I didn't sleep well last night, and today I am tired. My back is sore, my brain feels like it has been left out in the rain , even my eyes are scratchy and feel too big for my head. This could be Sheila's fault ( it might have nothing to do with the fact that I skipped the sleep thing again yesterday), I kept thinking about how she was feeling all night long. Her "what is wrong with us?" and "why can't we just be normal?" feelings are familiar to anyone who works in rescue. Self doubt, lack of validation, a real fear of insanity and an emotional, deep down exhaustion each morning when facing the same as the day before, with no end in sigh,t becomes our norm. Last night, I tried to talk her out of those feelings, knowing that those are not feelings you can talk away, they are always hanging out around the corner to trip us up and bring us down, then they sit on us, like a dense and giant rotti, til we make them get off.
There are animals that just cannot survive in the "real" world. Wee Hopeful Bug was like that, and so were Sheila's Butch and Scotty. Ollie might be like that too. And those animals are the hardest to live with each and every day. Thank god Oliver is not a SAINTS dog because i don't have to share the burden of guilt for his being there. He's their own damn fault for actually looking at him in the first place and seeing his need. The only real answer for this one, is to stop doing rescue. We could kill ourselves just as easily fighting global warming, or third world starvation or halting the spread of AIDS. And, people would respect and value us alot more while we were at it. So why don't we? I don't know. All I know is every single day that I lived with Hope, I wished that she would just go away. One day she did, and now I am sad.
I think we are like everyone else, (at least anyone else with a passion, a mission that motivates them to give someting back in some way that fits) we feel the same things deep down inside us, we just feel them because of different things. I don't see anything wrong with that. If we all felt exactly the same about the exact same things, we might halt the spread of AIDS but the children would still die of hunger. Wee Hopeful Bug would never have found a heart to mourn her loss. Maybe Hopey wasn't as important to the rest of the world as she was to me, but to me, Hope is the heart of SAINTS, and for the animals that come here, her being that important to me was a real good thing. I refuse to believe that any one act of goodness or kindness has more value than a different act of another. If I believed otherwise, I would do something else. Maybe, some day I will,...but not yet. Right now, there is a floor to bleach and a stall to clean and I promised Miss Mellie a donut. And I am sending a cyber hug to anyone out there who is having a bad day making the world a little bit better for someone, no matter how small and insignificant that someone is.