Rescue Journal

ok...i found it, i think i can walk again.

Carol  ·  Jan. 26, 2014

I do not know if you can actually live deep in the rescue world and not sometimes sink into bat shit crazy. it is a world of illusions and smokescreens where nothing is what it seems to be. you are not just unable to trust what you see and hear all around you, sometimes you lose the ability to trust what you feel and believe deep inside you and that is when it gets really weird.

a week ago I was pulling my car over inbetween clients and crying. when I got home I would care for the animals and sometimes cry inbetween them too. the only time I felt right inside was when I was actually busy caring for someone because then I knew exactly who I was and what I was doing.

I cannot function here as a wet soggy bag of hundreds of tears..it doesn't work. so I whip myself up into a rage to turn that fire of passion on again to get thru the day. if given a choice between sliding down the drain in defeat or suffering a few burns...i'll take getting burnt and go on to another day.

and I have no idea why it is so important to me to at least try to present this one single rescue story as unpainted and unvarnished as I can but it is. hah! maybe I have a death wish.

but these animals who surround me every day deserve at least some kind of feeble attempt at what their abandonment and eventual rescue means. its not something always beautiful, sometimes it is also ugly....its reality.

there is no sweet dream in rescue...the dream is what we want to see and mostly we all want to see pretty.

my pledge to each animal here was...my house, my paycheque, my time, my effort, my life, my mind, my heart and despite my flaws and limitations... whatever courage and strength I can find. but I never offered my soul. that's me inside those deep murky depths and I need me to be able to stand and cry and fall and stand again in the face of myself and this all.

I somehow forgot, rescue sucks.

so whatever.

Comments

Carol

I am really going to try marisa not to let people stuff drive me over the edge anymore. where there's a will, there must be a way.

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Marisa

Carol, I volunteered at a privately-run (i.e. one person at the helm) shelter for some time and it was probably one of the most educational experiences I had in terms of what goes on behind the scenes in rescue. And since that time I have always believed that the hardest part of rescue is the human-human relationships.
The fact is animals do not get rescued without human intervention. So humans are necessary for this whole process. And I simply don't think a rescue can be the best it can be without more than one human working away at the many tasks that must be done. So, inevitably, many humans work closely together and it is just a fact that personalities and opinions will clash and the person at the top of the pyramid can certainly become a target.
I have wracked my brains for many years to figure out the magic potion that helps both the volunteers and the head honcho understand each other so that they can have disagreements and discussions but, in the end, still come together and work harmoniously for the good of the animals. And, of course, no magic potion exists. The humans will always be the fly in the ointment. A volunteer with a sense of humour, an intact sense of self so they are not trying to fill a void and an understanding that the leader lives this life 24/7 while they get to go home at the end of the day is worth their weight in gold.
In the many years I have been following the blog it strikes me that you and SAINTS have come CLOSE to that magic potion. Probably because, in the end, you and many of your volunteers always come back to the animals as the anchor that holds everything fast. And that's an excellent check when things go off course.
I wonder if every time things start to go off the rails people need to turn to each other and ask "What do you actually WANT here?" It's the passive-aggressive undercurrents that I think are the death knell of a rescue and, as you posted, it's so important to bring the festering infections to the surface so they can be dealt with. It might be surprising how many potentially explosive situations could be defused by simply asking a person to be upfront about their real motives at any given moment.
Aw geez...I just wish we could figure this all out in the rescue community because the human interaction always takes a greater toll on a rescuer than the rescuing itself. We're a smart species...and rescuers are particularly compassionate people. Why can't we have more compassion for each other?

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