October 1, 2001

• This may look like two entries in one day. The last entry was Sunday night, for me. This is Monday morning.
  
  True Confessions
  
  I did some hollering on a couple of folks this weekend. When I get angry, I like to use it as many ways as I can. So this morning I'm going to do some self-exploration, and you get to be voyeurs.
  
  We were in the middle of the SHARE Power Lunch. This is a weekly meeting of the participants in SHARE, a group of homeless and formerly homeless men and women who run a network of self-managed homeless shelters and other resources. We were discussing a crisis: a lot of shelter space has just been lost in one are, and King County is saying it won't open the Winter Response shelter this season, that it's opened every winter for 11 years, that's managed by SHARE. And they say that SHARE is lying, manipulative and untrustworthy, which they've never said in 11 years, but I don't think that had anything to do with stirring me up.
  
  Background included for the rest of you listening to my thoughts here, who don't know SHARE: We have eight staff members for our 400-bed shelter network, and about 20-25 "SHARE2" folks hired out of the shelters to do 8 hours of work a week in return for housing. A majority of the work is volunteer effort by shelter participants, and a few previous shelter participants like me who've stuck on. Staff do donkey-work like admin and shuttling supplies around, and make recommendations and suggestions for organizing, but don't get a vote. We have 11 Board members because we're a registered non-profit and that's how we have to be organized, and the Saturday Power Lunch is our official Board meeting; but in practice, everybody who is homeless or formerly homeless is invited to meeting, every shelter and other SHARE program has to have someone there, and everyone there (except staff) has an equal vote.
  
  Boring stuff over. Hopefully.
  
  Staff had recommended that we go down en masse Monday night and open the Winter Response shelter. If this sounds like it has a potential of turning confrontative, it does. Groups have been talking about this and planning for the possibility all week, but this was the first time that the organization as a whole was going to vote it up or down. We discussed risks; those of us who've been in similar things in the past explained that if the police are called, they will warn everybody before making any arrests, and no one has to be arrested unless they want to, and there are lots of ways to support the group besides being arrested. We discussed who our allies are.
  
  Then this guy gets up and starts a long rambling discourse summarized as "I have a question. Can a homeless person who has just made one mistake be barred on one person's decision and forced to sleep out in the street?" As soon as the rest of us realized that he was not discussing the issue on the agenda we started trying to interrupt and tell him to bring up his case at the appropriate point, but another guy spoke up and said, "Let the man speak!" and the first guy said, "The reason this relates is, I think we should be solving this kind of problem before we're discussing setting up new shelters or asking homeless people to take risks." The other guy spoke for awhile saying basically the same thing, that we were abusing homeless people inside the organization, so we shouldn't do anything else until we'd cleaned house. Except all of this took a whole lot longer than I've described here, because both these guys repeated themselves a lot and whenever they got the floor they wanted to wander all over it before they gave it up.
  
  I started by being a lot more patient than anyone else wanted to be, because I wanted to make sure that if there had been any abuses they were addressed. I explained what the grievance policy was and how to appeal a bar and what to do if you wanted to change how SHARE worked and volunteered to personally help to whatever extent they needed.
  
  How they proceeded to piss me off:

  1. Neither one would agree to table this matter until the end of the agenda and allow regular business to proceed.
  2. They repeated themselves a lot and never acknowledged hearing anyone else's point.
  3. Complainant #1 would not be specific about what he had been barred for. (I found out why later: he'd been barred for making an obscene phone call to a woman in the same building, and if he'd said that, he'd probably have lost all sympathy.)
  4. Complainant #1 kept talking about "This governing body" and "Maybe you've all forgotten how it is to be homeless," when almost everybody around the table was homeless, and this is a self-governing body.
  5. Complainant #2 sat there and said that staff made all the decisions around here. He had already sat through three quarters of a meeting in which shelter residents had been discussing decisions among each other and voting on them, and when I said that Board members don't have any more power than anyone else and the members of SHARE make decisions for themselves he told me to my face that I was lying. I've been involved in SHARE for almost six years now, I'm Board President and I know how little anybody listens to me, I've never even seen this guy before, and he tells me I don't know how things work around here, that staff and a bunch of Board members who've probably never been homeless make all the decisions.

  Annoying little git.
  
  So, my voice started getting louder and louder. When #2 said that we should postpone the Monday night action I calmed down and asked, "Is that a motion?" He made it a motion, somebody else seconded it, we discussed it, it was voted on, there were only two votes for it and the majority for going ahead Monday. When another woman at the table showed me a Bar Form that did not have the Grievance Procedure on the back of it (all the new ones are supposed to) I calmed down and said that would explain a lot of confusion, and told staff that we have got to make sure everyone has the new forms. But most of the rest of the discussion, I was busting out without waiting for the chairperson to call on me, and I was hollering.
  
  Laying it all out here does help me. (I apologize if it bores anyone else.) I can see my buttons that got pushed:

  1. The accusation that I don't know what I'm talking about.
  2. The accusation that I'm lying.
  3. The dismissal of something I consider urgent as being of no importance.

  The first is a lot more sensitive than the second. Do I feel less secure about my knowledge of what's going on than I do about my honesty? BINGO! I have a 42-year history of The Great Gray Fog, from three years old until diagnosis and treatment 7 years ago. At both ends of the bipolar cycle, you aren't really aware of your environment or of people. And in my childhood, in a combination of codependence and empathy and being a bookworm rather than hanging out with peers, I was rather naive and easily convinced. I have made a lot of mistakes about what was really going on.
  
  I disciplined myself to be more skeptical, more objective, more observant. (One of the things I like about being a writer is that it makes me more observant.) But I am obviously still sensitive about that. And I have some concern that I am being conned, I am being used, the staff of SHARE really are manipulating all the rest of us and I'm defending them. So I'm going to have to do some thinking about all that.
  
  The tension on #3 is residual; most of my early life anything that was important to me was dismissed by everybody else in my life as unimportant. Yeah, there's still pain there. I'm crying now as I uncover this. Damn, I thought I was over that! I have a whole tribe of people who care about me and about what I care for, now. I also find it easy to accept that not everyone is going to have the same priorities. If we were all working on exactly the same cause, the world would probably be three miles deep in whales. But that pocket of pain will still twinge if something I'm totally caught up in is just dissed.
  
  Part of what happened was that I still, on occasion, meet someone's refusal to listen by raising my voice louder. I know that this is ridiculous, ineffective, a waste of time and energy, I don't do it often -- but I still do it occasionally, all right? I'm not perfect. True confessions.
  
  The final capper was when man #2 was on his way out the door after the meeting and I ran over to make sure that he wasn't going to just give up, that he would follow through on the grievance process. And he said, "Yeah, I know what I have to do. I have to go somewhere else, 'cause nobody in SHARE wants to listen to people like me, that's what I have to do." Then I blew up again, turning away, saying, "You mean you don't want to be helped, you just want to have your way!"
  
  That's something else that angers me. If someone wants to accomplish something, they will use the means that will accomplish it -- including diplomacy and negotiation. If someone refuses dialogue and negotiation, I am of the opinion that their real purpose is not what they say they want to accomplish.
  
  I am angry whenever someone says they are trying to help people, or help themselves, and what they do is at odds with that. Usually I use that anger, any anger at something I consider wrong, calmly and fairly effectively. But according to my sweetie, and a few other folks, I do rant a lot about obstinate people.
  
  Of course, I'm just purposeful and persistent. :)
  
  Saturday night I handled another annoyance much more calmly, possibly because I'd blown off so much steam earlier. One man came to the benefit reading by mistake; he thought it was a report on the racism conference in Durban. He asked if we were reading poetry or prose, we said "both", I introduced myself and pointed out the other readers, he said he bought Real Change but he usually prefers "informative reading." I grinned mischievously and said that we liked to consider Real Change informative; we really did have more than the poetry page. Then he got defensive and said that poetry can have information in it too.
  
  This is just introduction. As we waited for enough people to gather to start the reading event, several of us were gathered around the book table browsing. This guy went on and on about Al Gore and everything bad he did about the environment and welfare reform, and why the Democrats are just as evil as the Republicans, and yadayada. After awhile he caught on that he was being ignored in droves. He stopped and said, "But nobody wants to listen, eveybody has something more important to do." I looked him in the eyes and said, "The one thing in the world that bores me the most is preaching to the converted."
  
  He blew up, saying, "I just wish that some of the 'converted' would actually start doing something!" and left.
  
  Now that I was able to laugh about. One of my pet peeves is people who come up and start telling you what you ought to be doing about The Cause without first finding out what you are already doing (okay, that and people who confuse "doing something" with "sitting around ranting about it"), but this case was just a chuckle.
  
  If it weren't for people, what would people find to laugh about?
  

  • 2:04 pm
  • 2 Comments