The life you save may be your own
Mar. 26th, 2020 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: illness]
I sent my latest menial-Internet-labour payout to the local hospital's COVID-19 preparedness fund.
'Finally,' I thought as I filled out the form, '*finally* a fucking pandemic charity. A couple years ago, I looked around and there was fucking *nowhere* you could go to throw money at this problem. If you wanted to help, you had to get a fucking biology PhD and do the damn research yourself. God, can you imagine me writing a fucking *thesis*? That *alone* sounds like a fucking *nightmare*.'
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(At a school event a few months back I met a nursing student, and we bonded over our mutual gratitude of "you volunteered to go into that field so I don't have to". I have that feeling about a lot of fields, an "I'm very glad there are people doing that, and I'm very glad that I'm not one of them". Conversely, a lot of other people feel that way about accounting: "gratitude that I'm voluntarily taking that bullet so society can function" is actually a very common response when people find out what I'm majoring in.
I have a valuable role to play in society, but it's not *this* role, and that does bother me on occasion. A tiny part of me wonders if I ought to do it anyway despite not being well suited to it, like a car factory churning out surgical masks. I think I'm rather less suited to it than a car factory is to mask production, though. I certainly couldn't pivot inside of a month or two like they're doing: I highly doubt I could pivot inside of a *decade*. And I would spend a lot more of that decade miserable (see above, re: thesis, nightmare).)
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(edit: postscript)
I sent my latest menial-Internet-labour payout to the local hospital's COVID-19 preparedness fund.
'Finally,' I thought as I filled out the form, '*finally* a fucking pandemic charity. A couple years ago, I looked around and there was fucking *nowhere* you could go to throw money at this problem. If you wanted to help, you had to get a fucking biology PhD and do the damn research yourself. God, can you imagine me writing a fucking *thesis*? That *alone* sounds like a fucking *nightmare*.'
---
(At a school event a few months back I met a nursing student, and we bonded over our mutual gratitude of "you volunteered to go into that field so I don't have to". I have that feeling about a lot of fields, an "I'm very glad there are people doing that, and I'm very glad that I'm not one of them". Conversely, a lot of other people feel that way about accounting: "gratitude that I'm voluntarily taking that bullet so society can function" is actually a very common response when people find out what I'm majoring in.
I have a valuable role to play in society, but it's not *this* role, and that does bother me on occasion. A tiny part of me wonders if I ought to do it anyway despite not being well suited to it, like a car factory churning out surgical masks. I think I'm rather less suited to it than a car factory is to mask production, though. I certainly couldn't pivot inside of a month or two like they're doing: I highly doubt I could pivot inside of a *decade*. And I would spend a lot more of that decade miserable (see above, re: thesis, nightmare).)
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(edit: postscript)
