I've spent most of today sitting in front of my computer editing master's theses for my fellow cohort members. Right now, I'm working on a particularly difficult paper and I've been listening to Pandora's Classical for Studying channel. Most of the songs that have been playing are songs that I played over the years I studied classical piano. I thought to myself, why didn't I pursue music? It's so much easier than writing research papers. Then I remembered, it was for the same reason I didn't pursue Quantitative Psychology, I didn't want to be stuck in a room alone for several hours every day. I wanted to help people.
The calling to a helping profession is a difficult one for people to understand if they don't feel that particular pull. I've been asked by several family members why I want to become a social worker, how can I do the work I am training to do? I'm always puzzled by that question because my answer seems obvious, how can I not? To work in a helping profession requires people to lack the ability to see someone in pain, crisis, living in poverty or oppression and turn away. It's a very specific calling and it's not for everyone.
In my macro social work class there's been a lot of discussion around people doing what they feel they were meant to do. I don't know if I'm doing what I'm meant to do. I don't know that there's anything I'm meant to do. If you go by talents, there are a lot of things I could have done and I would have been very good at them, but none of them would have given me the sense of meaning that I feel I need to be fulfilled in my life.
My plan, before I entered graduate school and even into the middle of first year, was to become a child welfare social worker and see what sorts of opportunities arose. Now, at the beginning of my second year, my plan is to spend a few years in child welfare, get my clinical license, enter a Ph.D. program and become a professor/researcher and have a part-time clinical practice. It was a difficult decision to come to because being a professor seems a bit removed from being on the front lines helping families in crisis, but it turns out I have particular talents in the areas of research and teaching and apparently the combination is rare. Not only that, there is a serious need for social work professors who actually have a background and field experience in social work. After many conversations with friends and faculty I came to the decision that helping to train the next generation of social workers, as well as contributing to the field of social work as a researcher, is helping people and the need is great.
I've often felt some level of irritation at my need to find meaning in the work I do, to have it mean something. Both my family and I have railed at my inability to get a good job and just stick with it. My mother has often asked me why I feel like I have to be Joan of Arc and save the world. I'm not trying to save the world, I'm just trying to have meaning in my life and in what I spend a large amount of time doing every day because the calling for that in me is great. I know there are other people like me, I see many of them in my classes during the week. I see them working ungodly amounts of hours investigating calls of child abuse and neglect. I see them struggle not to lose hope in the face of what seem impossible challenges and continue on, helping and hoping.
It's important to honor the call of meaning inside of us. If we don't honor that call it doesn't become silent, it pursues us every day, coloring our lives and demanding to be heard. It requires one to become still and silent so they can hear the meaning of that call. It requires one to be very honest with oneself, to understand where meaning lies, to honor that and then follow it because the call for meaning can only be heard on the inside of a person, but to find meaning requires one to move in the world and to connect with others.
One year, for my mother's birthday I gave my mom Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" because she was searching for meaning in her life and she didn't know how to find it. One passage that stood out to me is the following, "By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic "the self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself--be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”
What I got from this passage is that in order to find meaning we have to get out of our own way because it's not about us. Finding meaning is about transcending ourselves and putting ourselves out into the world to help or connect in whatever way best suits what comes before us. It's not about how can we fill the need inside of us, it's about how we can fill the need in front of us. In doing this we serve humanity, the world, even ourselves. In remembering this I remember to get out of my own way, get out of my own ego and to face the need or the person in front of me with whatever it is needed to make the situation better. We can all make a situation better, someone feel better, put more kindness in the world, touch a life and heal a soul. In honoring meaning within ourselves we honor it for everyone.
I'm not going to fight the plan to become a professor anymore. There are many needs to be faced along the way, my classmates' needs regarding their theses, my future client's needs, and eventually the field of social work's needs. It's possible that new needs will arise and plans will seemingly change; but the truth is they won't change at all because my ultimate plan, the foundational plan that underlies everything I do is to face the need in front of me and offer whatever I can to make the situation better.
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