"I feel pretty good this week" - everything in the news instantly becomes unconscionable, my house breaks, my work machine breaks so I can barely get my job done even though I have a horrible, looming deadline... Still, it's hard to look at my life and feel sorry for it when there are so many people hurting so much this week.  

Even before all this, I've been thinking a lot lately about community and the people that our society fail. One of the things that I started doing this spring in my effort to not just lay down and die of depression was taking a kind of personal, secret responsibility for the neglected little neighborhood food pantry in my area. Nothing like a little white sanctimony to improve my withered mental health and sense of uselessness as a person! 

But it actually really surprised me. I always thought that a good antidote for feeling bad about myself is doing something good for my community, even just picking up trash. Picking up a country road full of trash is inherently satisfying. You're outside in a beautiful place. You can see the big bags that you filled and the road itself looks better when you're done. You can see the work and immediately feel good about it. It's very a clean-feeling kind of community service. "Other people have been poor stewards of the land, but not me, and I did my part to make it better."

Trying to keep a food pantry constantly full is a really different feeling and has made me think about different things. Because of the adjacency of my neighborhood to the mission, a lot of people who rely on it are unhoused or don't have access to kitchen stuff. If I buy cans that don't have pop tops, there's a chance someone won't be able to open it. I try to get foods that don't require extra ingredients to prepare like those knorr sides or peanut butter crackers or shelf stable tuna or ravioli. Then I started thinking about things like hygiene products or pet food. It got hot last weekend, and I realized how difficult it must be to stay hydrated when you are spending your whole day walking around until the mission opens. It feels like every single thing I consider expands out into a larger need. 

Another thing I didn't anticipate would be how fucking annoying other well-meaning people are. There's not a week that goes by that I don't pull out some kind of rotting crap from the box. Most recently, 3-4 withered tiny potatoes. A half-eaten vegetable tray where the ranch has gone rancid in the unrefrigerated box. Literal trash. The worst was a bunch of expired meat someone had clearly cleaned out of their freezer. Again, the box is unrefrigerated. It makes me so angry. Like, would you want to eat that? 

It all feels shitty and not enough. On Saturday morning, I got some stuff to take when I was at Kroger, and then stopped at the farmer's market on the way to the food box. It was hot and I bought myself an iced lemonade from a food truck. I also bought myself flowers: big, fragrant peonies that I could put in one of my many vases and arrange in my cute little kitchen to fill it with cheerful brightness. Then I got to the box and found a thank-you note scrawled on a fucking coffee filter and felt this raw, insane feeling of sorrow, rage, and sense of the profound unfairness that I was out buying myself little treats when someone else was checking the box, hoping there was something there they could eat and not literal garbage. I didn't do anything better than anybody else. I don't deserve what I have anymore than the people who don't have it deserve not to. 

As I write all this, I guess I "hear" myself. Oh, my little plan to make myself feel better by helping the impoverished backfired and made me think critically about have and have nots in our society? It feels easier and cleaner to play Captain Planet in the woods than it is to engage in real human need in my own community? Like, come on. I'm probably not going to stop buying myself lemonade. I tried to imagine being homeless: I was at a point last year where I literally didn't think I had a place in the world to go. Even so, I still made more money than I ever had in my life.

I guess I don't really have any point, or much less, a meaningful conclusion about what I've learned through this, but I wanted to write this out because it's been on my mind a lot. Maybe even the fact that I have turned the act of buying a few extra shelf stable goods into a personal essay about my relationship with wealth and need is inherently selfish and stupid. But that's one of the great things about having my own stupid blog where I can write the shittiest things I can imagine that I'll never say to anyone.