Dorothy Day Thesis

Dorothy Day is known for fighting for the poor and bringing awareness to poverty and those who suffer in so-called silence. She constantly addressed how we must show compassion and love to everyone, even those whom society often neglects. As Palmer explains in his quote, people often don’t come to realize their self-purpose until after they have traveled a long journey and experienced hardships and adversity along the way. Day, in her process of fighting for the poor and developing the Catholic Worker Movement, had to struggle in order to find her true sense of self. It was only after these hardships that she came to understand the true importance of what she was doing and the impact that the movement was making on the world; she came to better

She dedicated her newspaper for those who were poor and felt like the world had no light at the end of the road (413). Naturally, because she was making a newspaper for the poor by the poor, the money needed to fully manufacture and publish it wasn’t always guaranteed. As she explains in the first issue of The Catholic Worker, the newspaper itself was run entirely on donations. She was unsure of how often new publishing’s would be made because it entirely depended on the money they received by those generous enough to support the movement. Additionally, everyone who worked on the project went unpaid and were simply doing it out of the goodness of their heart, knowing that they wouldn’t be making a profit from the hard work and effort they put in (414). The time and utilities needed to make this newspaper a reality wasn’t handed to Day. She went out of her way to make it work, even if it was difficult and oftentimes forced suffering onto herself. Day had to fight through the hardships and the unlikelihood of success, and by doing so, she realized how important these newspapers would become to the people who subscribed. She was meant to overcome problems in order to make a difference for the poverty-stricken people that society tends to neglect (415). While it most likely was emotionally taxing, it allowed her to realize that this was something the world needed

I had to be good at athletics, be at the top of my class, and hard-working if I was going to be the perfect daughter that my parents expected me to be. Having older sisters that were all amazing and talented, I had big shoes that I needed to fill. Essentially, my parents and society as a whole had already drawn an outline of who I was supposed to be and my job was to make sure I colored within the lines. For a long time, I obliged and allowed myself to be this page in a coloring book called life, but as I got older I began to wonder if that was really all I was. I remember back in middle school I had a creative writing class where each day we were given a prompt to write about for an undivided ten minutes. One of the prompts was “are you more like a coloring book or a sketch book and why?” This prompt, while it was probably not meant to elicit a deep series of thoughts, made me reflect back on all the expectations I carried on my back. My whole life I was given identity after identity, being forced to wear them like a mask and call them my own. However, it was then that I realized coloring outside the lines wasn’t going to break the world in two. Instead, I was a sketchbook and my unique journey was meant to create my own lines into a beautiful picture that represented me. So what if it got a little messy and the colors bled together? So what if the lines were shaky at points and strong at others? As Palmer