Why Go On?

(Written in August 2008)
Why go on?  This is a serious question this morning.  Not that I would try to kill myself today.  My chest hurts, it’s grey out, I’m deeply discouraged.
The Planet I love is in deep trouble, what little I can do to help seems so small and pitifully inadequate.
I need a sense of community — my community feels tiny and scattered.  I need to be effective and I’m too tired to keep my house clean.  I need to make a contribution and what skills I have and what wisdom I have gained are not much use to anybody, not much in demand.  I need a sense of hope, of a larger context and meaning, and it’s all gone.
Went down to Dover with some musician friends to do a “diversity” program for a company — it was a little discouraging.  Very few got up to dance which triggered all my stuff about being unattractive and inadequate.  We talked about ways we might do it differently to get more people to participate.
Well, I can see how an experience like that could re-stimulate my daily experience in my family of origin that what I have to give wasn’t valued or wanted.  This is the opposite of my experience in Laura’s training last spring where the women were delighted with and grateful for what I was offering.  That one was disconcerting because it went so strongly against my previous beliefs.  The other one — yesterday’s — feels like the way it is.  It also felt — highly familiar feeling — like I was trying to lift a huge heavy weight all by myself.
I wish I were part of a group engaged in a project — doing something good for the planet — and the group was basically effective (I think of Heifer) — and I just played a little supporting role.  So I did not have to do it all myself, so I wasn’t in the limelight, so my failures and inadequacies would not matter so much.