Why I Write to Champion the Untold Story
Perhaps, early in my career I couldn’t even see the untold story. During my second job, I worked at a day program that was connected to a 30 day crisis house. I worked as if I were a choir boy singing the words to Amazing Grace without understanding its meaning. Individuals could seek respite from housing emergencies and focus on their mental health. They joined individuals from the community who also attended the day program. I ran groups and helped many find affordable housing placements.
Landing the job gave me the financial power to get myself recruited into a community house with some vague acquaintances so I could leave a ghetto apartment I maintained for five years previous. Since I was only just entering a Master’s Program, I felt extremely privileged to hold this responsible job. As a result, I tended to align myself with my supervisor and other more experienced workers and learn the ropes from them. Without credentials, I was focused on survival and that meant working with people who would get my back in case something happened.
One day, a client who I worked with wanted help finding housing. I was ready to get to work, and then I found out that she came attached with a more experienced case manager. Though she was subservient and not very talkative, she did tell me very clearly that she did not want to go to a particular boarding home, the largest such facility in the county. When I talked to the case manager who would later be my supervisor when I got promoted, he was clear about the woman’s future. She had to go to the unwanted boarding home.
“Wow, that girl is really sick!” I heard the coworker who worked the graveyard shift at the crisis house say. The co-worker had been a single mother who was clear that she still pampered her son, a prison guard. She would really lose it a few years later when her son died mysteriously.
“I don’t get it,” I said, “I don’t see why she can’t live where she wants to. I help other people find housing, why can’t I help her.”
“That girl is very sick, I can just tell by the way her eyes roll to the side” said my co-worker
I deferred to experience. Sure I had been hospitalized for six months myself, but I knew better than to make waves. The woman was shipped away to the very place she most did not want to go. She had been right not to trust any of us and let us know she was hearing voices. It was just protocol that the case manager makes the decision. I went on, just doing as I was told.
Once I was degreed and promoted, I visited the infamous boarding home which was buried in the Pine Barrens in the far reaches of the county. Out in the pines, there were few stores, lots of sand and aged pine trees, whose growth was stunted by fire. The pines were where most of the county’s boarding homes were located. I admired the scenery as I drove out to the large boarding home the first time.
The one-story buildings were made of quarter inch plywood and styled in rows like chicken coops. There was no insulation from the elements in any of the four or five buildings. They were long and full of small rooms with cots and no furniture. At the end of each row of rooms there was an open rec room where open vats of warm, iceless bug juice were just sitting out under the dim lighting. There were no fans to drown out the buzz of the flies. These inside rooms reeked of sickness. The chipping linoleum floors were being mopped with stink water mixed with cheap chemicals that reinforced the sick feel. Almost all the clients were either gone to a day program or had walked the three miles to the store where they bought their smokes at. I could not even begin to picture what the place looked like when it was full.
When I finished meeting with my client I followed the owner to the front office to check in on some business. The owner’s daughter had been in my sister’s class at our posh private school. I had grown up in privileged contexts, my parents both private school teachers. Back at the office, the owner had barraged me with gossip and information about the school.
When this had started in front of the client, I had been ashamed to have the privilege of my past revealed. By then I was learning to undermine the subservience that clients’ showed me, not exacerbate it. As a result, I found myself struggling not to be offensive to this woman who had helped pay for my rearing.
Once freed to collect my thoughts, I recall betting to myself that they treated mentally ill better back in the Middle Ages. I was stunned by the fact that so many good people I had worked with for years were living lives like this and that I had never given it any consideration.
In a year, I made enough money to fund a move to the west coast. Within six months of moving, I made a risky job transfer into setting up services in a section eight housing facility. When I found out my supervisor had a cocaine habit, I stopped heeding her. I started to act like a vigilante. I started to community build. I leaked info openly to a community activist and to newspapers and was starting to face unforeseen levels of threats.
One day, a resident who had pointed out the local drug kingpin to me, told me that I was deeply loved by all the residents, even the shady ones, but that they were all worried that I would end up becoming a resident of the building myself. They were worried about losing their housing too. That kingpin had been employed as a social service worker and frequently made eyes at me.
Within a week, after an unsuspected threat from a dear friend, I was picked up out of a ditch on a mountain pass outside of Butte Montana. I had been harassed by police for the past two days since they stopped me trying to escape to Canada. Finally, I surrendered to them.
Two months in, just when I had finally started to accept the very poor treatment I was receiving amid menacing mafia thugs and crazy people, I was transferred to the most chronic unit. The temperature inside was below freezing. There would be icicles inside the window that sat above my head. The conditions were almost as bad as the boarding home in South Jersey. When I first entered those dank halls, I, again, couldn’t believe that they treat mentally ill like this. Now I was victim to it feeling destined to behave with the subservient merriment of the thirty year residents. I was given old dirty clothing so that I could layer up among the crowded halls. My appearance and sense of self declined. Fungus off the bathroom tiles grew under my toenails and warts covered by hands.
Now, I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who works in a day program in the historical section of a city hospital in Oakland CA. I also write to help create a culture for other people like me who have had their life severely impacted by stigma and discrimination. My first book is a memoir detailing events that led into that backward of a state hospital. Much of the book is about my recovery coming out of “psychosis” while working at the only job I could find, a deli worker at an upscale Italian Deli. The Midwest Book Review has said my memoir is “deeply personal and impressively well written.” Reader’s Choice and Reader’s View have likewise given me five star reviews. My current effort is more of a technical book that tries to better define what “psychosis” really is in order to promote healing and recovery.
I write because now I see that there are so many untold stories out there. I write because twenty years ago a woman was committed to squalor and I did nothing. I write because I once was so arrogant so as to think it couldn’t happen to me. I write to learn how to appreciate, love and support the people I work for. I write to prepare myself for any type of survival that is to come. I write because I know firsthand how devastating it feels to be demeaned like a client. I write because I believe that loss of housing and mental health can happen to any of us regardless.
In this age of heightened social disparities and the disintegration of the middle class, the human propensity for dehumanizing things is on the rise. Now that the public is finally able to see the way that black men are shot indiscriminately by police. Now that we can watch television series and see how prisons are disproportionately filled with mentally ill, people of color, and many essential political prisoners. Now we all know that years of slaughter in the Middle East can be traced back to fabricated evidence. And still we listen to and promote lies. We blame it on the mentally ill, the immigrants, and African-Americans. We think we can make ourselves safer by taking more power. Already there are too many stories that happen in our country that are left untold.
I write to tell those stories.
