Leaving Whole Foods after work today, I was approached by a young man wearing a Greenpeace shirt, who wanted to talk to me about water pollution and making a donation. Usually I just don't engage with any street campaigners to whom I don't plan to make a pledge that day so I don't waste their time, but I got stuck because I was carrying some groceries and I was slow. I told him upfront that I would not be able to make a donation at the moment, including some line about being a "broke student," only half of which is true at this point, but I was going for concise and understandable rather than perfectly accurate. He said compared to many other countries in the world, we're actually pretty rich. He said he's seen people talking to him holding the keys to a Mercedes and claiming they're broke. (Only in Orange County...) He said he'd first gotten involved with Greenpeace as a student himself, and that even though things were tight, he knew $5 or $10 per month wouldn't break the bank. Gentle reader, if you know anything about my finances and the likeliness of bank-breakage over a misspent $5, you can only imagine the exasperated sigh going on in my head at that point. It was something like this:
Uuuuuunnnnnnnnnnggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh [rolls mind's eye]
But that still doesn't really do it justice. I thought this was about to be one of those TV moments when someone gets righteously and thoroughly told off, à la Betty Draper on Mad Men. I thought, There's so much I can tell him to PROVE I cannot afford to donate now and that he should lay off because HE DOESN'T KNOW ME AND DOESN'T UNDERSTAND AGHAGHUGHGRRRRR [foams at the mouth in rage a little bit].
Yes, I was carrying a grocery bag out of Whole Foods a little after 2 PM on a Tuesday and was wearing clothes that were not ripped and not [too] stained, and since I was there, I [presumably] could afford to live in Orange County. What he doesn't know is that grocery trip is my first time shopping at Whole Foods in over a month, since fabulous employee discount or no, sometimes buying ANYTHING just isn't in the budget. I'm not shopping at 2 PM because I'm in the leisure class, it's because my shift started at 6 and I'm already off work. He doesn't know that I comparison shopped the crap out of it to get a good deal, only bought necessities I'd carefully selected ahead of time, and you bet I used my price book to know what to wait until later to buy. For all he knows, I could've bought everything that I did with food stamps (I currently make too much for that by about $60 per month). He doesn't know it's been a month with a lot of one-time expenses for me (a Costco membership and $500 pet deposit are the big ones) and that consequently I've got about $3 as a cushion until payday, which, mercifully, is Friday. Doesn't leave much, even for the whales.
He doesn't know that for me, "affording" living in Orange county means 75-80% of my take-home pay goes to rent and utilities (no fancy cable included in that--only gas, electric, and the cheapest possible internet package. Our complex pays water). I split the other 20-25% of my income among food for me and Oscar the cat, gas, and in the near future car insurance as well. Entertainment? Nah. Happy hour? I wish, but no--B knows this and often volunteers to pay for us both, to get me to come with him. Clothes? Snort. Yeah right, not since I started budgeting in December. Home stuff? Not unless we're truly OUT of toilet paper. I'm lucky to still be on my parents' health insurance, a family phone plan, and family car insurance for the moment, but those last two are more than I really feel comfortable accepting. I'm at this fun stage where I just hope nothing breaks or wears out--for example, I had an out-of-the-blue $200 car repair in January which would be totally impossible to pay for now. I'm paid fairly for my position, including good benefits, but unemployment ate up all my savings and not being full-time (or having an opportunity to become so in the next few months) is keeping me treading water instead of rebuilding.
I geared up to yell all this at the guy from Greenpeace, including a piece about how I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO JUSTIFY MY PERSONAL FINANCE TO STRANGERS, but then it hit me. This guy? He has no clue that this is my situation. Not only that, there's no possible way he could be expected to know. What kind of jerk yells at a stranger for not knowing something literally impossible for them to know? What sort of a response is that, to think yelling will somehow improve the situation or make me feel better? Besides, Greenpeace is an organization whose mission I support, and most of the stuff he was saying I understand and agree with in the abstract--I only take umbrage when it's making me uncomfortable, of course. I do know I'm still ridiculously well off compared to a woman living in Mali, whose worries are famine, ebola, dying in childbirth, and civil war. I know that I have so much to be grateful for--a job that pays me fairly, a roof over my head, a family who loves me, financial independence (however tenuous), basic freedoms, good health. Money stress comes and goes, but getting so miserable about it that you take it out on strangers is a looooooong way from who I want to be. So I pulled back from the edge and decided not to be that person today.
The same way I want him to have compassion for me, to not badger me and to understand that I care deeply about the environment even though I can't give today, I need to have compassion for him as someone just trying to get money from strangers for a worthy cause, and dealing with a wall of excuses for inaction and apathy. As part of my religious studies minor in college, I took a class called Compassion, and one of the main topics of discussion was how to avoid projecting our own assumptions, prejudices, biases, and motives onto other people. Defensiveness over nothing is one of the key symptoms that you're having a problem with projection--looks like I could use a brush-up. "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle," a wonderful quote attributed to pretty much every great figure in compassion, seems appropriate. I'm going to try to think that more often this week, and try to recreate that habit of just not projecting. It's so simple, but has the potential to be so powerful. As I ride out this particular storm (a small one, in the grand scheme of things), I'm going to strive to be less angry, judgmental, and scared, and more loving, understanding, and at peace. This too, like all things, shall pass.
