From a hurt soul

Raging into the night as the poet did, air conditioners and lack of sleep, pain and relentless pressure render my spirit to a state of powerlessness and where I don’t want to be..  I am no longer a social worker but, no, I am actually a social worker because I have a profound empathy towards each and every one of the people who stand in front of me, naked and exposed. Is it a power trip? Maybe it is! I cannot, not in my heart, my soul or my conscience look upon a woman who as put together as she is at 50, had all her teeth broken as a youngster, or the resilient one who cares not for me but pretends and I sign papers because, although she does not speak it, her other teeth were also broken at a much younger age. I speak of women and men and I hear their stories and I feel for them because I once was a little girl. I once had dreams of my own. I would be an archeologist and I’d dig the earth for the past and for the stories we have all lived a billion times. Why, why must we keep on keeping on repeating the same cruelties, the same vicious deranged atrocities that awaken me in the night, startle me, me, the one who watches no news because it I have seen it all. Can it get any worse than Treblinka? They continue, I refuse. I am so angry and defeated by the men who are long dead, the teachers who have gone their way. Can I stop reliving the past in the present? Can I learn what I teach?

If I cannot, I am a hypocrite and must change course, because as I know me, I know that coherence and honesty are my only courses, as my father taught me. The price? I will pay. It does not come cheap and neither is it painless.