Gratitude.

This one will have to come in parts. I'm still trying to get this "writing thing" down. I think about writing a lot; when I first wake up, when I'm out walking, sometimes when I'm cooking dinner, and most certainly when I'm sitting in the awful light of the Mammoth Hospital ER waiting to evaluate a patient who is potentially harmful to self and/or others (as I've been several times this call schedule). For reasons that have to do with total pitch darkness and cold temperatures, I haven't been able to get myself out of bed before 5:30 in order to make time for writing. Now, too, there is making a fire for warmth, which takes time, and the aforementioned training I am doing, mostly in the afternoon and evening, taking time and much effort. I think about writing while I'm strengthening my mostly non existent core muscles or practicing my form while doing lunges and squats in the forest. Okay, so now I write. In parts.

Around our office we often discuss why some of our clients, maybe even most of them, do not seem to have or express gratitude about what we offer them. Not the kind of, "I'm a piece of shit and couldn't live without you" gratitude, but more of the, "hey I notice you are a./feeding me, b./housing me, c./helping me get MediCal, d./listening to me talk about my terrible feelings, e./getting me into re-hab, f./keeping me out of jail," gratefulness. Perhaps what we are looking for is an exchange that recognizes our work? It doesn't feel like ego to me (but, please point it out if it does to you), more like a place to recognize that others (us) are working hard to give you opportunities or to make your ends meet a little more.

We are, in my office, mostly women. This is the first thing I wonder about. Do we participate in the message that we are taught, the one where we are expected to be helpful and invisible? Maybe some of us, but most of us are rather crusty about "not working harder than the client" and while we are good at our jobs and take what we do seriously, it's not all that we are so we don't need people to need us so we feel valuable or important. Maybe it's that, as women, the expectation is we are there to "mommy" those who didn't get what they needed way back when and so they get to project their "bad mommy" deal onto us? They take the food, the clothes, the cash, the services, the help and feel entitled to our efforts. The "I didn't get it then so I deserve it now" point of view, perhaps.

Not all clients are in this group, of course. Some are too sick, too fragile to notice much. Their voices or their addiction is much to loud and drowns out everything else, literally. But often the one's we, as a team, work the hardest on end up being the most entitled and least grateful. I'll make a confession here: I do not do well with entitlement. Don't like it, don't believe in it, think it's cultural and therefore not really a part of what is real about the human condition. It is the American way, if you think about our cultural dialogue or the way we, as a collective, treat the planet, so I get that, but still, my hackle goes up when I hear the call of entitlement.

Since I'm a supervisor, it's my job to understand why trends happen. At our sober living house, again generally, the folks who come and go do not express a sense of belonging or gratitude for having the opportunity to live there. It's a common occurrence, so I suspect there are things we are and are not doing that add to this dynamic. I tend to think that humans need to have rituals and conversations about their place in the world, and so I've introduced some of this to the dialogue and experience of those who live in our house. For instance, I tell the residents often how hard the lead person who they deal with, the one who oversee's their daily life and makes sure the bills are paid so they have heat and electricity, works to make sure they have what they have. I figure this gives them some insight, or at least a chance for it, about what goes into their experience of home. I don't have measurable results about this, but I do think the energy around, "where's my....that you owe me," as calmed down some.

Today at our staff meeting I'll talk about the three people I've seen in the ER this week. The back story is we don't get paid very much to be on call and the work is tricky and stressful and takes away from your ability to sleep well or have time off on your weekend; the rest of that story is, we all take it very seriously when we get called in and are professional to the hospital staff and the patient in question, even when one or the other might be screaming at you. I won't look for gratitude there, though from myself I will make sure I account for all it takes for me to do this and do it well. On the larger scale I'll think about the system we have created as a society where some people find comfort in being in the ER bed, drunk out of their mind or "suicidal" (often both) because that is the kind of attention they cannot get anywhere else in their world. And, on a much smaller but very important scale, I'll be ever grateful to be able to finally have a beer after spin, tonight, now that I'm off the beeper.

More-much-on this later.