonal depression is a real thing. Something about arriving in your basement office as the sun is rising and leaving well after the sun has set really seems to say, "Abandon all hope, ye who reside here." Actually, it screams it. At your soul. Relentlessly.
I could blame the polar vortex. I don't like how a weather phenomenon that is not actually a real scientific occurrence added a whole slew of new things to worry about to my list of things I already worry about. Cool new things like "frostbite" and "water pipes bursting" and "I don't own enough sweaters to survive in this winter."
Or maybe it was just a lot of things all at once. Whatever the reason was, I wasn't doing so hot with the JVC thing.
But like all of life's sucky things, the feeling of hating my decision to completely disassemble everything I knew in my life to start over in Chicago passed. Services have slowed down at the center. I brought a new (ish) winter coat from a thrift store that makes being outside slightly less soul crushing. And winter is on it's way out. In fact, it's a balmy 10 degrees outside right now. Hell, it's basically Spring already.
I went home for a few days for Christmas. It wasn't a long time to do much of anything besides eat a lot of food and see the family, but it was long enough to make me realize something: I'm changing. It might take being with people who knew me as I was to realize that, but things are different. I'm not the person I was in August, and that was something that used to scare the ever-loving crap out of me. I don't know if I expected doing a year of something completely different to leave me unchanged, but I distinctly did not want to lose the person I was during this time.
This notion of "ruined for life" JVC has needs more consideration than I've given it. When you ruin a dress or a cake or whatever, it takes almost no time to realize it's ruined. When a year of living with Jesuit values ruins something, it takes its sweet ass time. You don't realize it's happening and you may feel underwhelmed by this supposedly incredible change you're undergoing. But then you go home for Christmas and you try to tell your mom about what you're experiencing, and you notice something is different. Living without what you thought were "the comforts of home" isn't a miserable time, exactly--it's just living.You're not out to save the world anymore--you're just happy if the gloves you gave a man can stop his fingers from freezing. You aren't super human--you're an average person who can at best manage something average to make an improvement somewhere, somehow.
The average part is the hardest thing to accept. I didn't join JVC to find out that I'm limited in what I can do. I joined to end poverty and stop world hunger. In the span of a year. On $100 a month...
"Ruined for life” isn't an "Oh shit, I spilled wine on my
white shirt! It's ruined!" sort of deal. It's more like those times you
spill wine on your shirt, but it's only a little spot of wine and you don't
realize it’s there until the fourth or fifth time you wear the same shirt after
the initial wine spillage incident. By the time you realize the wine is there,
it's been too long to consider the shirt "ruined." Besides, you've
been functioning just fine with this so called "ruined" shirt that
the tiny stain doesn't seem to matter; it's just a change you decide to live
with. Maybe you have to downgrade said shirt to a "cleaning day" or
"workout" shirt, but you'll still wear it because the shirt isn't any
worse, it's just not the pure white shirt it used to be.
Aren’t metaphors fun? In unrelated news, I
really need to do laundry.
JVC had its reorientation at the end of
January, which asked the Midwest JVs to recommit to the things they committed
to at orientation--the spirituality, the commitment to justice, the simple
living, and the community. I left Re-o feeling like this was a something I
could do again, so I might as well try to make these next 6 months something
affirming.
And maybe something worth writing about.
