Done Adulting Vol. 1 Ch. 60 (Patreon)

“If it’s alright with you, I want to start with before you came here. That will help me understand your feelings about this world,” Mary said. She sat with tablet and stylus in hand. She was older than Rebecca, with rectangle glasses and the soft skin of a woman on the far side of middle age. Her voice to this point had been kind but business-like. She was practiced in the art of her science, at making her patients know what she needed from them and then gently coaxing it out.

Jamie lay on his back against the arm of the sofa, staring at the door to the waiting area. He could stare at the door silently for as long as she could stare at him over her tablet, or he could cooperate and make this as painless as possible. One thing he was determined to do was not to cry. Enough of that. Too many tears shed during and after a life that was over for him now, or at least behind a curtain for good.

“I know what you did for a living. What did you for fun?”

“For fun? I was sort of active when I wanted to be … I went to the beach a lot to swim … I went to the gym sometimes, when I cared to … I’d get into it for a few months and burn out on it and stop. I liked to tell people I was a hiker, but that was sporadic; I’d go months without hiking … I watched a lot of TV, binged a lot of the same shows over and over, just to have the background noise sometimes … I read sometimes, but in the last few years I mostly read news; my attention span wasn’t what it used to be, and I’d have a hard time staying committed to a book, even one I liked … I can’t remember the last piece of fiction I read … I always wanted to do something creative like sing or play an instrument or paint or something, but it never seemed like I had time, or if I did that it would be too hard; ya know, like I wouldn’t be good at it right away, of course, and I’d get frustrated.”

“Nobody’s good at anything right away, right?”

“No, course not. Just, when you’re doing something for fun … it’s hard to have fun doing something you suck at.”

“Do you ever draw or color now?”

“Yeah. In a coloring book. Nothing original.”

“You read a lot.”

“I do. We don’t watch much TV at home, so I read a lot.”

“What do you read?”

“I guess you’d call it young adult fiction.”

“No regular fiction?”

“Not yet.”

“No nonfiction or news?”

“No.”

“So the average workday a year ago. What was your evening like?”

“I left work around 5:30 or 6:00. If I was staying fit at the time, I’d go to the gym and get home around 7:30 or 8. If I wasn’t, then I’d be home by 6:15 or 6:45 and have dinner and watch Netflix and surf on my computer. Sometimes I’d play video games, if there was one I liked playing that was new out; I was picky about which games I bought.”

“And on the weekends?”

Jamie shrugged. “A long version of my weekday evenings. I’d usually get up and take a hot bath and read for longer than I meant to. Go run any errands. Go to the gym or beach, maybe have lunch or dinner out. A lot of times, though, well, really, I guess most of the time, I’d stay home all day. I‘d always make plans to go do something like hike or go swimming and then not go. And I’d feel guilty about that, felt like I was missing out on things, wasting my days.” He nodded his head toward his left shoulder in another shrug. “Eventually I told myself that it was my free time and that if I was doing that I wanted to in the moment then it wasn’t a waste of time.”

“You like hiking and swimming and things like that?”

“Yes.”

“And you’d skip them anyway sometimes. Did you feel like you weren’t taking pleasure in the things you liked anymore?”

Jamie knew what she was getting at: anhedonia. “Yes. And yes, I was being treated for depression.”

“Do you feel depressed now?”

“Well … I’m not sure. Sometimes. If I’m busy or with someone, then no.”

“When you were describing your free time, you didn’t mention hanging out with friends.”

“Didn’t have any.”

“None?”

“I had long-distance friends I lost touch with. I had work friends, but I never asked them to do anything outside the office, and they never asked me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess maybe we saw enough of each other during the day, or else we all just wanted to draw a line between work and home … I always thought it would be kind of awkward to ask, because you know they’re going to say yes just out of collegial courtesy … and then what if you found out something about the other you didn’t like and had to see that person all the time and act normal? Or if it just turned out you didn’t like them as a friend or person?”

“Did you have a hard time making friends, or did you not try, or both?”

“Both. I’m bad at social situations most of the time. Or at least think I am and then overanalyze everything. Takes all the fun out of it … and how do you try anyway? Growing up, all your friendships are organic, and then that stops unless you do make friend-friends with your coworkers. Trying to make friends in some random or even purposeful way seemed like too much work.”

Mary paused to take more notes before moving on. “About work. Tell me more about what you did.”

Jamie took a deep breath. They made it awful hard to put it behind him. Jamie figured his ability to be happy at times over the past weeks was precisely because he was too busy with other things to think back on it. What was wrong with that strategy? It was essentially what he intended when he left, to be absorbed in a new life. “I was a social worker. I mostly worked with kids.”

“Doing what?”

“Child welfare.”

“What’s that?”

“I think you know.”

“Yeah, but I want to hear what you did, specifically.”

“A relative, a neighbor, a teacher, a friend’s parent, a cop, a doctor, a priest – whomever – reports a concern about a child being neglected or abused or just in a bad situation – that happens most often, whole family is in a bad situation – and I’d check it out. Go through the guidelines, make an assessment, and if I find the report substantiated, then I try to fix the problem.”

“How?”

“Depends on what the problem is. Remove them from the family, or sometimes keep certain family members away. Get the family counseling or other services. Try to get them better housing, get on food assistance, get them medical care, get them job counseling. Work with the school to make sure the kid’s getting what he needs. Or work with the police to keep the kid out of trouble, or more often to get him out of trouble. If I do have to separate them from their family, try to place them with other relatives, or a foster parent, or as a last resort, a group home.” Group homes: Jamie shook his head. “Basically whatever I can do to make sure the kid is healthy, safe, and on a path that doesn’t lead to crime, addiction, prison or death.”

“Do you realize you just said all that in the present tense?” Jamie hadn’t.

“No … I see your point.”

“I saw in your file that your job had a lot to do with why you decided to come here. Can you tell me more about that?”

This time Jamie didn’t respond right away. It always came back to this. Well, fine, Jamie thought, out with it. “I got tired of failing at my job and seeing people I was responsible for get hurt. Even when I got a kid out of bad situation, I didn’t get ‘em far. They’re still poor and still stuck in a high-crime neighborhood and still having to choose between life, if they’re lucky, driving a shuttle at the airport or pushing a broom, or crime. And that’s if they even get that far.

“I had a client who was shot on the street walking home; someone killed him to steal his cell phone. I had a kid die of an asthma attack because his parents couldn’t afford an inhaler after they got kicked off welfare and it took too long for the ambulance to get there. I had one of my clients murder another of my clients over an argument, and they were actually friends.

“I don’t even know how many ended up in jail or dead after they aged out. I had girls who were prostituting themselves for drugs. I had 12-year-old alcoholics. I had pregnant teens. Every which kind of mental illness you can think of compounded by poverty and every other problem they had. Kids who the court returned to their parents only for the parents to beat on them some more or worse. Kids going to jail. Kids getting beaten by the cops or a rival gang. Kids suspended or expelled from school for having a weapon or drugs, and probably one out of every three of those, it was the parent who gave it to them.”

Jamie took a breath and slowed down, thinking back on all of it. His eyes fell, and he breathed slowly. “Those were just the worst parts. Ya know, like they stand out but they were rare. Those were … god, they were so fucking hard, but it was the shit that passed for good that … that’s what burned me out. All the work I’d do getting a kid in a good situation, making sure he had what needed, that he stayed on the right path – success was just not falling into gang life or getting arrested or getting killed. Success was just graduating high school, even then not always, and then getting a job. Any job. Burger flipper, floor sweeper, bus driver, ticket taker, luggage handler, concessionaire at the ballpark. Success was getting them into a life of sustainable poverty or near-poverty. That’s what’s realistically open to most poor kids, and it’s just accepted, like poverty is a birth defect …

“There’s hardly any winning. I had less than ten percent of my kids go to any kind of post-secondary education. Trade school, community college, college. Most of them didn’t make it through their first year. Students with A’s in the shit schools they came from, and not at all prepared for actual learning.

“Best outcome was the military, provided they didn’t get wounded or killed. What kind of society is that? Having to choose between the street, a life of working your ass off and still being poor, or maybe getting killed. Don’t even list climbing into the middle class as an option; might as well be a myth for how often it actually happens. Yeah, some, but not nearly as many as don’t.

“And hardly anyone gives a damn. Social workers, teachers. Most everyone else ignores it; even if they acknowledge it exists, they do nothing or next to nothing to change it. And worse, half of them that know it blame the kids, say they should work harder, say the parents should get off welfare, and just to help, we’ll take welfare away. Plunge the kid deeper into poverty just because they don’t like that the adult is also getting welfare. And then they want to throw the key away when a kid starts stealing or dealing, like they wouldn’t do the same fucking thing if they grew up in those environments and with those same chances in life.”

Jamie rubbed his face and eyes. “So I couldn’t take it anymore. Failing even when I succeeded, and watching all that happen again and again. … You become a party to it, when you make yourself a part of a broken system. Even with the best intentions and all the hard work and even if you’re better at it than most … It ends up being your fault too.” Jamie sat there silent.

“Some people would call you a hero for trying,” Mary ventured.

With his eyes closed and jaw tight, Jamie answered, “Do you have any idea what a shit feeling it is to be called that when you failed and the consequence for that failure is someone gets hurt or hurt themselves or just ends up caught in another cycle of generational poverty and all the shit that comes with it?”

Mary hadn’t thought of that. People bandied the word around Itali, too. She never considered that being called a hero could make someone feel worse. “So why didn’t you just walk away and stay in that world?”

“Couldn’t. I couldn’t be so close to it, literally, and stay away. Couldn’t live with myself if I became one of the people who just ignore it. Hard enough failing all my kids and abandoning them. I … I needed distance, I guess … and a life so different it doesn’t seem … doesn’t seem like I’m surrounded by it. I know it’s bullshit, but … I guess I feel like my kids are not in this world, therefore I’m not ignoring them. I know that’s wrong. I know they still exist.”

“Jamie, why was all of this your responsibility to fix?”

“Because I took the job … No, because if a few people hadn’t stepped up for me, I would have ended up like most of my kids. I tried to pay it forward. I took the job.”

“Fair enough. But why is it you take it so personally? Obviously not all of your colleagues feel like they’ve failed because they couldn’t fix everything … and surely some left without feeling like they’d abandoned anyone. Why isn’t that you?”

“Different perspectives.”

“Because you were a foster kid?”

“That and just … they can forgive themselves for their failure … and that’s assuming they even think it’s their failure.”

“You said yourself these problems are systemic, in so many words. Why is it the individual social worker who needs forgiveness? Or at least, why do you think you do?”

Jamie didn’t have a ready reply. He didn’t even have a thought process for a reply. He just lay there with his mind clear, his eye not focused on anything. No awkward silence was going to give him an answer, nor could he reason one out. He knew it wasn’t reasonable; he felt that way nonetheless. There’s no telling yourself not to feel a certain way. You may get over the feeling, or the feeling can be replaced by another, but you can’t reason your way out of a feeling. That’s why they call it a feeling and not an opinion. Sometimes, though, if you wait patiently, the clarity you need just comes on its own, and the thoughts you couldn’t express on purpose express themselves.

Jamie started talking again without putting much deliberate thought into his words. They just came. “You have violent people here?”

“Of course.”

“We did, too. Always something in the news, no matter where you live, right? Some guy murders someone over a drug debt. I can forgive him; maybe he goes to prison, maybe he doesn’t, but I can forgive him because I don’t think he’s necessarily an evil person or beyond redemption. Does that make sense?”

“I think so.”

“But someone … hurts someone defenseless, hurts his girlfriend, someone …” He swallowed hard. “Hurts a kid. I can’t …” His eyes flashed, and he choked on the very thought. “I can’t forgive that person. Lot of reasons other than evil someone does that. Doesn’t matter. I can’t forgive it. I don’t want to. Maybe that person is beyond redemption or not …” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. He doesn’t deserve a chance at redemption. Least, I won’t give it to him …” Jamie’s forehead knotted and his lips grew thin; his eyes were looking somewhere not in the room. “Fuck him.” He spat the words out.

“Jamie, did someone hurt you, when you were young?”

“… Sometimes.”

“Do you think that’s why you feel so strongly about it?”

Jamie didn’t hesitate. “Nope. I forgave those people. They … they weren’t worth hating. They don’t get to have me spend the energy on them that it takes to hate.”

“Why then?”

“Because … I forgave the people who hurt me because that’s what was best for me. I even meant it, sometimes. But what’s best for these kids, my kids … what’s best for them is that I hate those … that I hate those people, so there’s no mistaking whose side I’m on … and so I fight for my kids with everything. No sympathy. Empathy maybe, but no sympathy, not for those kinds of people.”

“And did you? Fight for them?”

Jamie exhaled as tears came to his eyes. “Fuck yeah, I did. For all of ‘em. Not just the ones who were being hurt but all of ‘em, the ones who needed a little help and the ones who needed saving, even from themselves. Fought like my own army; at least, I tried to.”

“And yet you feel guilty.”

“I didn’t always win, did I? I don’t even think I won half … The abuse cases were easy by comparison; not always easy to prove, but if you did, you could lock those people up. It’s the other ones. Neglect cases where the parent can barely take of themselves; that’s not a monster, just a pity case … Kids getting into trouble; kids who are hungry every day; kids getting pulled into gangs; kids whose only problem is they’re poor or live in the wrong neighborhood; selling drugs, taking drug, drinking; violence. Trying to save ‘em before they get hutt or end up in jail. And so many of those kids … Five; saving five might as well be a million. Like trying to hold back five oceans that are gonna crash on these kids and there’s just one of me.”

“Doesn’t trying count for something?”

“How much difference is there between someone who hurts a kid and someone who fails to protect a kid? Whether he tried or not? … You fail; it enable all the other shit that comes at the kid, whether it’s the abusive parent or the poverty that’s gonna swallow her like it swallowed her parents. Kid still gets hurt. Kid still gets lost in the shuffle. You tell them they can count on you … when it turns out you can’t, that hurts them, too … I hurt them, too … and then I left and came here, even after telling … I don’t know how many, but telling them I was always going to be there. So I guess that makes me just the latest person to lie to them and abandon them. Maybe; I don’t know. I’m so tired of … I’m just got so tired.”

Mary looked down at Jamie. He had that thousand-yard stare; she wondered what he was seeing right then. Maybe nothing. Jamie was case-reportable, she thought, easily no other little like him and with his experiences and issues anywhere in Itali. Others had other kinds of suffering. The circumstances behind his arrival and his decision to not be regressed or even have some memories removed just made Jamie unique. “Okay. I think that’s enough for today, unless there’s something else you want to talk about.”

Jamie shook his head. He didn’t have more to say that day.

“Do you want to take a minute, or …”

“No, I’m good.” He sounded like he meant it too. Calm, like he hadn’t just recited all the very worst feelings he’d ever had.

It’s scarier when someone with that much pain is calm. You never know how close to an edge they are or how they might let those emotions out.

“Okay.” Mary stood, and Jamie stood after her. “I’m going to ask you to wait in the waiting area while I talk to Amanda and your mom. Okay?”

Jamie just nodded and opened the door, walking into the outer room. Amanda and Becky stood and smiled gently.

“How’d it go?”

“Fine. Your turn, I guess,” Jamie responded with a simple smile, as though he didn’t take it all that seriously, that learning to live with it all was his best chance, so why not talk about it? And so why take talking about it all that seriously?

Mary said, “Jamie is going to wait out here, if that’s alright with you, while we talk now.”

When they were seated on either side of her desk, Mary put on her professional smile and deliberately made herself sound upbeat to start the conversation. “That is one complicated little you guys got there.”

“Ya think,” Amanda joked.

Mary chuckled. “One of you is rubbing off on the other. Jamie has some wonderful qualities, and I’m sure you’ve noticed them. He’s passionate. He’s empathetic. He’s humble. He doesn’t judge people too harshly. He has a strong moral code. Those are all such great things, things that should be encouraged. Where he seems to be running into trouble is believing it’s his responsibility to fix things he couldn’t possibly fix. He sets himself up for failure in that way. It’s a collision of all those good qualities taken to an extreme and then not applied to himself.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Rebecca replied.

“Jamie has a lot of empathy, except for himself. He doesn’t judge people harshly, but he judges himself harshly, and by standards no one could meet and no one would reasonably hold someone else to. That strong moral code and his passion are partly why. He sees a problem, he believes he must fix it, and whether it’s fixable doesn’t matter to him. He fixes it or he doesn’t, and because the problems he was engaged in where he comes from are so big, there was virtually no way for him to walk away feeling like he fixed anything, even when he succeeded by the standards of his profession. Does that make more sense?”

“Yes. We’ve known all along his work drove him here. That and his childhood,” Amanda said.

“So basically his whole life,” Becky frowned.

“And we know he wanted to leave there; he didn’t really want to come here, per se,” Amanda finished.

“In our calls, you said he has anger outbursts. What are those usually over?”

“People treating him like he’s regressed. Or just frustration boiling over, but that’s doesn’t happen as much as it did when he got here.”

“How does he feel afterward?”

“If it’s over someone treating him poorly, he stays mad about it. He’s getting better at controlling those outbursts and ignoring those people, and at not letting it get to him in the first place, but probably in more than half those cases he still gets pretty upset. When he just loses his temper, though, when he calms down he’s ashamed,” Becky answered,

Mary replied, “That makes sense based on what he just told me. He said he has a difficult time forgiving people who hurt those who can’t defend themselves, and that’s him now, defenseless. And realizing that’s him, being defenseless, like he was as a child, probably drives a lot of that frustration. And when he lets out those negative emotions, then he feels he’s in the wrong and has a hard time forgiving himself because that’s hard for him to do. The standard he sets for himself is too high,” Mary explained. She pondered silently for a moment.

She began again, “Bottom line is he’s angry at himself. He’s angry at others, but anger turned outward stays anger. Anger turned inward is depression.”

Becky was getting irritated, not at Mary but in feeling like they’d been going in circles ever since Amanda opened his file. “We’ve known that. It’s just … he’s such a sweet and kind person. I …” Rebecca put her forehead in her hand and her elbow on her knee, looking at the floor in front of her chair. “I don’t understand how he can be so angry with himself. He’s so … ” She trailed off with a sigh.

Amanda added, “And we don’t want to give you the wrong impression. He’s happy, at least on the outside, most of the time now. Things were harder at first, but he’s had very few outbursts since the first couple weeks; he tends to get more quiet and brooding than outwardly angry. He’s had, I don’t know, maybe two or three episodes where his frustration boiled over. I mean, is he making progress or not?”

Mary smiled to reassure them, “Absolutely he is. I suspect, though, that’s he’s making more progress in adjusting to his new environment – knowing what to expect and so not getting so frustrated in the first place, having fewer big emotions, and learning to control those big emotions he does have better. But I don’t think he’s making much progress with the issues that led him here.”

“Guilt, right,” Becky asked. “He feels guilty for having left those kids behind, but that doesn’t even make sense. He left because he felt guilty for leaving?”

Mary nodded in sympathy. “It’s a little more complex that guilt. He feels guilty because he let them down, both by not being able to solve their problems and now because he left. More problematic than the guilt over leaving, however, is that he sees letting someone down as being the same as hurting someone on purpose.

“That’s not uncommon in professions like his. It’s someone who empathizes too much with the people he needs to help; he loses the critical distance. There’s no way a person like him doesn’t burn out. What concerns me is how calm he is about it. That usually means someone has made a decision.”

Amanda spoke up, “He wasn’t calm about it when he got here. He was … he was a wreck. He didn’t just cry. I mean … he sobbed, full body, clinging to me, shaking all over. He still cries maybe kinda easily, even for a little … even compared to a regressed little. We had an incident a two nights ago where he got very upset over something and really broke down about it, but that was the first time in weeks. We thought he was getting better.”

“I think he’s learning to live with it,” Mary replied.

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“Yes. If he had done something wrong, by all means, learn to live with it. But he didn’t do anything wrong. If he continues thinking he did, it will hang over him forever, and he’ll probably never be happy with himself or fully embrace this or any life.”

“What do you think he decided,” Becky asked, her mind thinking of all the worst possible answers.

“That because he’s equivalent in his mind to the people who hurt kids on purpose, that he may not be redeemable, and that even if he is, he doesn’t deserve forgiveness.”

“How do we help him?”

“We have to teach him he’s not that person he’s afraid he is. By showing him all the good he does in the world. But he’ll only accept that if he’s trusts us enough to believe we’re not just saying it. Just saying it will make it worse.

“We have to show it, over and over, and he needs to see it from more than just the two of you. You guys are on the right track: if he can trust you enough to let himself depend on you for anything, he’ll trust you on this. That’s the hardest thing for him to trust others on. If we can get him to trust that he really is the sweet, kind person we know he is, then, maybe, we can prove to him one day that there’s nothing he needs to be forgiven for.”

Becky absorbed that and asked, “How do we show it?”

“Two ways. The first is praise. When he does something nice or kind or anything that shows what a good person he is, always call it out for him. To him, those are things he’s just supposed to do, so in his eyes, doing them doesn’t count. Make sure he recognizes when he’s being those things, because he doesn’t give himself credit for them.

“The second is love. If he knows how much everyone loves him, then he’ll start to understand that he’s worth loving and come to love himself. Every day, make sure he knows he’s loved, and by as many people as possible. A big, loving circle of people who care about him.”

That seemed too easy, or at least sounded like it. Mary saw that reaction and added, “And we’ll continue to work in here. This is where the heaviest emotional lifting will get done. He’s stuck in these negative feedback loops. We call them cognitive distortions. These are errors in his thinking: he sees what he thinks are negatives about himself – which really aren’t negatives at all – and his mind magnifies them and makes them even worse in his eyes. At the same time, he ignores the good things about himself. What he and I are going to work on, and what we’ll eventually need your help with too, is to break him out of those distorted thought patterns and replace them with positive patterns and coping skills.”

Becky sat back in her chair. Amanda glanced from her mom back to Mary and quipped, “So you’re saying this is gonna take a while.”