All of It. The It. Of course we each need to understand ourselves in the context of the world and, the most important question, I believe, is *not* ‘Where do I fit in?’ You *are* in. As a white male you are more ‘in’ than than nearly everybody else. (As the brilliant John Scalzi wrote, our life-as-video-game difficulty settings are on the lowest level.) I believe the most important question is ‘Who is my neighbor?’ (Something I stole from Walter Brueggmann.) Your paradigm is one of purity and as such, from my reading, is not really any different than the one from which you “burnt out”. You have constructed a new version of white savior.
I struggle against the same shit and that is why I felt compelled to comment and why I was so, what…, so disturbed by your writing. Disturbed because I have passed through this same disfunction, no…, because I *get stuck in* this same disfunction.