It's hard to feel the pull to help, and not be able to go. "These people," as we keep hearing them called with disdain, are pretty much the same as my patient population: poor, urban, African-American, traumatized. It's not a specialty that many psychologists have, but I love working with them, and I'm good at it. They could use me. But I have another commitment right now.
I do have to say, though, that when the rage and the bitterness and the sick hopelessness threaten to overpower me, it helps to have my attention claimed by a little person who is learning how to eat cereal, likes to have poetry read to her, and keeps rolling over onto her tummy and getting stuck there. I was about to call it "perspective," but it's not that. It's just solace.
