My confession

Here's my dirty little secret:

I have not been happy this last month.

So if I've evaded your questions about how things are in California or how I'm doing it's because I don't really want to admit that the answer is "Not great, I miss home, I miss my girlfriend, I feel like I'm not doing anything at work and am wasting my time. I feel really guilty for not having time for people back home. I feel guilty for being distant from my community to try to make time for people at home. I hate how hot it is here. I hate that I can't just go home and lay in my bed for the weekend and see my little brother and parents like I did at college. I hate not having privacy in this house. I hate that I'm still really shy and it is keeping me from talking to students and the people I work with. I hate that I feel so useless and like a burden to others. But other than that things are great!"

I haven't seen anything in LA yet. I haven't done any work at all, really. I led one of our weekly Saturday Service trips yesterday and that was nice. It helped to remind me why the heck I bothered to try to do this. But on the whole I have felt like I haven't gotten anything I hoped to get out of this initially so far. I should have expected it to be really hard, but the difficulties are not the difficulties I expected. Community life in and of itself doesn't bother me. I like living with people, I kind of like the difficulties of grocery shopping and balancing different tastes and learning different ways of thinking and hearing how different people's perspectives are. I don't mind trying to live on a budget and all of that.

My housemates are really nice, interesting, funny people. There is:

Matt, from North Carolina (UNC Chapel Hill)
Kathryn, from Long Island (University of Scranton, and friends with miss Stephanie Salinis)
Cata, from Portland (Gonzaga University. Also I hope I remembered where she's from correctly.)
Stephanie, from New York (Fordham University.)
Caitlin, from Virginia (Holy Cross in Boston)
Meg, from Boston (Boston College)
Rachel, from Illinois (Xavier University)

Sometimes agenda meetings and such can be tense--but we do a pretty good job at keeping things respectful and comfortable.

But boy it doesn't make the thing I'm struggling with easier. Part of my problem is I don't deal with my emotions and talk about them. It took until almost halfway through September and all of them asking how I'm doing before I finally talked through it a little bit with housemates. It takes a lot for Sara to be able to get anything out of me. The only people I've really admitted it to on a regular basis are my parents (where a few of my revelations even come from) and then on top of that I even feel guilty for just always being so miserable when I talk to them. Which is bizarre...

But everything's not terrible. Some days are just really difficult. I don't know. Some days I feel hopeful, other days I feel like every day for the rest of the year is just going to be stressful and I'll never get any relief and I'll never be able to find any balance between community life and a long distance relationship and work won't pick up and I won't come out of my shell and I'll have wasted my year and everyone's time.

Perhaps these are normal feelings in the first month of a service year. I know from people who have volunteered in the past that sometimes the beginning--even the first half of the year is immensely challenging...it gives me hope.

Some days I have no drive to get out of bed--work is strange because my job isn't a day-to-day necessity like some of my housemates. I don't provide immediate, necessary service like my housemates at My Friend's Place (a homeless drop-in shelter for youth), or Chrysalis (an organization dedicated to finding housing for people without homes) or St. Francis Center (a soup kitchen). They are all extremely challenging jobs but they are also making an impact and right from the beginning were contributing. Sort of...I know it's not that simple. But it sure sounds like they do things on a daily basis. Which is more than I can say. Some days I hardly see any of the Verb boys at all. And when I do I don't know how to make a connection. But even when I do talk to them...that doesn't do anything. I wanted to be here to serve but I feel as if I'm providing nothing.

I'm trying to approach it as a service of being present...but I haven't even really gotten an opportunity to be present to them. It's not as much about the service I coordinate or the applications I help complete (though I haven't even done anything like that...I don't know if it's part of what I do) as much as it is giving time to these kids and learning about their lives and being a positive role model and a source of encouragement.

But I can't even do that.

Every day is a challenge and a struggle and every day I question why it's worth it and many days I can't find an answer. I'm not willing to quit or anything, but sometimes it's difficult to see a bright side or to be optimistic about the future of this year or what comes after. Will it have been worth it? Will I have learned anything? Will I have helped anyone?

I don't know. I hope so.

There are days I feel like work is going to pick up. Like helping to chaperone my service trip on Saturday. Or teaching an SAT Prep course, or like tomorrow when I'll be presenting about involvement  and activities in college. Then there's freshman retreat and the Urban Plunge weekend in October which I'm very excited for. But some days when all I'm doing is filing or copying or just sitting...there's nothing but that incredibly slow crawl of the hands on my watch.

Oh, and I also worry that my coworkers think I'm really rude or something because I'm really shy and never talk or anything. It'd be nice to have a work-friend.

It'd be nice if things were easy. But I guess things that are worth it never are.