Work

This is the first job I’ve had where I’m never even slightly bored; I only work six hours a day so by the time I get in I’m already thinking about what I have to do, where I have to go, who I need to see. Who needs a food parcel today, and who needs a follow-up phone call? Who needs to be hooked up with PTSD services and who needs Burmese interpretation? Call refugee services. Call the benefits rights advocates. Call the city mission. I write notes to myself all day in, really, a special new little notebook I got specifically for this purpose, and at the end of the day I get this weird sense of accomplishment If I’ve managed to cross off everything I’ve meant to do, and from seeing the next day’s list. No more sighing at the computer, no more hours-long meetings where I doodle KILL ME NOW in the margin of my eighteen-point agenda, no more staring out the window and idly wishing I could be doing something a little more meaningful.

This is, incredibly, my first real hard out full on social work job, the first time in the six years since I graduated from my grad school program that my master’s has been specifically relevant to what I do for money. The seven thousand clients at my job represent twenty-five languages and forty ethnicities, and by the time they get referred to social work usually multiple things have gone very seriously wrong for them. Many of my clients are refugees (hence the constant need for interpretation to do a lot of my job); some of them are from Iraq, and if you thought I was anti-war before, HOO BOY. I’ve head a lot of really difficult stories and spent some really hard moments with people whose lives will never be peaceful and easy, who harbor nightmares that most of us can never comprehend. On the upside, though, in the last month I have learned a couple of words in Arabic, Fijian, Samoan, Burmese, Somali, and Assyrian, and when my clients and I are not talking about the practical ramifications of devastation (or of just plain poverty) we are talking about goals and dreams and recipes and music and looking at baby photos and a lot of really good things that give me hope for the world.

That week where I had the three job interviews in forty-eight hours, this was the one I took the least seriously, the one I thought wouldn’t pan out because it is so intense and because I don’t really have the kind of experience necessary to do this kind of work–especially in a country where I’ve only been living a year and with whose social services system I am less than completely familiar. They were taking a huge chance on hiring me, and if staying in New Zealand for just a little while longer hadn’t been actively hanging in the balance, I’m not sure I would have taken it, now that I think about it. The end of my first week there, after I’d battled with immigration and finally got the visa and gone on seven home visits, at which six languages were represented, I texted all my friends: “My first week at work = AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!”

But just a couple of weeks have smoothed it out a little and I am no longer thinking longingly of what it might be like to just curl up underneath the desk that I share with several other people. I know what questions to ask now; now when I work with a client I can start to see the different pieces and understand how they might all fit together. I can start to solve the problem—and not just whatever problem the client needs help with, but also the problem I’ve had since I became an adult: what will I do with my life? How can I find good work, what kind of contribution will I make?

I still wonder about that. When I was twenty-five we all used to laugh about, hee hee, we were all just such big kids! And we didn’t know what we wanted to be when we grew up, ha ha! Seven years later it’s a slightly different, slightly more rueful laugh, if for no other reason than I have a better idea of what I don’t want, and also because I no longer labor under the illusion that my life is all ahead of me, at least career-wise. Some of it, a little of it, is behind me now, and I have to live with the choices I made when I was the person I was when I was twenty-five. I am supposed to have experience, now. I am no longer the ingénue.

But even though I often want to be doing something more innovative and creative, even though I wish I had a bit more freedom in my work and I didn’t have to deal with office stuff and with low pay, I have been thinking lately that I made the right choice back then, when I was trying to decide what to do in my work life. At least I made a right choice, one right choice. I’ve waited a long time to be able to say that.

I won’t be here for very long; in some of my more difficult moments I have reminded myself very gratefully that I’m glad this contract is over in February and that I won’t have to do this hard work forever. I still don’t know if I’m really cut out to be this kind of social worker, honestly, not for long term. But even though it’s really demanding and I feel sometimes as though I have no idea what I’m doing, even though I often laugh at myself and refer derisively to the amount I went into debt in order to do difficult, low-paid work, even though I still secretly want to be a writer or a dancer or a rock star or a poet–sometimes, when it all comes together, when I am able to work with a client to do something really useful and life-changing, when it’s all going the way it’s supposed to go, I remember that this isn’t just what I do, this is what I am.