I can’t pick a single issue.

For my MSW program, I had to choose a concentration for my second and last year. I chose the mental health concentration because it encompasses everything, race, religion, social and economic status, sexuality and gender identity. Truly, mental health is the most important issue for me. But sometimes it doesn’t seem enough. It doesn’t seem enough to focus on people with schizophrenia or dementia and their caretakers, even though that has become a passion for me. It doesn’t seem enough when ICE, our president, and so many others are committing crimes against humanity.

But I’ve been told to focus on an issue or two because otherwise I’ll be stretched too thin. And I’ve been told that I can’t help everyone, even though I want to.

I’ve known that I can’t help everyone for a long time. I knew I couldn’t help my friend when four year old me had the suspicion she was afraid of her father. I couldn’t help that little bird in the backyard who had lost its mother and couldn’t fly. I learned again that I couldn’t help everyone after a couple people at my internship expressed their opinions that they would rather drink themselves to death and be homeless than live in their current situation.

I’ve told myself several times that people hurt and struggle every day no matter what big thing is going on in the news and that is why I’m focusing on these people on a smaller level instead of stressing about nationwide and worldwide situations I cannot possibly have any control over. It works, sometimes.

I can’t pick a single issue. But maybe focusing on mental health is a start.

Kindness

“Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend. ”
—Naomi Shihab Nye