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{"id":12090,"date":"2020-02-19T22:51:26","date_gmt":"2020-02-20T02:51:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/?p=12090"},"modified":"2020-02-19T22:51:26","modified_gmt":"2020-02-20T02:51:26","slug":"12090","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/2020\/02\/12090\/","title":{"rendered":"Beautiful, Broken, and Okay"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"\"$ <\/p>\n

I have been depressed lately.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s another of the 200 symptoms of fibromyalgia, and not a very common one for me. I usually get anxious rather than depressed. That, combined with the bad joint pain, has left me feeling speechless for a couple of weeks. Usually, words flow easily and I don\u2019t get writer\u2019s block. But this February has been difficult. When my fingers feel A-okay for typing, my mind won\u2019t come up with ideas. And when my mind finally does come up with an idea\u2013 painfully, like a hen laying a really big egg\u2013 depression tells me it\u2019s rotten.<\/p>\n

I get in the shower, which I call my Blog Post incubator; I usually start outlining my posts and thinking of good ways to word things in the shower. But every time I come up with a funny wording or a nice compact argument, depression tells me it\u2019s stupid. No one will want to read it. I will get trolled by liberal and conservative readers alike. Traditionalist Catholics will call me a demon again and atheists will tell me I\u2019ve insulted them.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to get around depression.<\/p>\n

I scroll through social media, looking for ideas of something fun and funny to say, until my scrolling finger starts to hurt with fibro joint pain, and then I take an epsoms salt bath. And in the bath, depression taunts me.<\/p>\n

On social media, I ran into a beautiful woman named Shirley Raines, who is a hairdresser. Every time I see a photo of her, her hair is a different neon color and she\u2019s got a new pair of glorious earrings on, to say nothing of her eyeshadow choices. If I had the confidence I would dress and make up just like her.<\/p>\n

Ms. Raines runs a charity called Beauty 2 the Streetz<\/a>. Weekly, she packs her van with food and supplies she buys with donations people give her, and she drives to Skid Row in Downtown Los Angeles. For those who don\u2019t know, that\u2019s where the homeless people congregate\u2013 about two thousand of them, lining the street in tents, one of the largest \u201cstable populations of homeless<\/a>\u201d in the United States. They don\u2019t have plumbing; there\u2019s nowhere to go to the bathroom. They come down with Medieval plagues like typhus and tuberculosis<\/a>. And with housing prices what they are and poverty getting worse, they\u2019re likely to stay that way for a long time.<\/p>\n

That place is hell on earth, I\u2019m sure, but in the videos Ms. Raines posts, she makes it look happy. I want to visit there with her, because she brings joy and fun when she visits.<\/p>\n

Ms. Raines serves the homeless people a meal she\u2019s prepared, including a dessert. She says it\u2019s important to give the homeless people choices of toppings on their sandwiches and ice cream sundaes, because homeless people have so few choices anywhere in their lives. And then she and her team of volunteers do the women\u2019s hair. She brings portable showers and some kind of pump-operated beauty shop sink with tanks of water from her own house. She doesn\u2019t just give them a quick wash and trim, but a real trip to the beauty shop with haircolor, wigs and makeup. On Valentine\u2019s Day she also handed out roses and pink treat bags and served sparkling cider.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been watching all the videos and photos she posts on social media<\/a>, grinning from ear to ear. I love how she calls the homeless women \u201cqueens\u201d and how she says \u201cthank you for saying thank you!\u201d whenever she\u2019s thanked.<\/p>\n

One day she posted a video showing her shopping cart full of rotisserie chickens. \u201cHit up Costco<\/span>to purchase 38 chickens! Gonna pull these and make chicken fajitas for 500 plus. Y\u2019all donations make all this possible. Bless u!\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been happier at the sight of 38 rotisserie chickens.<\/p>\n

In the comments, I saw somebody complaining that Costco rotisserie chickens are bland, and in another place I saw someone commenting that she should shop for things that don\u2019t use so much plastic.<\/p>\n

I was appalled\u2013 all the good this lady is doing, and somebody wanted to complain about the chicken, and to chide her for having no choice but to buy chickens in individual plastic boxes. Yes, somewhere in the supply chain, somebody ought to make a more responsible choice about chicken packaging, but the person who buys the chicken can\u2019t control that. Individual consumers aren\u2019t to blame for the environmental crisis we\u2019re in now, any more than individual poor people are at fault for the housing crisis that leaves them on Skid Row.<\/p>\n

Some people will find fault with anything, even a beautiful woman making fajitas for 500 poor people before she washes their hair.<\/p>\n

Several days later it was Valentine\u2019s Day. My friend Mark Shea was gushing about how much he loves his wife and how deeply he enjoyed the simple dinner of liver and onions she made him, and I smiled again. Then I saw the comments, where someone was chiding him for eating liver on a Friday.<\/p>\n

It takes a special kind of troll to frown on a grandfather\u2019s innocent enjoyment of liver and onions on Valentine\u2019s Day\u2013 particularly so close to Lent, when some churches in communion with Rome are holding a fast-free week anyway. But people manage to be miserable.<\/p>\n

I think, maybe, it would do us all some good if we looked at our depression as an internet troll.<\/p>\n