"I can save the world"

Drifted like a dark cloud through social work tutorial today and then realised that I'm not as irritated by stupidity or insensitivity as I am with idealism.

We were drawing ecomaps depicting a family's social relationships and discussing potential interventions, and it was faintly amusing to see how everyone referred the family to the FSC for everything, from tuition services to psychiatric help to financial aid etc like the FSCs are a petrol kiosk i.e one-stop shop for all your needs. I suppose it is true to a certain extent, but to have people put so much faith in what social workers can do, and to have classmates who are so fired up with the fervent zeal to connect the client with this or that service can be rather unnerving at times. I suppose they mean well, and perhaps they do really believe in the extent of help that social workers can provide (and I do believe that social workers do help a lot and in many ways), but they make it sound as if they can solve the world's problems on a piece of paper. Not too unlike GP essays.

And the ideas of empowering clients through choices? Choices can be crippling because of the immense responsibility it places on an individual should you make the wrong choice.

We talked about suicide prevention in tutorial and what came up most was the word 'Hope'.

"we should give them hope in life so that they can continue living"

As if hope in life can be so easily imbued in someone. And this is assuming that all of the social workers possess hope and want to live in the first place, doesn't it?

Two semesters into university and I cannot find any trace of the social worker in myself. I lack the necessary optimism, the idealism that translates into motivation for action, perhaps also the desire to help, especially when you see that all help, be it physical or emotional, only serves to prolong a person's pain. Because to live is to die, and to live longer means to have yourself eaten away slowly from the inside.

"Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Isa step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone, and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them,
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them." - T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets