Tough

 School is getting tough. Life is getting tough. After getting that huge raise last year, I'm back down to part-time and having to watch every penny again. Not that I mind, as I was poor for a long time after T's dad and I split up. Food stamps poor. Still not poor enough for medicaid, though. Which should make me feel better, but it just puts me in that gray area of "don't get sick."

But I digress. The real point of this is: nothing lasts forever. You can be on top one minute and drowning in your own tears the next. 

For years, I really wanted to work in the non-profit world. I wanted to help people any way I could and working for the greater good while also earning a living seemed right up my alley. I work for five years to get where I was last year and now I'm back where I was at the beginning of those five years, only smarter.

I digress again. Now, being employed should make me really happy. Believe me, I am grateful. But living in one of the fastest growing cities in America, coupled with the fact that I am trying to finish a degree I probably won’t even use when I graduate, makes it rather difficult to not just “take what you can get.” Being a fundraiser for a non-profit makes that even moreso.

Being the sole provider and caretaker for a six-year-old doesn’t make things any easier. I talk a lot about how hard it is to survive in today’s world without any help, but I am totally aware of how much better I have it than my predecessors. The hardest thing for me is not having any help. After T’s dad up and moved to Colorado, the help has gone down to zero. When he was taking him every other weekend, that was my study time. Then he slowly stopped seeing him and my study time got smaller and smaller. Before I knew it, he was just gone. No more help. REALLY no help now.

What the hell am I going to do? How the hell am I going to finish school? Afford a babysitter just so I don’t run off into the woods naked and screaming with my arms flailing above my head?

I’m not, I figured out. I’m just going to make what I have in my power work. Come hell or high water, I am going to cut back and start working on my photography. I am going to make a living as a photographer. I am going to succeed in my craft. I have to…it’s the only way I can be happy.

Now, I grew up in a family where you didn’t chase your dreams. You went to college, got a degree, got a job, got married and started a family (not necessarily in that order).

I’ve always been the rogue agent. I never got married. I still don’t have my degree. I have no idea where I am headed, but I think I am going in the right direction. I think. But the broken feeling still persists.

The saving grace of working for a non-profit is that I get to meet people who do really great things for underprivileged people. One of the groups that has inspired me to keep doing this work is the Worker's Defense Project. They help workers who have been victims of wage theft. This makes it all worth it.