And now for my house. Above, is the porch, and some seattle JVs the day we moved in, and the day everyone else piled their luggage into our yard before taking off one respective trains. Above that, is what I see when I sit on my porch, after work, attempting to read but never really being able to stay focused.

There is a lot of joy to living in community. There are dishes and donated bread and the hectic mornings of never being able to brush your teeth when you actually need to, but beyond that there is this process of getting to know other people in a way you've never known anyone else. And through that, getting to know yourself. Learning, maybe for the second or third time, how you want to present yourself and the support you need on a bad day.

Yesterday, in the later afternoon, Henry's daughter came into the office. She was beautiful, and she was tired, and she came to introduce herself. I guess that's when my frustrations started to melt a bit, and I realized the humanity in Henry that I'd pushed away during my last ugly confrontation in him. He's an addict. And in many ways, a bit of a mess, and he has burnt a lot of bridges. But he is a father to two beautiful women, the one in front of me that looked close to my age, and that was enough to stregthen my patience a bit more. I could go home at 5 and potentially not think of him again. Someday he'll leave RCP and who knows if I'll ever see him again. But he'll still have his daughters. And his mother. And all of the people who after all of this time still depend on him, and no matter how much it hurts, are not able to give up on him.

It's strange to see what people remember the most about their lives. Harriet, for example, talked of the oatmeal that her sister hated to eat. Even years afterward. "It was all we had, you know. That and cornmeal." We waited for her to be checked in at the clinic, and she told me of her family, her father who died and her mother who spent all of the money on alcohol. At ten, and the oldest, oatmeal was all she had to give to her sister, who was four at the time. She must have been too young to understand, she said. And I guess there are somethings that you can just never make sense of, no matter how old you are, or how long its been.

what it actually looks like

I sat on the train on the way to Tacoma and looked out the window. I'd heard the view was lovely, although that night I would be unable to see it. It was nighttime now, and all of the passengers struggled to stay patient after the hour delay. I chatted with Jean, an older woman beside me, who advised me to not have 11 children if I could help it. I told her it didn't look like a possibility in the near future.

I thought mostly of my job, which continues to be hard, and leaves me distressed and slightly confused at the end of each day, and has made me realize that some moments are just hard to let go of. That no matter how hard we all try there are still people that seem to fall through the cracks. I thought of the dirty drapes above Henry's bed. How he tugged at the for no reason, how his pupils turned as small as pins. I thought of the almost empty medicine jar on the table, and how he wrapped his thin, dangly arms around the television in the corner and attempted to move it. I thought of Cathleen, laying helplessly on her bed, almost unable to lift the cup of milk to her lips. "How did she get back in here?" The housing specialist kept asking. The recuperative care program requires patients to be able to take care of themselves, and Cathleen, now 86 pounds, is not able to do that. But somehow it happened. And then Friday afternoon rolled around, and we were scrambling to find a different situation for her.

I've realized throughout the month that suffering does not always look like suffering. It is not always sadness, or honest remorse. Suffering does not always come in tears or crying or moments that are so insightful that you can feel your heart sinking a bit deeper into your chest. It manifests in other ways, in ugly, dishonest ways. The fake gasps a woman let out in order to get an oxygen tank, and the cigarette I see her smoking after my three different phone conversations with the home care company. The stolen pain meds. The anxiety from the stolen pain meds. The moments that spring up on me during the day, the ones that leave me feeling frozen in helplessness, fearing what else is out there.

On Thursday afternoon I came home from the afternoon where Henry took too many of his pain meds. When I stood by his door for 30 minutes waiting while my co worker called the hospital. Henry said he saw two of me, and a dog. He said his daughter wished he were dead. That he liked the book he was reading. He reached for something in the air and caught nothing.

So I walked in my house not knowing quite what to do with all of that. We ate dinner and danced around the kitchen. I baked Banana bread and packed my things for the weekend. And through all of it I felt a bit different than I did the night before.

Self Care

I’m sitting in my living room, sort of watching a movie about a high school history teacher with a cocaine addiction. I’m not sure of the name, and hesitant to ask my housemates who are actually focusing on the movie, rather than walking in half way through attempting to steal internet connection from the neighbors. I like these moments—the ones that take place in the living room, where I can be surrounded by people and not necessarily have to carry on a conversation. The fall is setting in a bit. It is drizzling out. We have our blankets over us, and appreciating the downtime.

We’ve talked a bit about vicarious trauma at work lately. Nic made it the word of the week after everything that happened the first week, and everything that continues to happen in the population we serve each day. How it’s important to be proactive about dealing with the pain that we see people go through everyday, and the result of being in vulnerable situations. What to do with pain that is not completely our own. So I’m trying to figure that out, and I’m not sure that I’ve reached any conclusions, or new ways to unwind. But there are the parts of my work day that aren’t completely work related that I’ve been hanging onto. The conversations I have with the parking attendant, Adrian, after I drop the van off. His yellow shirt and yellow booth and the large textbook he had opened on the small table. “I’m learning Japanese,” he told me. He paused for a moment when I asked him why. “To be cool,” he said. I nodded and went on my way. There is the bike ride there and back, the walk to the pharmacy to pick up the pain medication, and the walk to the primary care clinic to divide out the week supplies. I guess I never realized how much effort it would take for me to remind myself that the world that I’m working in is not all bad. That there are small glimpses of lights if you stay open to them. And no matter how crazy the day is, there is always time for short conversations.

On another note: we successfully survived our first trip out of the state, to the Cherry Abby JV house in Seattle. There is something about leaving your home for a few days, driving in a direction you’ve never been before. We left promptly at 7 on Friday, with the I pod ready, and arrived around 10 and spent a few minutes frantically searching for the house with prayer flags on Cherry St. It was a charming house, in the way that the Portland volunteer houses are, with shelves of books and dusty corners and bedrooms that may have once been linen closets. And how nice it was to hang out with other communities outside of the structure of orientation. To compare notes and what it’s really like to live with people you don’t know and have a job that you’re completely unqualified for.