Wednesday, September 27, 2006

taking it personally

I got asked out by a client at work last night. Anyone who reads this site regularly knows I work in a transitional housing facility for the homeless mentally ill. The kid who asked me out was just drunk enough to have poor judgment, but not drunk enough to stumble and slur, and he'd been goaded to come talk to me by an older, sneakier guy for whom my little would-be paramour was just an entertainment.

The kid was sweet, but I politely declined. It got me thinking about how easy it can be to take things about the job personally. One of the first things I realized when I started that job was that "it" could happen to anybody, "it" being whatever it takes to land an otherwise normal person in a souped-up homeless shelter. This point was hammered home by a client I met early on who had a phonetically identical name to my own (though spelled differently) -- in fact, it was a big joke among the staff when I started because I appeared to have the exact same name as this client. It caused troubles with phone calls all the time and sometimes with mail.

Anyway, this guy had been a doctor, living a normal life full of normal things, when a series of unpredictible, unpreventable "bad" things happened to him that left his life completely unrecognizeable. All the normal things that had filled and defined his normal life were gone. Depression ensued. Before you know it, he's sitting on our couch reading pulp fiction all day and letting fungus grow over his bald spot because he's too debilitated by his depression to shower. I mean... wow. That's a big change for an otherwise normal guy. And if it could happen to him, why couldn't it happen to anybody?

He was my first example, and especially meaningful to me because we shared a name, but there have been tons and tons of other examples over the years. We've had clients who had been successful entrepenuers and business owners, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, registered nurses, engineers, even a famous punk musician. What I have seen over and over is that there isn't always a clearly drawn line between a good life and a life spun out of control and the distance between one and the other is sometimes frighteningly small.

What's that got to do with the drunk kid asking me out? Why shouldn't he ask me out? It's not like we're from two different species, just because he's on the other side of the desk, as it were. Of course, in my private life, I have a million reasons why I wouldn't want to go out with him and, in my professional life, I have very important boundaries that would prevent me from going out with him even if I wanted to. But as two people, spending time in the same space, knowing the same people, sharing some little bit of life, it makes sense that we would sometimes see each other as people and not just as the roles we're filling in the moment. It would make sense that the drunk kid might see me as someone to ask out, or that I might see another client as someone fun to play cards with. Boundaries are necessary in this kind of job, to protect both staff and clients, but sometimes it's more humane to at least look beyond the roles of "staff" and "clients," while not aboloshing them, to see and acknowledge the actual real, normal people who exist underneath.

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