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I’ve been reading The Road, but it’s so emotionally overwhelming that I have to stop every few pages to keep myself from breaking down. I decided to read something lighter concurrently to have another book to escape to when my psychological defenses are low and ended up choosing Mountains Beyond Mountains, about the doctor and anthropologist Paul Farmer. I’m really enjoying the book, but with the goal I had in mind, I don’t think it was the right choice.

Just now I was reading about Farmer’s decision to endure a multitude of hardships in order to serve the underclass in Haiti, which he said was “a way to deal with ambivalence.” Farmer is quoted as saying, “I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can’t buy them. You can feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent. Comma.” The author explains, “[This way of ending his sentence] stood for the word that would follow the comma, which was asshole.”

Then I broke down. This part, which refers to a patient there, was what did it: “A younger man whom Farmer refers to as Lazarus, who arrived some months ago on a bed frame carried by relatives, wasted by AIDS and TB to about 90 pounds, now weighing in at about 150, cured of TB and his AIDS arrested thanks to medications.”

Reading about someone being so miraculously helped by medicine made me feel inadequate, naive, misdirected… In my head a voice rang out over and over again, “What are you doing [to help]? What are you doing? What are you doing?”

I haven’t been able to help anyone like that with my work, nor do I think I ever will, and that troubles me. For the past few years I have also wondered if my work on gay men in Tokyo is the best way to try and help, never mind the barriers that academia puts in place towards achieving such a goal, nor the pitfalls associated with comparing forms of oppression. A research participant even asked once how I proposed to help people with my work, and all I could say was that my primary goal as a sociocultural anthropologist is to understand.

I’m far along on this path and there isn’t much I can do about it now, and I do believe that my work has merit, but I must find a way to do more. Every time I feel pleased, happy, or comfortable I try to remind myself of that and remember the others who don’t have the same privileges that I do. I must find a way to rid myself of this burden of happiness.