Making it Up as We Go Along

“Real” adults often ask me what type of job I want to have after graduation (since that’s like, only two years away, yikes).

I HAVE NO IDEA.

I’d like to write, but I don’t write as much as I should. I recently read this book called The Opposite of Loneliness where the college-aged author would write three hours a day, no exceptions. Well shit, I’m already behind! Besides the writing, however, I’ve learned from making my resume the last couple years that everything I like to do has some sort of social purpose. I’m not sure if that’s a family thing or not, since my parents and extended family are mostly involved in service-oriented professions such as therapists and teachers. I also know that my dad (thank you, dad) has given me the wonderful gift of feeling everything extremely heavily and therefore I have major burnout potential from working with something like human trafficking for the rest of my life.

Maybe my interest in social justice is a generational thing, too, since many of my friends and my boyfriend want to orient their future profession around a social or environmental cause. Maybe it’s me; my friends are the people I surround myself with because they’re like me. WHO KNOWS.

My internship at the Freedom Center has been more emotionally taxing than I could’ve imagined, but definitely worth it. It’s difficult enough to do research about modern-day slavery for twelve hours a week, so I can only imagine what it’s like for my coworkers who are there full time. Even though I’m not working directly with survivors, my introduction to the nonprofit world has made me realize how daunting it is to tackle major issues such as the 30 million slaves in the world today. How can I feel like my standard of living is not mutually exclusive to global inequality? That’s something I thought about a lot after going to India in 2014, and now it’s all coming back up again.

Nonetheless, I am optimistic. One of my responsibilities at the Freedom Center is to expand on weekly “actions” anyone can take to become more aware of human trafficking and live without slave labor (there are 176 so far). The actions I’ve created have been published on the Freedom Center’s End Slavery Now website, and you can see them here. These small actions make the daunting issue of human trafficking a little more manageable, and over time we can become more educated abolitionists. Feel free to sign up for the weekly email about new actions!

I’ve also found a love of fair trade. In an initiative to make the Modern Day Slavery Exhibit more interactive, I’m putting together a “gallery talk” where I’ll be leading a discussion about forced labor and how we can lead a fair trade lifestyle. The date is TBD, but sometime in the next few weeks. Check the Freedom Center website for event updates. I’ll probably write a post about fair trade here soon.

A really awesome event coming up this Saturday, July 29th, however, is the Freedom Market! I’m really excited about this. From 11am to 5pm on the plaza outside the Freedom Center, we’ll be holding a market of fair trade and survivor-made goods. Vendors include Freeset, Ten Thousand Villages, and Aruna, and you can buy products such as clothing, accessories, and home goods. I’ll be there helping out, so feel free to stop by!

Finally, I want to recommend an amazing book I just read, Half the Sky, by Pulitzer prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The book is a compilation of the human rights abuses of gender-based violence Kristof and WuDunn saw for decades from their journalistic and humanitarian work all over the world. Their research and storytelling looks at the many examples of gender discrimination worldwide, but also how women are the world’s number one economic asset and their empowerment is the key to alleviating global poverty. The book has been turned into a documentary as well as a movement that works to make its ideas from the book a reality. Half the Sky never wavers from optimism, giving practical advice and a call to action for humanitarians everywhere, and you should go read it right now.

Overall, my life has been consumed with sewing, writing, reading, research, Game of Thrones episodes, and getting ready to move into my house in Columbus at the end of August. Ah! Summer is going by too fast. Although I do really love working at the Freedom Center, I’m looking forward to different experiences over the next couple years that may guide me in the right direction of “what to do with my life.” But from a piece of advice I’ve heard numerous times that makes me feel both worse and better, we’re all just making it up as we go along.