Winter 2020 (+ Summer 2024 Addendum)

I’m pretty sure that, with so much of my time spent brain-on and body-on for work, warming center, purple house, art stuff, etc. that my reflex in down time has been anything that lets me feel off. Lots of TV and smoking and phone-scrolling happening. I do want to to return to reading, writing, running, things like that.

I spend a lot of time (what time I’m not at work) on WCO and warming center and amnesty stuff, navigating a slew of new dynamics (and a resurgence of age-old ones). Day to day and week to week I don’t always strike a perfect balance for myself, but I feel myself changing. I’m burnt out, but I’m learning all the time about boundaries and my own needs and how to speak/honor it all.

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Addendum: Something about this period of time is that I don’t think I really recorded it anywhere in my journals; not because I didn’t want to, but because I did not have any additional mental or physical capacity to lend to the task. I don’t feel pity for myself or others when I reflect on these things – they are a more normal piece of life than a lot of us would like to think. When I look back on the little writing I did, though, I see a freakishly positive spin on things like growth and learning and “things worth doing.” I think that mindset was helping me to cope and I just want to make an honest attempt to record my memory of this time, which felt simultaneously utterly fucked and completely fine:

When I refer to myself as seeking to be “off” or being inundated with dynamics I never had time to explain, what I mean is that, at a time when everyone was shut in and battling isolation, I was surrounded by bodies, busier and more social than I’ve maybe ever otherwise been, and getting reacquainted with misogyny and internal politics while also learning new reflexes for living.

I was taking volunteer shelter shifts at 11 at night, asking adults I didn’t know well to pick up after themselves, to wear masks and to “please [not] say that to me” lol. Over time, they became people I knew quite well. We played a lot of spades, which was my favorite pastime in that basement. It was my closest proximity to hard drugs that truly scare me. Around 2 or 3am, I’d drive home to sleep, and then I’d head back to give rides and bus tokens to the warming center. It was my closest proximity to human excrement, and one time, after being screamed at by [redacted] at 7 in the morning, I picked up her soiled laundry in my arms and cried while I drove to the church to wash it. And then I went to work at 9am.

We were all building the bicycle as we rode it. There were so many things I didn’t understand yet about the unsteady infrastructure that created that winter. Some days and nights were good times but most were not. The few of us in this boat would take turns (presumably venting and crying lmao) on off-days. I’ve never learned more in such a short time. I’ve never bought more cigarettes and Mountain Dew!! Don’t even want to think about how many miles I put on the car giving rides.

I’ve possibly never had to make harder decisions. When I picked up [redacted] from the hospital detox, I wasn’t sure how he’d make it through a night without alcohol, and in the moment, the most responsible choice felt like the one to buy him two beers on the way back to the purple house basement. When [redacted] was blasted off his ass and hurled a slur across the room, and made some vile gestures at my body, the best choice felt like the one that might put him out in the cold on a freezing night. And I did call 911 to take him away from there, and it felt like such a betrayal of some values to uphold other ones.

This is how I took down the care instructions that a U-M nurse gave me over the phone, for a man I had only met the previous day. I was asked to pick him up in Ypsi and take him to the hospital because he had been punched and had an injury to his jaw. When the hospital called me to retrieve him, this is what she told me:

I followed up with him for a short time, but he had latched onto something I told him about pizza, and began texting and Facebook messaging me all the time to ask me out for it. I got uncomfortable enough that I just left him hanging one day, assuming he’d memorized the care instructions or taken them down himself.

I really felt during that time that I was young and green to a lot of the world. And that was true. In my memory now, it was a lot of exhaustion, getting screamed at by people who were high off their asses or battling something psychologically that none of us had the resources to appropriately address. We listened to a lot of music and played more spades and talked about what someone might do once their housing voucher goes through. Or learned about people’s families and children. There’s a lot of a sense of camaraderie in my memories, too.

At the beginning I felt like I was playing a character, braver and more authoritative than the person I knew I was. After playing that character enough times, I started to become what I needed to be: strong enough to set the rules, brave enough to enforce them, wise enough to understand that the the small inconsistencies between the larger project/politics and our choices minute-by-minute were OK, because we were imperfect in urgency.

The daytimes were not so harrowing, mostly, though I was dead tired and I had been living alone for fear of bringing COVID home from any of my various shifts and errands. There was a wedding at the warming center one of the days. And we made a lot of friends. And there was so much food that it was actually too much food. There’s not too much more I have to say about this year-or-so of my life — it was utterly fucked and completely fine.