I have not found that book learning and on-the-job-training gave me the tools I needed to understand and help people. Instead I have had to use experience, curiosity, and following my own spirit or moral compass. Now, I think this is largely because I didn’t understand the realities of black market America with compassion. Without understanding the rules, the pros the cons and the oppression that results from the crime industry it can be hard to provide the necessary empathy and validation to establish connection and be supportive. Because I didn’t get that training in school, I have had to undergo a journey to learn to be helpful.

As I have come to see it, in poorer communities the impact of black market America functions as an iron curtain that some earnest people who enter the field are not formally trained to understand or believe. It’s true that social workers who come from these communities may recognize black market realities quicker than I have. Indeed, I can recall co-workers who really helped me understand things along the way. On the other hand, perhaps it just takes a lot of time to understand streets and crime well enough to see how it shows up in peoples’ behavior and the decisions they make. Indeed, navigating this world in poverty and without financial aid is not an easy thing to do.

Still, many social workers like me stay encapsulated in their world view for extended periods of time. While some of us are only there to do our training in poor communities, many of us stay in them with our salaries and the discourse of our profession, things that keep many of us insulated.

What School Didn’t Teach Me:

In school, I took sociology and counseling psychology. I learned a lot about injustice in third world countries and wealth-fare (tax breaks for the rich,) but this did not prepare me to understand the affects of corruption and crime on our society’s most vulnerable individuals, the homeless, protective custody parolees, and the people with mental health challenges like addiction and schizophrenia.

I have generally been considered a conscientious social worker performing high in stats and looking good on paper. But learning how to get street smart and overcome the limits of my own world view has taken upper-middle class me a long time. I have come to believe that crime is a legitimate industry in this country that is vital to redistributing the wealth. It plays a bigger part in governing vulnerable individuals than social workers who do not understand it can. And yet vulnerable people are often victimized by its machine and need to express themselves and need support to help them find the freedom they may seek.

On the Ground Lessons in Black Market America:

About six years into my career, I moved and took a job in a Seattle, Section 8 Housing Authority Complex. It was a position that no one else would take. I did so brashly. When I found out my boss who I had witnessed expel a naive client who was unwittingly letting a boyfriend deal drugs out of her apartment, had a drug problem herself, I stopped heeding her.

The needle and pipe drug trades were visible throughout the housing complex just by taking a flight of stairs. The management had records on their residents that were off limits to us. I didn’t really understand that my desire to help the poor mentally disturbed individuals instead of the dealers and thugs made me a liability to the powers that be who hired me.

I didn’t disapprove of the residents who became addicts. However, as I started to see that the focus of the authority management, the police and the power brokers were not utilizing their resources on safety, I started to become protective. I didn’t initially realize that by disapproving of the violence and corruption that come with the drug trades, that I was essentially putting myself at odds with the powers that be. I was becoming a vigilante.

Who Was I and Why Was I in this Situation?

Back in college, I had taken up residence in the ghetto community that surrounded the commuter university I attended. I had caught a case of male anorexia in the private prep school I attended and wanted to evade the people who tormented me, like my parents who were on the faculty. I worked and studied and was so isolated to have not attended a single college party.

I secretly believed that the suburban social working professionals that I interviewed for school projects were burned out cogs in a machine. These social workers I interviewed didn’t seem to understand or help the people I worked beside in the local businesses that paid under-the-table wages. I believed, I’d learned more from a three-minute KRS-One lecture blaring out of the radio in the deli I worked for, than I did from those interviews.

But money was tight, I needed a job, and I was after all a high performing student with a stellar work ethic. When my isolated life style resulted in a second mental health crisis, the therapist I found was always directing me to go on social security. I found myself locked up for a month and started on a high level of medication cocktails that catapulted me over the barrier I was facing. Finally, I accepted a role as a social worker.

Instead, of social security, I got a master’s level job and started a master’s program. I did eventually excel on the job, graduated and got promoted to the highest level before going into management. I knew how to work with people and had satisfied customers. Still, I used significant clinical barrier between the people I worked with and my own state of mental health. I really did not relate to them or use my lived experience to be helpful.

Learning My Lesson:

Back at the section 8 authority compound, one resident, who had proved to be an accurate intelligence source, told me that he admired my ways, but had heard word that I might become a resident myself one day and he feared that for me.

Now, the story is very complicated, but when I did face specific personal threats and fled for the Canadian border, the police did stop, separate me from my car and track me until I was admitted for three months into a state hospital in Montana.

Before I could get back into social work, I had to accept an arranged job at a suburban Italian Delicatessen. Coming out of a period of transience, I had to accept that my belongings were moved around in the apartment I could barely afford. I had to accept that my employment related mail was opened before I could get to it. I had to accept that I frequently ran into street people who suggested they worked for the CIA. And finally, I had to accept that I had to bike twenty miles a day to get to work and back. Finally, I went on medication and admitted that I was a schizophrenic. Not until I was able to make friends with the workers and bosses at the Italian Deli did I find myself granted the opportunity to go back to social work.

Lessons Learned:

What I have learned about being a social worker is that it is important to respect the crime industry and the limits of my own power. Within the section 8 complex there were likely informants and spies who were cutting deals ultimately to save lives even though lives were lost. Keeping the money flowing including that of my low wage pay check is always part of the game.

At one point, the newspaper reporter I was speaking to wanted to go undercover in the building. She did not understand that the whole power structure knew who she was and expressed anger at me for speaking to her before she even left the building.

One could argue that social workers do work for the system and are not paid to start social movements. When I was in college and judged the system in a negative light that kind of statement would have been very discouraging to me. But I have found that the social worker who is committed can understand all the mechanisms of injustice and go as far as they can to stretch against the seemingly stagnant system they work for and help their individual clients find the freedom that they seek.

I got a lot of help from reading books like Patrick McDonald’s Memoir on growing up in South Boston, All Souls Day. I found this book taught me a lot about how gangsterism affects impoverished families.

Social workers should not, in my opinion, take their privilege lightly. They should not presume that they could handle the lives their subjects are suffering through. Finding freedom often involves a die-hard belief in the impoverished citizen’s ability to find a role they feel passionately about.

I would not take back anything that happened to me. Social work is still good work. Don’t ever give up your sense of justice that brought you to it in the first place. But remember that people always have a right to move their lives in a healthier direction.

Patrick McDonald, All Souls Day: A Family Story from Southie, Beacon Press, 2007

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“Wow, I just took a shit and it was this big!” John Bulushi

I feel sorry for my English professor who wanted to put my essay up for an award! The glare I gave him and the lack of response: it was, at its best, very rude.

The fact is, I only learned it bothered him because my best friend who was fifteen years older than me got an invite to the professor’s house for dinner. My friend who had a lifetime of experience using and dealing drugs reported that the professor had called his cute, sleeping hound a beast repeatedly throughout the night and talked about how alcohol was his drug of choice while toasting his guest’s sobriety. However, my friend reported, when it came to me, the professor admitted that he just didn’t know what to say.

“I think I know what that kid’s problem is,” the professor had conceded.

I gave my favorite sociology professor the same look when he announced that my paper was one of the few 100% papers he’d ever given out.

Okay, so I am the sort who spends a lot of time trying to understand my own warped behavior. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I have taken to writing in the first place.

Ready to Break into the Social Media Market?

But, oh-me, oh-my, the sudden dilemmas of a writer like me who has squandered away his life, sitting on his work without sending it out to be published. What does it mean to suddenly be exposed to a social media market when you are just poking your head out after all these years?

Sure, I have a life-sustaining professional guise, but I have no kids, make no friends and tolerate no dinner parties. I have always worked more than full-time to stay out of the mental hospital and off the streets. I write to survive instead of dealing with my domestic responsibilities!

And suddenly I am looking out on a landscape that requires a blog and a brand. There is the implied presumption on the web that you have friends and loved ones who will become fans. Suddenly, I must make friends—lots of them—in order to sell them a book that took me seven years to write. Now I must write blogs that people want to read or there is no point. I wonder if write-to-live authors I love, like Salinger or Bukowski, would even be welcome anymore!

Voices Who Only Live-to-Write?

Maybe you’ve heard what I have: “most writers are voracious readers!” To me that sets up the expectation that writers are supposed to live to write! That’s what many of the publishing outlets want us to do. “Get to know our audience and then write for them,” they imply. Sometimes I wonder if the whole idea of journalism operates in this way. Outsiders go and learn about the lives of others, write, and so the public who has privilege can have their little tyrannical judgments validated.

My question: is when we live to write in this manner and then write to publish, what happens to the reality of the rest of us? How does the masses of stories that I hear at the urban psychiatric ward where I work become so invisible? How do the shootings in the inner-city pass on without being mourned by the mobs of traffic that siphon into the city to work?

I want to write-to-live. I want to extend my truth. I am a psychotherapist who works in the inner-city. Why can’t I write about that? In eeking out an existence, I want to strengthen what I experience and live a truer life.

Does the social media era support the practice of just telling people more of what they want to hear? Is it all only about reading the kinds of facts that make us feel good about ourselves?

Writing-to-Live:

When I think about how I discovered writing in high school. it was not about loving books and reading. I loved music, not books. I had no rhythm on the guitar, loved the words I was singing, and had to write a lot a lot of papers to graduate. Somehow, I tired of grading on people’s ears and found the art of word expression satisfying.

I particularly started to work on writing once I suspected that my mother who was on the faculty of our private school, outed all my inpatient antics to her faculty friends. When I finally got discharged from hospitals for male anorexia, it had seemed that news had spread like wildfire straight back to my bully peers. Now the truth about me was distorted, potentially distorted by my parents. Since this was my reality, I wrote creatively to own my life.

Writing became a reason to keep on living. I was at the word processor an awful lot.

I returned to school living at a friend’s house and now my greatest efforts did not even bring me the grades I wanted let alone the awards that I fantasized about. In fact my best essay was turned into the school psychologist and I was formally confronted. I saw it as them threatening to kick me out of school. I still sent the essay out to colleges. I got into some decent ones, but I didn’t want to enter more phony life where grapevines were lies. Instead, I would get together with an older woman and enter a commuter college in the inner-city.

It’s true, due to unrecognized ADD and dyslexia, teachers always found my spelling mistakes menacing. Perhaps they just presumed I wasn’t putting in the effort. Perhaps with my father as their manager and my mother as their reading specialist, no teacher ever knew what to do with me.

I did graduate cum laude, but I graduated believing the concept of grades was more political than based on merit. Research shows this to be a true presumption, but students aren’t supposed to think like that.

You to Go Fuck Yourself!

So clearly my biggest concern in attending college was to send almost all the people I knew the biggest, “fuck you,” I could muster. And, so, the fuck-the-awards, creative writer was born.

There I was three-years later at the kind of school that was not the type that drew out future academics or writers. The career development computer program I took recommended a career in law enforcement. I had too many neighborhood friends at the Korean Deli where I worked insulting the vice squad behind their backs to take the consideration very seriously. As per other students, most couldn’t relate to a clearly anorectic male who would go to no parties and drink no beer.

I’d lived in the library where I diligently outlined everything I read so I could pay attention to it.

I logged so many hours, reading just wasn’t something I was going to keep up with for fun. So much for being the voracious reader and writing about writings of others!

Supporting myself through a master’s program did not give me much time to read for pleasure either. I was faking my way through master’s level work on the social work job and remember looking at the full-time students who even had time to read the paper and thinking they were entitled. The locks to my car were broken and because I had no money or time to fix them, I just entered my car through the back and crawled my way up to the driver seat. I didn’t care what the full-time students said when they laughed and tried to insult me.

While I was, by no means the only one who worked my way through at the school I went to, I was the only one who entered my car in this manner. I missed graduation because I never did get the paperwork in on time.

So, when school was out, I was done with books. I returned to a creative poetry habit and kept my internal buzz alive; but couldn’t find anyone else’s work that I appreciated. I did occasionally frequent poetry readings; but couldn’t read my poetry without quivering.

“I think writing is good for you,” said my shrink of seven years when I brought up the issue, “but that’s it! You are always so disappointed when you share your work, I think there is no need for that.”

I often found my obsessive re-writing hard to stop.

Consider the Reader?

I know people are supposed to be humble about themselves and not bore the reader with irrelevant info. But I write to live. I write to share the truth about other people who are condemned and lied on. I started with an award-winning memoir; but blogging to get recognized in social media markets is a different pickle.

So, I am faced with the same questions we all face. Do I join writer’s groups and start sharing my work and getting feedback, so I can swap likes on Facebook to look popular and loved? Do I spend hours playing with social media, so others will read your posts? Do I start making friends with people who went to school at elite universities and have large twitter following so you can access their readers? Is this even possible when the very reason I write is because people have always rejected me! Is there really time for any of this when you work and commit to ten hours of writing a week.

So, here I am writing another essay for an audience of people who I don’t even know to be out there for sure on social media.

I’ll keep giving myself assignments to try to get published somewhere besides just my blog. I think an audience of working people exists out there, who might respond to my efforts to relate the things I observe. I spend my time living and that’s what I write about. But I guess I can keep going with my write-to-live attitude on social media till I find people who can relate. Nobody’s stopping me.

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