Sunday, February 24, 2019

Derby Story


I have a new hat. A derby, which is a hat with a lot of personality. And it’s added something to my life. An accent, an opening, a challenge? All three and more. I didn’t know how much I’d wear it, but I took it out of the bag as we left the store and I’ve worn it almost every day since. 

The hat makes people take notice, and that gives me the desire to wear it, and a competing desire not to. It’s one of those swords that cuts multiple ways. Because it grabs people’s attention and declares that there’s something special, or fun or interesting going on. And I don’t necessarily feel prepared to live up to that.



When I first started getting the extra attention, it caught me off guard, and I often turned away from it, avoiding eye contact, not acknowledging the looks. It was like when someone mistakes you for someone else. They call out, they break into a loud smile, and you know you aren't who they think you are. To avoid the embarrassment, I was pretending not to notice them noticing.

But I didn’t avoid eye contact for very long, because it didn’t reflect what I really felt. I love this hat. I love how it feels and how it makes me feel. And how is that? Proper is one word. I feel proper in my hat. Cool and comfortable and just right. Not cool as in hip, though some people take it for a hipster’s hat. It doesn’t make me feel ‘with it’. It makes me feel like I’m in just the right place and have everything I need.

And so, feeling that, I started to relax and smile. I figure that the good feeling might just translate, it might communicate. After all, it makes me feel good to see someone wearing something unusual that I like. As I started to smile more, people started to speak to me. “Nice hat”, “Love that hat”, ‘What a cool hat’. ‘I haven’t seen a hat like that in years!’ And sometimes, a little conversation followed. Where did I get it. Where can they get one. Is it a bowler or a derby….. 

And a lot of people would say, “I couldn’t pull off wearing a hat like that.” Which of course I understand, because that’s the story of the first few paragraphs. A hat like that is something you feel you have to live up to. There are expectations that go with it.

But after awhile, as I became more comfortable with my derby, as I wore it day after day, I spoke to them about how it felt to wear it. I told them, “Of course, you can pull it off. You don’t have to sell the hat. The hat is gonna sell you. All you have to do is be yourself. And smile.” Which is curiously true.

I never bought into the notion that ‘the clothes make the man’. And I don't get fashion at all. But my derby makes it clear to me that, not only does what I wear affect how others see me, it affects how see myself. I can’t deny it. In my derby, I feel like an accented me. I feel like I’m presenting something of myself, rather than hiding in my anonymity. It’s a way of being more personal with the world.

I get compliments on the derby almost every day . And quite a few curious or friendly looks, nods and smiles. It’s even drawn a snicker or two; can't ever please all the critics, I guess. But that's only a small annoyance. And worth it to break through some of the stranger-to-stranger iciness in this city I so love.


Sunday, February 17, 2019

Encounters with Past and Future

Now and then, I run across an old client, someone I worked with years before. I’ve spent most of my working life in social services, and much of that with youth ranging from 13 to 20 or so. And because youth grow so quickly, when I meet one I haven’t seen in awhile, the change can be remarkable.

My work has been in schools, where I focused on drop-out prevention, in group homes for runaways and throwaways, and sometimes in detention centers or halfway houses for those ending periods of incarceration. So they’ve mostly been young men (occasionally women) whose lives have been full of hurt, failure and disappointment.

Youth have the reputation of being difficult to work with, because they have so much energy and emotion and they haven’t developed the skills to manage or even understand them. But these are some of the reasons why those of us who’ve focused on youth work find it so rewarding. All that energy and emotion is the mark of a person in movement, going through change. And it’s easier to help a moving, growing person find direction, than it is to generate motion in an older person whose direction is set or who perhaps hasn’t moved at all in years.

Social workers can be as judgmental as anyone, though we try not to be. And, especially in my early years, it wasn’t unusual for me and my colleagues to decide who was on a positive course and who wasn’t. This one, we’d say, was hopeless, but that one was going to make it. This one never listened and didn’t want to do better, but that one had a good heart and just needed a chance.  And these are just the kinds of lazy judgements that my occasional encounters with former clients have helped me to stop making. At least to try and stop making. I don’t know that the human tendency to judge and predict is ever put to rest.

I have two, glaring examples. Two young men whom I worked with in the same group home at different times, both alienated from families that lacked the wherewithal to provide the basics of a secure and loving home, both high-school aged and Black. I’ll call them Kevin and Eric.

Eric was a hell-raiser. He was very angry. He blamed everything that happened to him on someone else. He was so entitled and impatient that even positive interactions quickly went downhill as soon as he had to wait for anything, or if the slightest obstacle presented itself. It was as though he was always looking for a fight. You couldn’t criticize him, or even advise him, because he interpreted anything like that as an attack. And he was very intelligent, and had comebacks for almost anything said to him. He exhausted everyone who worked with him and alienated anyone who tried to do something for him. It seemed that he was always on the verge of exploding and he constantly got into fights and arguments with the other kids, who mostly feared and avoided him. We all expected, even predicted, that Eric had a hard road ahead. His anger and his selfish motivations seemed to foreshadow problems with the law. It was hard to imagine him ever succeeding in work or in school.

Kevin was the opposite. He was quiet and even-tempered and easy to engage. Not only did he respond well to counselling, actually testing suggestions made to him and digging down into the feedback he received. He actually sought out staff when he had problems. He was very self-aware, and took responsibility for where he was, the mistakes he’s made, and what he’d suffered, even to the point of sometimes down-playing the unmet responsibilities of others. He actively discussed his options and the future he’d like for himself and didn’t seem to hold any unrealistic expectations. And, he was empathetic, often sharing and showing concern for the other youth he lived with. All of us who worked with Kevin though very highly of him. It seemed that he was primed to flourish, as soon as he was able to find himself in a stable, nurturing environment.

From my preamble, you’ll already guess that things didn’t turn out as expected. Some 4-5 years later, I encountered both Kevin and Eric, in situations I would never have predicted.

On one occasion, I was volunteering with a group that made visits to a state penitentiary, to give readings and talk about literacy and culture. As the inmates come into the meeting room, I saw Kevin. We instantly recognized one another and got to speak privately for a few minutes during the program. He was a couple of years into serving a sentence for assault and kidnapping. He’d made some bad choices, which he acknowledged as readily as he ever had. He had a ways to go before he’d be eligible for parole. He was trying to make the best of it, he said.

A few months later, I was at a community meeting of directors of several programs who were seeking to develop some youth leadership programming. One of them came in with a young man he introduced as a protégé, who turned out to be Eric. Eric was in his second year of university, where he’d established himself as a leader. He was involved in community work and had plans for his future. We got to speak briefly, during which time he remained somewhat aloof and unsmiling – not surprising. But I did not detect the anger that had always been so palpable.

Who can say how much their group home experiences, under the care of myself and others who wrongly predicted their futures, ultimately affected Eric and Kevin? Even if I’d have cared to say so in the past, I wouldn’t dare now. Not only do I not know how I impacted them, I don’t know anything, really, about the ultimate outcomes. These two meetings may be as mis-leading as they are revealing. Did Kevin make parole? And what happened then? Did Eric graduate and make contributions to his community? And whatever became of all that anger. I’ll probably never know.

As I write this, I fault myself for not having further contact with either of these young men. It was a transitional time in my own life, and the group home where I’d encountered them had depleted me. I think I just didn’t feel I had the resources to do so. But I sure did learn from those encounters, and they made me a better worker, and I’ve shared this anecdote with dozens of colleagues since then.

We err when we think we know another person’s future, what they have in them, or how they are impacted by their experiences. If we make judgements, and if we allow these judgements to limit the kind or degree of support we offer (which is almost inevitable if we believe our judgements) we do a disservice.

These are only two of the encounters I’ve have with former clients. Quite a few others have revealed to me that when I thought I wasn’t being heard, I was actually having a substantial impact. Where I thought an interaction was negligible, it’s sometimes planted a seed that grew over the years. I’ve had former clients recount conversations and interventions I had totally forgotten. And these interactions have not always been positive and to my credit. I’m very grateful and relieved that many of them have been.

These chance meetings have reminded me of things that my parents, teachers and other adults said or did with me that have stuck with me through all my life, that have motivated me in both positive and negative ways. It’s made me more careful about what I say and do, and about how I say and do it. Sometimes, it’s a matter of explaining what my motivation or intent is. At other times, it leads to an admission that an action or decision isn’t arising out of certainty. And most of all, it’s taught me to ask more questions of clients, and to listen more, and sometimes, just to pause. Because we never can know the full ramifications of the judgements we make about others. And we’ll never be fully aware of the seeds we’re planting and how they will grow.