In limbo

I have long been comfortable with people older than myself, perhaps more so than I typically am with my peers. Part of it is likely because I have two older siblings and was always hanging about with their friends. Most of it is probably just in my nature. I don't necessarily look older than I am, but in almost every context of my life where my age is not a given, almost everyone I meet thinks I am older than my twenty one years. Every so often someone around my age will say, "We're getting so old!" I feel exactly the opposite. I feel 21 is so young. I also feel that my life is that of someone much older, and that my daily life is vastly different from almost every 21 year old I know.

Now, more than at any point in my life, my daily existence requires maturity that likely shouldn't be expected of a 21 year old. I work almost thirty hours a week as a child welfare caseworker. When daily concerns are domestic violence, homelessness, mental illness, drug and alcohol addictions, physical, sexual, and verbal abuse, I find it hard to relate to, or care about, the daily concerns that plague most of my peers. A friend and I will be catching up, and she is obsessing and ruminating over adding this class or that, adding a concentration, and I want to say, "It doesn't really matter." Of course I don't say that. But it seems so trivial to me. School at this point is a second thought, somewhere in the back of my mind. But I don't fit in in either world.

At work, I'm not a full-time caseworker. I'm seen as the student. At school I find myself not caring. I always felt that much of the knowledge I was gaining in the college classroom was somewhat esoteric, particularly at Goucher, but now I have a concrete "other" to compare it to, a real life, something with substance, with real peoples' lives and pains and struggles playing out right beside me, and me having a potential very real impact on them through my actions and words.

At a certain point, the ability to do my job falls outside of maturity. Some people would never be able to to my job, regardless of age. I talk to people of all ages about the particulars of my job and I constantly hear in response, "I don't know how you do it. I never could."

The truth is, no one, or only a very small percentage of the population is cut out for this job, because the system is flawed. It seems designed to set up caseworkers for burnout, apathy, or both. It wears down on you slowly over time, and rapidly when a client manipulates you, you're forced to remove a child from a home, or return her to her home against your personal beliefs, or a client falls back into addiction for the seventh time, or gives birth to her fourth baby born with crack in its system. Some people leave very suddenly, without another job lined up, because they simply "lose it" one day. Some go quietly, others with high emotions. But many stay long after they should have left. They carry out the motions of the job, but they have mostly stopped caring about the clients. They bitterly draw on their twelfth cigarette of the workday and complain about this mother or that paramour.

And I stare at them and think, "I'm only half in this world." I'm only half a real person plagued by these concerns. I can still go sit in class and think only of action potential of neurons and I can write off my lack of knowledge about certain things. I am not yet chest deep here. I haven't been swallowed by the cynicism, the cigarettes, or the lackluster... everything. I can still get out. This is not my long-term plan. This is how I can separate myself from the others. And yet I feel more akin to them than to my classmates.

With the exception of my social work classmates who are in the same internship, and not even them sometimes, I stare at the people I go to school with and wonder if we could possibly have anything in common. I find my mind drifting off at parties to thoughts of my work, my clients and I wonder what the hell I'm doing there. I know everyone has deeper thoughts than they let on, deeper struggles than they present to the outside world. Harder lives than I could ever know. I see this even in my cases, with children who are now grown, successful, normal, but whose childhood I know from case reports held a very different character.

I don't even have an all-encompassing thought here. I just know that a very wide chasm has grown between myself and not only people my age, but people who I feel don't fully grasp what it is I do four days a week. Between myself and lightheartedness, youth, and innocence, there is a growing space.

I still have aspects of a youthful life, but surely not enough. I don't want to force myself to do these things I feel I should be doing, yet I wonder what will happen if I miss them.

All of my friends are wondering what to do next year. My next year is set in stone and paperwork. In obligations and contracts. Verified in ink. It is real, it is serious, it is not delaying adulthood. It is the beginning of my career. It is a non-impressive but real, livable, actual salary, that, if I stayed at this job, would be hardly different after a decade. It is practical and adult and frustrating and invigorating. It is overwhelming, exhausting, terrifying. It is grounded and real. Real above all. There will be no vacations, no spring or summer breaks. There are already 10:30 bedtimes and 6:45 wake-ups, solid eight hours running into ten or eleven, again and again and again, ad infinitem it seems. Bleeding into sleep time. Thoughts of obligations to clients plague me as a lay in bed, staring at the wall. Although to me it has an end date. Sort of.

This job has given me a stony face, an unbreakable outer shell. It takes so much to phase me at this point. I plod away and nothing really jilts me. Is that being jaded or just practical? I need an outlet.