A few days ago while feeling particularly lonely and s**tty (I’d somehow forgotten the anniversary of my late cat by two days, and forgot to visit his grave–we had him for 15 years and, yes, he was my only friend IRL during that time), I decided to make an online donation to our local Humane Society in his name. (He was a shelter cat.) Not a tiny donation, either, but $100. I clicked their site donate link, went through my PayPal, in the note field chose to do it “in memory of” my cat’s name (they had this option, to make a donation as a memorial), and sent it through. It brought me back…to a dead link on the Humane Society site. Their “donation success” page is an “Oops, this page doesn’t exist!”-type thing.
I felt worried, but still, the money was taken out of my account (my PayPal summary lists the recipient and counts it as a donation and everything), and PayPal sent me a receipt, so…I hoped for the best.
That was three days ago and the Humane Society never acknowledged receipt of the donation. Not even an automated one.
I tried hard to tell myself, maybe they’re busy (we live nowhere near any metropolitan areas, we’re pretty rural), or maybe even they just don’t reply to all, or any, of the donations they receive…? I don’t know how they run things. For all I know that’s exactly the situation and it’d make me feel better to know that some lonely cat is snuggling with a new warm toy or enjoying a nice bowl of food because of a lonely person.
…But I do know what my luck is like. And the nagging voice in the back of my head, the one that keeps a running tally of all the s**t I keep getting hurled at me every single time I try to do something, anything, useful, is suggesting that the money was removed from my account, but never made it into the Humane Society account. Because OF COURSE, why would it?–why would I be allowed to do something useful after all these years of uselessness? Of course the money would be lost. Of course it’d just go to waste and now I’m out $100 which I can’t really afford to throw away and of course the Humane Society and those lonely unwanted cats are no better off for what I tried and likely failed to do, either. Of course. That’s just the way it goes, when you’re me.
I could do without a thank you or whatever, even though it would’ve helped me feel a little better. Doing good deeds isn’t supposed to be about getting thanks, and it wouldn’t even be the first time, a couple of times online I donated a little money to people who said they were in very difficult situations and at least one of them never responded so I don’t know if I helped them; you have to tell yourself, before giving money away, that you’ll be okay with the idea that maybe this person was just feeding you a line, or else you’ll become too bitter to help anyone at all.
But I just wish I knew that they even got the money, period. I’m crying again thinking that this small decent thing I TRIED to do in memory of my old friend was just…wasted…and nobody was helped, no good thing was accomplished at all. It’s the same as if I did absolutely nothing. Well, actually a little worse than the same…that $100 is gone.
I’m so sick of life. I’m so sick of being useless no matter what I do. 😭
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