These encounters are full-to-the-brim with subtleties related to affect, presentation, nonverbal and paraverbal communications, and vibes that are hard to translate from brief but profoundly intimate face-to-face encounters to words that are written on a computer and read on a screen. I’m attempting to engage in this act of translation because so much of the heart-work and life-affirming and -transforming interactions we have occurs at this level. Plus, I’m a big fan of developing an ongoing communal reflection on our praxis so I’ll do my best to contribute to that here.
First Encounter
During my regular outreach rounds last summer, I noticed a new and boisterous young man on the block. Often shirtless and followed by a posse of other young men, he had the kind of body a fellow gets after spending a couple of years in federal prison and he had the tattoos to match. He was clearly the leader of his group and he exuded strength and charm. I had the impression that he and his crew were out to make a lot of money the way that criminalized people who are bursting with life but denied the same opportunities as middle-or-upper class folks seek to make a lot of money (see Sayak Valencia’s Gore Capitalism for more on that).
There are many ways in which an outreach worker such as myself can go about trying to build a relationship with someone like this young man. In my opinion, a lot of workers are over-eager to serve and impress a man like this. He’s got danger vibes, he’s handsome, he’s cool, he’s charming and a natural leader and, like the fellows in his crew, young, impressionable workers feel kinda badass simply because they associate themselves with him (and, given the rate at which social services chew up, exploit, overwork, underpay, and then abandon their workers, most outreach workers are young and impressionable). So, workers rush to offer various supports to a fellow like this. They fawn a little bit over him, and quickly become a means to an end. When you adopt a “get rich or die trying” mentality (as people at all levels of society do, it’s just more explicit in some subcultures), people easily become means to ends. In this way, relationships between workers and the people they support become almost entirely utilitarian—the workers enter stats into databases to guarantee that their funding continues and the young man and his crew go to workers and say what one notoriously violent pimp said to me when I first approached him: “Why don’t you tell me what you can do for me.”
(The pimp was shirtless along with two other fellows in his crew, and they were jacked and covered in gang tats, and I had engaged this man and his crew because they were trying to take women from a safe place and traffic them and it was up to me to make that not happen and so, sniffing the air, I said, “well, based on what I’m smelling, I could get you some deodorant” and I knew that I was either gonna get my teeth knocked the fuck out or we were gonna have a good relationship and everything stood still and the pimp and his crew froze and then he laughed and they laughed and we had instant camaraderie and I worked things out so that they left that safe place and the women there alone and I was greatly relieved and this speaks to all the subtleties I mentioned at the outset and, please, kids, don’t try this at home but know that approaching potentially dangerous situations from unexpected angles can be one of the best ways of entirely shifting the energy in an encounter.)
So, when I saw this young man and his crew show up on the block, I played the long game. I figured we’d meet soon enough. I knew that they had seen me and they knew that I had seen them but I quietly went about my business and they loudly went about theirs and that was that. This approach shifted the perspective that the young man and his crew first took in relation to me. Instead of being like every other keen, do-gooder worker who is quickly acknowledged, used, and then forgotten (which, let me be clear, is how most of us relate to most other people in most shared spaces), I become an object of curiosity. Curiosity is a good place to begin any relationship.
Sure enough, after a few weeks, I was visiting with some folks behind the social housing building across from the cop shop (a woman was there who was five months pregnant and she had no housing or shelter and had been notified that social workers would take her baby away from her as soon as the baby was born—so I was chatting with her and her partner to figure out what I might be able to do to assist them, as well as casually shooting the shit with a few old-timers who were self-medicating there). The boisterous (and still shirtless) young man and a few of his fellows came rolling through and he stopped to talk with me.
Him: “You’re helping people, eh?”
Me, shrugging: “I do what I can.”
Him: “Nah, I’ve seen you around; I know you. You help people.”
He pauses and I don’t say anything and then he says this: “You’re out here helping people and I’m out here hurting people.” And then he laughs. It’s a short laugh but it’s a complicated laugh. It says a lot. There’s grief in it and some bitterness at the cruelty and absurdity of life and the circumstances that have brought us to where we are and there’s defiance but the defiance is mixed with hopelessness and it says:
I am alive, I am alive, and I am stuck, and I want to live and I hate myself, and it’s not my fault and it’s all mu fault and I don’t know maybe it is or isn’t but, still, it’s unfair, and I am alive, and I will love myself and choose myself, and I want so badly to live a full life and I’m not, even though I’m young and bursting with life, and I want something other than all of this but this is all I’ve got.
And I see that he is about to walk away grieving and I do not want him to grieve and I say to him:
“We’re like the yin and yang, man.”
And I see that this comment lands in his heart, which cracked when he paused and spoke and laughed. Because the yin and yang belong together and there is light and there is dark and they are two sides of the same thing and neither one is better than the other, they just are and they are one, and while he was imagining an impossibly large divide between him and I, I collapsed the gap and said, in one small comment, “no, you and I are essentially the same and you’re no more terrible than me for what you do and I’m no better than you for what I do.”
And he laughed again, only this time it was a surprised laugh, a laugh that expressed an unlooked for and unanticipated experience of comfort, and he repeated my words because I could tell he liked them so much and wanted to hear them again, and then he went on his way and I went back to the conversations I was having. But in that brief encounter I knew we had established an entirely different kind of relationship than the one he had expected to find. Instead of being “the social worker” and “the drug dealer,” or “the worker” and “the client,” or “the good guy” and “the bad guy,” we were now what we truly already always had been—brothers.
Second Encounter
Fast forward to the end of autumn. I am taking outreach lunches in a wagon around the downtown core. I circle the mostly abandoned strip mall that houses the Canadian Army recruitment centre (the Army always shows up in impoverished communities to offer people a way out of a life that mainstream society tells them is both materially and morally deficient). I see a couple of thirty-something men who appear to be sleeping rough (i.e., homeless and unsheltered) hunkered down in a doorway trying to organize their few belongings while a young, tall, and very muscular security guard stands in front of them with his (very large) arms crossed over his chest. Ignoring the guard, I approach the men and ask them if they would like some bag lunches. “Oh, man,” they respond, “yes, please, we’re so hungry.” I can tell from their facial expressions and tone that, shit, these guys really are very hungry and probably don’t know where they can go to eat. While I am getting their lunches from my wagon, I give them a really quick run down of a few places they can go for meals, but I also commiserate with them and with my non- and paraverbals communicate to them that, fuck, it’s really shitty and hard to go through what they are going through and, fuck, they don’t deserve any of it and, fuck, while I may only be able to give you lunches today, just know that I see you, I hear you, the way you are being treated is wrong, and, even though we’ve just met for the first time, there is a place in my heart for you.
During this actually rather brief exchange I have been deliberately ignoring the security guard but I’ve been very aware of him watching me and assessing me (giving off the appearance of ignoring people while simultaneously observing them is a useful life skill in a lot of different environments). I’m glad my approach made him pause enough to let me do my thing but I can tell he has been assessing me to see if I’m a risk or if I’ll get into a confrontation with him or what. He seems to also be listening closely to the heart-words I both give and receive with the fellows in the doorway and so, as I’m pulling out the lunches in the wagon, I turn to him and say:
How about you? You’re a young man and you’re carrying around all those giant muscles—maybe you’ve worked up an appetite? Would you like a lunch? Salami or Egg salad?
And in that moment, because of his openness to listening, the gap between all of us is collapsed and we are all just people with simple human needs—like the need for food and the need to both give and receive care—and the security guard loses his filters and his heart cracks open, too, and he says:
“Oh, I’m not hungry. I haven’t really done all that much today. I’m just… [pause] …kicking out hungry people.”
And I say: “Oof. Man, that’s really shitty.”
And I say that in a way that communicates that is shitty for all of us. For the men in the doorway, for him, for me, and for the whole world we live in where that sort of thing happens in countless doorways every day. It’s an observation of something we all know is shitty and, in this interaction, all acknowledge as shitty.
The security guard pauses again and kind of looks into the middle distance, goes somewhere inside of himself for a few seconds but also an eternity, and then he says to nobody:
“I’m a terrible person.”
And he turns and walks away grieving. And I don’t stop him and I don’t comfort him. And the men in the doorway don’t laugh or gloat or rejoice. Instead, they open their lunches and begin to eat. We are people going through it and bearing witness to others who are also going through it. And nobody wants to hurt anybody else. And so, in that moment, nobody did.