Progress on Book 3 / Scene: Dispute with my Case Worker
Hi! I've been churning away on my third book, the working title of which I've changed to Within the Box (previously: In the Box). Here's a scene I'm sharing, where I'm sitting down one-to-one with my assigned personal counselor Mark Raybourne.
The overall backdrop here is that this is a rehab facility; my status is voluntary; I went AWOL once, bored and less than thrilled with the place, and since then I've been barred from going outdoors for recreation, so to get exercise I've taken to making circuits of the long hallways of the institution, walking laps around the rectangle that they form in this sprawling facility.
-----
“Thanks for being flexible about the time”, Mark says. He had had something else going on that conflicted with our regular individual counseling session, so he’d asked if we could meet early afternoon. He knows my schedule, and it’s not like I was likely to have penciled in a dentist’s visit or a wine tasting, but nice of him to ask me instead of telling me.
“We need to talk”, he tells me. “About your excursions up and down the hall. It’s attracting a lot of attention.”
I nod. Yes, and?
“Most people aren’t comfortable in a social situation if everyone else thinks they’re behaving oddly. So it’s not just that you’re walking around and around like a robot, it’s also the fact that you don’t show any sign of recognizing how odd this looks to everyone else. A lot of people on the staff are saying this shows a worrisome lack of insight, and we’re all concerned that you’re in some type of emotional turmoil”.
“That’s interesting”, I reply. “My nursing instructor brought that up to me once. I had just had a patient die on me while I was away at lunch, and she had me clean him up for the family to come in and have a final visit. So I was still in the patient’s room when they all came trooping in, a minister with a Bible and three or four middle-aged people and an older woman with a cane. They didn’t speak to me, so I didn’t speak to them. And the minister said a prayer and we all stood there like that for awhile. My nursing instructor said they all kept looking over at me, wondering why I was there in the room, and she found it weird that I didn’t react to that at all. She said they clearly expected me to leave so the family could be with the man in privacy. But they were all standing between me and the door and it felt like it would be more disruptive to push past them, and I didn’t mind being there, he’d been my patient for all the good I’d done him, and it felt disrespectful to dash off like I have more important things to do than stand here honoring the dead. So, yeah, I can be pretty oblivious to being the focus of attention if nobody’s actually saying anything.”
“Doesn’t it occur to you that nobody else goes on a purposeless march and makes a spectacle of themself in the corridor? Everyone here is trying to get better. Healthier. Nobody wants to look like they’re having some kind of breakdown! So either you really are experiencing a breakdown or there’s something fundamentally wrong, that you don’t care how people perceive you!”
“I’ve been blocked from going out for recreation. I was already not getting enough exercise, so if the hospital’s going to keep me indoors, I’m going to get my recreation this way. Simple as that. If nobody’s going to bother to just ask me why I’m doing it, it must not matter much to them.”
“Well, people are usually reluctant to point out that someone’s behaving strangely. They don’t want to embarrass the other person”.
“I haven’t found that to be true. All my life people have made a point of coming up to me and telling me I’m strange.”
“I was hoping you’d give some more thought to it maybe not being in your best interests to not care what other people think about you. I spoke to you about this just the other day. Clearly, it didn’t seem to have any effect, because next thing I know, you’re out here pretending you’re a wind-up toy instead of a human being!”
“I actually have been giving it quite a bit of thought. It’s an interesting topic. What you need to realize is that I’ve spent a lifetime having people react to me as if I’m weird. They mostly weren’t very nice about it, and mocked me and made fun of me and called me names. I learned not to care because how else would you keep them from getting to you? I was never going to blend in.”
I pause for a moment, reminded of a line of thought I’d pursued once or twice before. “That was less true for my sister. Jan didn’t easily fit in everywhere. Whenever we moved, or changed school systems, I think she had to work at it to make new friends, get people to accept her, avoid being the kid that other people leave out or talk about and make fun of. I think she put some effort into tucking in any odd corners so people couldn’t see. Popularity was important to her; I don’t mean she was super popular, most popular girl in the class or anything, but popular enough. But that wasn’t an option for me. I wasn’t a kid who was seen as having something about them that was a little different. I was the kid that everyone in the school heard about from the other kids before they ever saw me. I had a reputation that had stuff that people made up about me added to what was already there, and being stared at was not something I was going to be able to avoid. I remember kids from other classrooms bringing their friends with them to point me out through the open classroom door, you know, ‘See, over there, that’s him’. So I have a lifetime of training that’s made it pretty much invisible to me. That means even if I agree with you, which I partly do, by the way, that it probably costs me certain things, that’s like saying ‘Gee, if you’re moving to Spain, you’d be better off if you spoke Spanish instead of English’, you can say it and it may be true but you don’t just decide to switch languages and the next day you’re speaking Spanish. Just because you don’t notice any difference in my behavior doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about what you said”.
“What does speaking Spanish have to do with walking around and around and around in the hallway?”
I sigh.
-----
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
The overall backdrop here is that this is a rehab facility; my status is voluntary; I went AWOL once, bored and less than thrilled with the place, and since then I've been barred from going outdoors for recreation, so to get exercise I've taken to making circuits of the long hallways of the institution, walking laps around the rectangle that they form in this sprawling facility.
-----
“Thanks for being flexible about the time”, Mark says. He had had something else going on that conflicted with our regular individual counseling session, so he’d asked if we could meet early afternoon. He knows my schedule, and it’s not like I was likely to have penciled in a dentist’s visit or a wine tasting, but nice of him to ask me instead of telling me.
“We need to talk”, he tells me. “About your excursions up and down the hall. It’s attracting a lot of attention.”
I nod. Yes, and?
“Most people aren’t comfortable in a social situation if everyone else thinks they’re behaving oddly. So it’s not just that you’re walking around and around like a robot, it’s also the fact that you don’t show any sign of recognizing how odd this looks to everyone else. A lot of people on the staff are saying this shows a worrisome lack of insight, and we’re all concerned that you’re in some type of emotional turmoil”.
“That’s interesting”, I reply. “My nursing instructor brought that up to me once. I had just had a patient die on me while I was away at lunch, and she had me clean him up for the family to come in and have a final visit. So I was still in the patient’s room when they all came trooping in, a minister with a Bible and three or four middle-aged people and an older woman with a cane. They didn’t speak to me, so I didn’t speak to them. And the minister said a prayer and we all stood there like that for awhile. My nursing instructor said they all kept looking over at me, wondering why I was there in the room, and she found it weird that I didn’t react to that at all. She said they clearly expected me to leave so the family could be with the man in privacy. But they were all standing between me and the door and it felt like it would be more disruptive to push past them, and I didn’t mind being there, he’d been my patient for all the good I’d done him, and it felt disrespectful to dash off like I have more important things to do than stand here honoring the dead. So, yeah, I can be pretty oblivious to being the focus of attention if nobody’s actually saying anything.”
“Doesn’t it occur to you that nobody else goes on a purposeless march and makes a spectacle of themself in the corridor? Everyone here is trying to get better. Healthier. Nobody wants to look like they’re having some kind of breakdown! So either you really are experiencing a breakdown or there’s something fundamentally wrong, that you don’t care how people perceive you!”
“I’ve been blocked from going out for recreation. I was already not getting enough exercise, so if the hospital’s going to keep me indoors, I’m going to get my recreation this way. Simple as that. If nobody’s going to bother to just ask me why I’m doing it, it must not matter much to them.”
“Well, people are usually reluctant to point out that someone’s behaving strangely. They don’t want to embarrass the other person”.
“I haven’t found that to be true. All my life people have made a point of coming up to me and telling me I’m strange.”
“I was hoping you’d give some more thought to it maybe not being in your best interests to not care what other people think about you. I spoke to you about this just the other day. Clearly, it didn’t seem to have any effect, because next thing I know, you’re out here pretending you’re a wind-up toy instead of a human being!”
“I actually have been giving it quite a bit of thought. It’s an interesting topic. What you need to realize is that I’ve spent a lifetime having people react to me as if I’m weird. They mostly weren’t very nice about it, and mocked me and made fun of me and called me names. I learned not to care because how else would you keep them from getting to you? I was never going to blend in.”
I pause for a moment, reminded of a line of thought I’d pursued once or twice before. “That was less true for my sister. Jan didn’t easily fit in everywhere. Whenever we moved, or changed school systems, I think she had to work at it to make new friends, get people to accept her, avoid being the kid that other people leave out or talk about and make fun of. I think she put some effort into tucking in any odd corners so people couldn’t see. Popularity was important to her; I don’t mean she was super popular, most popular girl in the class or anything, but popular enough. But that wasn’t an option for me. I wasn’t a kid who was seen as having something about them that was a little different. I was the kid that everyone in the school heard about from the other kids before they ever saw me. I had a reputation that had stuff that people made up about me added to what was already there, and being stared at was not something I was going to be able to avoid. I remember kids from other classrooms bringing their friends with them to point me out through the open classroom door, you know, ‘See, over there, that’s him’. So I have a lifetime of training that’s made it pretty much invisible to me. That means even if I agree with you, which I partly do, by the way, that it probably costs me certain things, that’s like saying ‘Gee, if you’re moving to Spain, you’d be better off if you spoke Spanish instead of English’, you can say it and it may be true but you don’t just decide to switch languages and the next day you’re speaking Spanish. Just because you don’t notice any difference in my behavior doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about what you said”.
“What does speaking Spanish have to do with walking around and around and around in the hallway?”
I sigh.
-----
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts