Everyone is passing around a different version of this meme. We can all feel society crumbling around us. There’s no other way of understanding it, only a difference in perceived velocity and degrees of dismantling.
Many of the memes include the useless tasks people must consume their time with to survive the end of the world in a home with electricity. Terms like spreadsheets, EOD, quarterly reports, slack notifications underline how deeply unserious and irrelevant our actions are in a time where so much action is needed. But people don’t think that applies to social workers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard an iteration of “at least you’re doing something that makes a difference”
Did I make a difference in my working hours? On an individual level, there are kids out there whose parents now understand their gender identity, people who didn’t kill themselves, people who don’t act on their intrusive thoughts, people who don’t use substances in a way that threaten their wellbeing. These are some of the things I tell myself to soften the blow of my student loan payments. On a larger scale though, the social worker’s function does not include changing the systems that created our slow apocalypse. Of course not. We wouldn’t be here if it did. In the best of times, you are grateful to see any changes in an individual, family, or community you work with. In the worst of times, being a social worker at the end of the world feels much worse than presenting any slide deck.
A close friend who works at a large regional advocacy and policy organization was in town recently. When I met up with him, he nearly cried saying “thank god I’m on vacation the week that Roe fell. I would have been sending fundraising emails and voting reminders to poor people right now”.
There’s a fire on your block.
Most people aren’t firefighters. They feel powerless. Some call you. They are also busy doing other things. You are the firefighter. You receive their calls and hear the most excruciating details of the damage. You go to collect all the resources you need to fight the fire. You are given a watering can. You ask, what happened to the truck and the hose? This year, your not-firefighter bosses all got together and decided that the best way to raise awareness of the fire department to get more money for fighting fires was to sell the truck and build a big, beautiful state-of-the-art fire station. They’re so proud of it. So you take your watering can down to the house, crawl inside the window, and see the people you cannot save with 48 oz of water. You are taught to chose. You are taught to make it work. You did your best and it isn’t good enough. Some will blame you. You go home and write the report on how dire the situation was, how you did your best to take action and your workplace provided you with the resources available so now you can’t sue them for not fighting the fire.
Okay- that was really convoluted. You get it. I want to be clear: I love social workers with my whole heart. On a whole, you won’t find a group of people with more conviction. But there is something especially horrific about looking a systemic problem in the eye, knowing what must be done to defeat it, having to do something entirely inconsequential instead.
A large domestic violence shelter we worked with at one of my jobs was having trouble supporting their clients with decreased staff. They were not paying enough to keep up with the rate of burnout. Everyone loved the shelter. They were the go-to donation destination in town. They provided wrap-around services such as peer support groups, job readiness training, short-term counseling, an emergency shelter, and even access to transitional housing services.
I don’t think it was because everyone did the math. You try not to. But I wonder if the burnout rate had to do with felt sense that each family’s services equaled approximately $40,000 a year. I wonder if they thought a $40,000 check could be more useful to a struggling parent in a horrible position than “access to services”.
The problem with social work isn’t that some social workers are racist or bad at their jobs. It’s that being good at our jobs cannot change what caused the problem we’re supposed to be solving. Many people are able to keep going and lead long careers in agencies with no working bathroom sinks. Some people are so dedicated and passionate that the incremental and individual changes they see are well worth their time. Some people are better at managing the stress of it. I hear some people have amazing supervisors that keep them afloat and give them hope. Some move up and are able to forget what it’s like on the street level. I don’t know why any of these things didn’t work for me. Maybe I’m simply not cut out for it. Easy as that.
Mostly, I want to say that I don’t think that making a spreadsheet about Instagram reach or whatever it is all of you do is less meaningful than helping the most powerful institutions and individuals in our society pretend that they are remotely interested in solving an extraordinary problem that they took part in causing.
This is one reason I’m out. At this point in my life, I crave transparency and honesty more than anything. A smarter person might express the merits of corporate giving or social entrepreneurism. I’m not going to go that far today, because what I wanted to say today is more simple.