Donnez-moi un instant de faveur (juste encore une fois)

If I were a different kind of Christian, I would be 'called' or 'convicted'.

But I'm not that kind of Christian, so all I know is that deep in my belly, in the primordial churning of my gut, I feel like my purpose in life is to facilitate, improve, and create mental health services in developing and/or post-conflict countries.

I also know that mental health is not on the first level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and that other things must be taken care of before people want to think about mental well-being. But I don't feel like those other things are my purpose and in any event, there are many people far better-qualified than I to carry out that mission.

For me, the single thing I want to do with my life, the single focus of my life for the last four years, is/has been to give what skills I have to those who need them most. That's all I want to do. I don't want to read newspaper or journal articles and have civilized conversations about them in my insulated, glossy world. I don't want to exploit people or gawk at or sensationalize their situations. I don't want to make money off of the suffering of others. I don't want to sit in an air-conditioned office or hotel room talking about what is best for people I have probably never seen. All I want to do is take my skills to the places they are needed most, and use them.

And despite the unfortunate end of my tenure in Chad, I do have much-needed skills (and I now have important lessons learned, as well). I want to go to these places for all the right reasons, I have a relevant skill-set and a deep, unwavering desire to use it and yet....

And yet.

I write you unemployed, despite numerous attempts at finding a position (including unpaid internships) that might allow me to once again feel as if I were in my right place. The closest I have thus far managed is to gain admittance to a university to study for a Ph.D. in a field that I am praying will allow me to put my foot back in the door. But I'll have to use the other foot, b/c this one has been crushed by the repeated slamming of said door.

While I appreciate the singular opportunity that has been offered to me by being allowed into this Ph.D. program, I must still ask the question: Why? Why is it that a person like me cannot even successfully beg for a job in this field, a field I now know to be populated by the self-interested, the self-righteous, and the just plain pragmatic, while I just want to give as much of myself as I can offer? But more than that, why do I feel so strongly that this is what I *must* do to feel complete, why is this the only part of my life that has offered some odd sort of fulfillment when it is seems at this moment that it is simply not going to happen for me? Why would God/Fate/Karma/Whatever do this? Why make every bone inside me whisper that this is my desire, this is my place -- why make me feel out of place in my own country, in my own culture -- when it is becoming increasingly plain that I am not permitted to live the life I could swear I was made for??

Yes, this is self-indulgent.

Yes, I am whining.

And yes, it is possible that I am catastrophizing just a bit.

But I just don't know what else to do when my heart is still breaking and the best I can hope for is that the gamble I've made by embarking on this Ph.D. program will pay off and I will one day be allowed back to the world I so unwillingly left five months ago, the world I finally scratched my way into only to be turned out again, the world that, although so wholly foreign from the physical surroundings in which I was raised, was the closest I have felt to home in my entire life. It was home b/c it was what is right for me, and I may never see it again.