I feel like kind of a Rikers Island maven of sorts. I know which facilities you will always wait at least 45 minutes at (RNDC, the former ARDC. It's the adolescent facility and I don't know why it always sucks to go there, but it does. There was a lawsuit and now they are legally required to produce people for counsel visits in I think half an hour, but they always give you some kind of reason for the delay whereof you have no way of testing the veracity. I hate that place.) and which one is usually a painless transaction (GMDC. I was there today, in and out.) I have a reasonably tuned instinct for how to get them to let you walk to RNDC, if you have to go there, instead of taking the bus. Yeah all of this is really pretty superficial but it gives me a shallow sort of expertise to feel fancy about. I ask the bus drivers if they're going to "Rosie" if I need to go to Rose M. Singer, the women's facility, because that's what people who work there call it. Are you impressed yet? Oh well.
Anyway today I interviewed two people in a row, which is...well ideally you'd want a few minutes to take some deep breaths and visualize a basket full of kittens or whatever gets you through. But it also meant getting back off the Island faster, so I can't really complain. Why I bring any of this up is to talk about the difference between why this work is sometimes really taxing and why people think it is.
The comment I said I always get? The one that gives this blog its title? It usually continues like this: "Oh, wow. That must be hard. Doesn't it get you down hearing people's stories all day, all that terrible stuff about abuse and whatnot?*" And depending on my mood, I either say "oh it's not that bad" and wait for the topic of conversation to change, or I get into it, if the person seems interested.
Client #1 was archetypal in his way. Childhood in a tough neighborhood (which is a category worth questioning but suffice it to say if they say it sucked without my prompting, the label probably has little to do with my bourgeois alienation from working class life), constant physical abuse and then, no great shock, he became a drug addict. If you know how the drug war works, you know that he's screwed but good. The law, being an ass, supposes that addiction and its consequences respond to treatment more quickly and permanently than they do, so he's likely to end up in and out of jail. But this guy, even if he got out, it was hard to know what he was going to do to pull it together. No GED, a few jobs for a few months, emotional problems, probably not the world's best support network.
Client #2 was 50, looked 35, articulate, affable, had a drug problem that didn't seem to really tear his life apart (some addicts are higher functioning than others) except when he got caught, has some serious drama with his kid's mother** but otherwise has some shot at holding it together. Except that he's probably going to use again and he's probably going to get caught again and after a while they stop giving you breaks, if they give them to you at all. So really both of these guys stand a good chance of things not working out, in a big way.
Experientially, the cases were the same in a way. I wasn't more beaten down after one or the other. They shared a characteristic that I am always grateful for, which is that both guys, when you asked them a question, gave you a detailed answer.
A thing that happens a lot that is draining and hard to work with is that plenty of clients (adolescents worst of all) answer a question like "what was it like growing up there?" with an almost monosyllabic slur of "it was aight." This happens for plenty of good reasons, I'm sure. Guessing at a few 1) not everyone has thought a lot about what their neighborhood is like in contrast to, oh, anywhere else. 2) it is not that fun being interviewed by a social worker and being asked questions one has heard before. 3) it is kind of a stupid question. Sometimes I get a look that seems to say "the South Bronx? It was like a champagne picnic on the beach every day, you asshole."
You can get past this sometimes. You can say "I know, dumb question, but I need to be able to talk about what's going on with you to people who may not automatically get it, and some of that is about where you're from" or words to that effect. Or you can ask it another way. Or you can come back to it. Frankly, what I end up doing most of the time, if it's an adolescent, is talking to the parents, who will immediately come out with "a crack addict lives outside our front door" and other stuff I can use. Anyway, I was glad not to have to do any of it.
The point, insofar as there was one, is that the traumatic context of people's stories, well...either that stuff kills you or it doesn't, and if hearing about someone getting beaten is likely to make you cry and ruin your day, you're likely not in this field. There's a kind of compartmentalization I'm not sure can be learned, though it is conventional wisdom that being in your own therapy if you're constantly subject to "secondary trauma" is not a bad idea. Me, I'm not tough about many things in life, so I claim it as my kind of rarefied toughness that I care about the things I hear but they don't sink their teeth into me.
What does leave tiremarks all over me is the systemic stuff. That is what's hard. You take a guy who has been rendered incapable of ordinary kinds of coping by his past and is likely to do time because society doesn't know what the fuck to do with him, and then take a guy who does this insane trick of navigating some serious socioeconomic hurdles, cobbling together an ok life, and sometimes has things derailed by a drug problem that ranges from manageable to not that manageable. Take these two guys and think about the fact that they're both somewhat likely to get fed to the drug war and the prison industry. This is the shit that wears a fellow down.
Enough for now. Currently nobody is reading this, in any case. Except B. Howdy B.
**I am somewhat hesitant about the term "baby mama" simply because it's not native to my dialect and I really hate hearing it used in a mocking way. It addresses the lack of a basic kinship term in what I suppose is class-determined Syntax, so really there's nothing funny about it but when people who wouldn't ordinarily say it say it, they're usually throwing some shade.
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