House Meeting

Last night I did yet another brave thing.  I took a shower at the Shelter.  Previously I had been showering at my Mother's house because I wasn't sure I could do it quickly enough to not really upset people.  But I decided to take the risk.  From the time I turned the water on to the time I turned it off, it was 26 minutes!  Yay!  That's really a huge victory considering that it usually takes me at least an hour. 

Long showers are a leftover self-comforting behavior from childhood times of taking a long time in the bathroom.  It was the only time I felt I had privacy.  Or the only time that others didn't seem to think they were entitled to knowing what I was doing.  Or the only time I felt like I didn't have to come up with a justification or excuse for doing what I was doing.  I guess I had that feeling when I was punished by being sent to my room too.  No one pried into what kind of mess I was making or when I would be finished or how productive it was or what I was learning or whatever.  I was just left to myself.  By the time I was 8 or 10, what had previously looked just like neglect was now blessed relief from judgment. 

I guess I feel entitled to relief from judgment.  No wonder I didn't quite buy into the huge guilt-trip that sometimes accompanies conversion to Christianity when I was 15.  Very often it's delivered as, "You can come inside if you first pay the toll of confessing that you're a terrible sinner worthy of death."  I had a big argument with my friend about that.  I had all sorts of sophisticated and philosophical reasons for having a problem with that, but the reality deep inside was that I was already burnt out on guilt.  What I thought I was hearing in "The Good News" was that it was time to retire from my life-time labor of feeling guilty about simply living.  As the years went by I sorted through my feelings about what "sin" was and the concept evolved as I matured.  It has a whole different meaning now than it did back then. 

So, somehow I have been able to break through the outer shell of feeling entitled enough to get underneath my shower issue.  This is just outstanding progress for me.  Amazing. 

And to end that little story on a funny note, I'll segue into the next story...

While I was in the shower, I noticed that the drain wasn't flowing well, and there was a bit of hair around it.  By the end,  I saw that there was alot of my own hair there too (it's a different color), and I made a mental note to clean that up when I was done.  When I finished, I used the hand-held shower to rinse things down and get the scum cleaned up from the drain.  After I put my jammies on, I was gonna go get a piece of toilet paper and clean up the hair, but there was someone waiting to get in, so I let her go and told myself I'd do it when she was done. 

Just then there was an announcement that there would be a mandatory house meeting in 5 minutes!  Fear shot through me.  Instantly, all that carefully placed short term memory was purged in favor of being available for whatever was coming.  I put my things away, checked if it was okay to show up in my jammies and fuzzy slippers and then went in to the dining room on pins and needles. 

I guess these meetings are held once in a while to read notes out of the complaint box and go over rule changes or upcoming events or whatever.  So, one of the Staff women opened up the complaint box and read the first note.  "Please don't leave hair in the shower drain in the women's bathroom!!"  And they talked about consequences for doing that and they were dire and so on and on. 

Crap.

That's the kind of stuff that happens to me all the time.  I'm so conscientious, it's pathetic.  Really.  It's sickening.  But if something happens that disrupts my memory storage between making that mental note and the time it comes due - I'm screwed.  'Cuz it's gone.  Long gone. 

This has been a problem for me in jobs.  I feel really intimidated by bosses.  Power relationships of any kind have been traumatizing for me.  It's one of the main consequences for having an attachment disorder.  Many bosses have eventually gotten this impression of me as dim-witted because I can't remember what I've been told over and over again, point-blank.  The key phrase there is "point-blank".  Because many have this tendency to deliver instruction very impersonally and with this "do-it-or-else" kind of spin that effectively prevents me from remembering what they're saying. 

And it's easy to see how it would escalate.  On their end, they just keep increasing the force.  On my end, I end up actually generating resistance.  Passive aggression prevents me from acting on instructions that I'm given - and I actually want to comply with - but can't because they are terrorizing me by increasing the threat while they are giving me the instructions.  Sometimes it takes days before this cycle starts at a job.  But usually, it starts within hours or minutes.  There's no way to tell from the interview how they're going to be, because their motivational skills don't actually go into effect until after you're on the team.  Too late.  Oh, well.

Even with all that going on, I've only ever been fired once in my life.  It's amazing.  I guess it's because I've overcompensated with extreme conscientiousness and I can be trusted with money, keys, effort, ability to get along with co-workers and all sorts of things of that nature.  Those are valuable in retail.  That's where I used to work.  Never again.  I'm no longer willing to let myself get traumatized like that.  I did it for years until I couldn't do it any longer.  I was failing and was not going to get better at it.  Increasing the fear only made it worse.  So, I needed to try something different. 

But back to my story.

So the House Meeting was very interesting.  There were two Staff Women running it, and one of the women, who is usually the more stern was being the "Good Cop" while the other was playing "Bad Cop".  It was an impressive show of force.  And, of course, it energized the corresponding "opposing force" in the community - until the hammer came down.  The bottom line is that the Shelter is supplying a service to the community: They offer a roof over our heads and food to eat as long as we are actively pursuing permanent housing.  It's not meant to be a "flop house" or "hotel" or other such place where there are no demands upon us (That's not what was being asked for, but this is the standard answer to anything that they don't want to offer). 

Translation: "You have no rights. And if you don't like it you can sleep in the gutter."

It's actually the same kind of threat you get in prison.  If you don't like the level of security, you can always sit in that fancy electric chair down the hall and your days of getting jumped in the shower will be over. 

The place was buzzing with acting out for the rest of the night.  People tattling on one another and lots of blatant defiance.  A little while before "Lights Out", there was a bed check, where the drawers under our beds were checked for stashed food (totally against the rules but one of the women had been tattled on - see next post).  I saw how my drawers were checked and it wasn't very thorough.  There was no food "found", even though I heard several of the women whispering that they were probably gonna get in trouble because they had this or that stashed in their drawers.  I'm not sure what they think they were accomplishing.  I guess that was saber-rattling.  Or maybe they let us win that one so that we'd chill out.  I don't know. 

Fascinating.