grey gardens

Beggars SHOULD Be Choosers

This week marks a small victory for the Right to Food movement in the DTES or at least the tiny wave of food activism that reverberates within the walls of where I work: we successfully got Food Runner  (the principle link between food donors, the food bank and non-profit organizations) to stop giving us bag loads of day old pastries! Yes, two weeks after we made a bold request, they showed up sans those big clear bags of stale poverty-diet-staples for us to sort.

Hell did not break loose, the apocalypse did not happen (yet), and we did not piss the FR off enough for them to stop delivering the food we actually need. Our clients will not starve as a result of our impudent requests (though it is fucked up that they could without the help of charity.) Nor did any of the other fears that keep organizations from telling donors what they do and do not need materialize--though we were afraid...

Email Revolution:

All it took was a simple email, one manager to another,  politely reiterating the health concerns that prevail among the population we serve and courteously requesting (if it is not too much trouble)  that they please keep those refined sugars and flours AWAY! It's probably a good thing that I didn't write the email, I do have a tendency to get a wee bit militant. Some clients refer to me as the food police--yes I am, so?--and I got in trouble in an interview setting with two managers once when I stated that I rather have clients starve to death than have them eat day old pastries every morning--its true though! Well at least theoretically.

Now my coworker Jess and I no longer have to cringe as we watch clients eating handfuls of donuts and cakes that we were forced to put out on the counter when we ran out of garbage space--a regular occurrence that completely reduced all our efforts to serve the most tasty and nutritious food possible to crumbs. We are still not able to do everything that we would like in the kitchen (the revolution is not funded!), but at least we can help our clients start the day off a little less toxically. 

Wants versus Needs and for Whom?

What we do deal with now though, even more profoundly, is the reality that it is very difficult to create a healthy meal with what tends to get donated and that pastries really filled a void (filler in the fullest sense of the word) where proper funding ought to be. 

We also deal with backlash from some clients who want the sweets, which raises ethical questions around speaking on behalf of individuals who seldom have the opportunity to speak for themselves and who don't have access to choice of any kind including in the basic realm of what to eat for breakfast today? 

It is important to think about the huge discrepancy between workers and the clients we are representing (and to always remember that it is pretty messed up that we are employed to "represent," at least ostensibly). Yes beggars can't be choosers in our society, but that's not just an old cliche, its a pervasive ideology that is self serving.

And it is so easy for me to take on the role of food Nazi when I can satisfy both wants and needs (i.e I can spend some of my paycheck on some tasty craft beer and overindulge with no critical--or pitying-- gazes monitoring and discussing my every move. I can also easily knock back some of my expensive supplements and organic foods the next day to bring the rosiness back to my sallow cheeks. )

Of course it is not me the individual who is robbing people from their right to choose (but maybe me as part of a collective); it is the charitable system itself (donor driven!) which is also a symptom of an inequitable society. Charity does not even allow us to secure basic needs and all the sugar in the world can't coat that truth.

The position I am in allows me two limited choices: to be a highly limited spokesperson (as  utterly problematic as that is) or to say nothing at all and carry on with business as usual.

I pick the lesser of two evils, that is my only choice. 

Out of Sight, In My Mind

It has always been a struggle for me not to be too much in my head.

As a kid I always looked forward to long car rides sitting in the back and to alone time in my room when I could just stare blankly into space and day dream continuously. Yes I was a dreamer creating worlds beyond the present that I could invest myself in by merely staring at a blank space on the wall. My reveries would take me far and I could stay there for quite some time. It was often a shock being jolted back into reality. 

I imagine it is a challenge for anyone to live in the present, after all it is sort of an age old cliched notion of enlightenment to overcome the void." But I think I took mental escapism further than most and at some point this “dreaminess” became complete disconnection. First through the use of substances and the loss of self through all encompassing relationships. Then my lack of centeredness was amplified by the rigours of academia and all the intensity that lifestyle entails.  Pulling all nighters, drinking coffee, and smoking cigarettes (my main hobby for that time and the perfect excuse to buy myself 5 minutes each hour to zone out) did little to rectify my growing sense of disembodiment. Not to mention the piles of literature I read (and took to heart as I did everything deep down) analyzing our fragmented, disembodied culture as a whole. Yes, my head was a more compelling option than getting sucked into the other vortexes of city life (the visual noise of advertisements, that asinine sounds of one-way cell phone conversations on the bus, the sense of being caged in by the ever changing--and rising--skyline of Vancouver, forever in flux.)

But I got fed up when I realized that I could go on a hike and never once look around at the beauty around me; that I hardly noticed anything about the world, unless it involved some form of mediation, direct drama or extreme stimuli; that even when I was jolted for a moment, I  would still quickly block it all out  and return to a faraway space and a disconcerting state of physical and emotional amnesia. When I began to not only really think about, but feel,  my own disconnect though, my head was no longer a comfortable space to be in all of the time (not that it ever really was, trust me.)

I wanted to open my eyes. I was pissed because I knew I had everything necessary at my disposal to be happy and connected to the present (after all I am mobile, I can leave without necessarily physically running away), yet I still had this sense of flat affect when I was engaged in the immediate. How could I embrace the present (an age old question), even for a little while? How could I stop being so damn numb in reality, such an escape artist and pretender?

It happened one day suddenly. I  just snapped out of it. (it was a scary, violent snap mind you! It's kind of a weird, interesting story that I will save for some other post, perhaps one about spiritual awakening and redemption through darkness, because in a sense, despite my faint yet enduring cynicism, that is what it truly was.)Several factors helped jolt me out of myself, including prolonged solitude and room to actually feel my feelings and lick some old wounds, the removal of stimulants from my day to day (including coffee!), committing to a grounding diet, trading in the bus for the bike,  and a looooong break from the Internet. 

For the first time in my life I found myself walking down the street, not only aware of everything around me, but also emotionally reacting to it (sometimes laughing alone like a total nutter!) I felt like a child exploring the world for the first time!

This complete (and very strange) clarity lasted for about six months. At first I dreaded the day that it would go away and even questioned my sanity wondering if this change in perspective was heralding a psychotic break. But I just let go of these thoughts. I had the capacity to enjoy! I also felt no stress and no desire to be lost in space as I could fully invest myself in the present without the urge to find an opportunity to be alone and to take myself away. Yes, I allowed myself some time to think or to dream or to write or to be carried away by a film, but I discovered the capacity to determine when and where. I could hone my attention and like it.

Nothing is Forever. Now that the weather has changed to the typical Vancouver-fall-bleakness, I am starting to feel like my old self, though cloudier in my head (I think the lack of stimulants is making me more sensitive to the permanent greyness that envelops us here.) I try to fight my wayward train of thoughts and to remain grounded by moving my body a lot. But it isn't always working, more often than not my bike feels like a treadmill. I feel tired more than elated most of the time. Yet I am OK with that. After all,  it is a little scary to always be connected to one's surroundings, I was starting to feel like one of those ecstatic-looking old people that roll around town looking like they are on a permanent hit of E!

Most importantly though, I know that I have the capacity to be centered now, which is huge. Because even though I feel depleted and foggy at the moment I am aware of this, thinking about it, and can usually answer why (and feeling drained and borderline depressed during the grey months in Vancouver is actually a sign of being connected I would argue!). I also understand now deeply that no feeling is forever and in knowing so I can enjoy the highs and lows. I can snap myself out of it (though sometimes its hard). And when I pull myself out of my head and into reality I am often rewarded!

For example, the other night I was riding home on my bike completely unaware of the beautiful night and the moon. My thoughts were on this constant loop of fatigue, hunger, discontent with a few dark thoughts thrown into this extended mix and I was kicking myself periodically, thinking why are we back to this old pattern? I decided to snap out of it and my gaze hit a coyote literally 20 meters from me. I stopped and it stopped and we stared at each other for a while under the moonlight (the serious moonlight!). It was mangy, a little creepy, but beautiful!

Then, a couple days ago I was on my way to the Sunshine Coast for some well needed down time. The commute, which I generally love because it is two uninterrupted hours of zoning out, was getting to me. I was feeling anxiety as my thoughts were ruminating. I was having big fears about the future with some negative thinking and confusion seeping in and muffling that voice that says its going to be all good. I was uncomfortable in my head and unable to escape for very long when I would try to push my thoughts to nicer places. I actually started to physically react to a growing anxiety that was getting overwhelming, no doubt amplified by actually sitting still after a week of stimuli. 

But then I looked out and spotted over 20 dolphins on the horizon, this beautiful, sunny, paradisaical horizon. No joke.

And I knew again that all is good because I could stare at those damn dolphins and this horizon and actually give a crap about something beyond me!

I did consider the extent to which the water is polluted and how much the ferry must be screwing with their sonar for a minute or two, but I quickly silenced those thoughts and was humbled by the visualness of this incredible moment in its immediacy. 

Knowledge is BioPower

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating- Michel Foucault

I work in an environment, rife for sociological analysis, but in order to really enjoy my job--which I do for the most part--I have sort of had to put my tendency to critically analyze everything to bed, at least some of the time. But here we are in the full swing of flu shot campaign season and I am feeling a lot  of pressure and a growing ball of rage. Emails are being sent from the ether (some operational director, or PR person) with updates to immunization policy, reminders to get our  shots and to make sure our managers get a record of immunization, or to see our bosses one on one to explain why we are not getting immunized. In these emails we are reminded that getting the shot is "not just something we must do, that it is the right thing to do." I have to wonder right for whom? And to pose the question: what about my rights? 

The campaign at my work portrays a heavy handed guideline or suggestion what really is an order. There are pretty coercive penalties built in that make it very difficult for one to stick to their principles and beliefs. First of all, if you do not comply you will be subject to public shaming as you will be forced to wear a mask throughout the entire flu season as well as a badge that states "I care, I wear as mask," fascism with a friendly face. Secondly, if there is an outbreak of the flu they really hit below the belt: you will be sent home for the duration of the epidemic with no pay or access to sick days. When I went to my manager for that one on one meeting to tell him I do not want to shoot mercury, formaldehyde and other dubious substances into my body or to buy into big pharma-fear mongering, he sort of smiled and said "I don't call the shots [no pun intended], direct your advocacy to them."

Yes "them" that faceless, abstract entity known as the Coastal Health Authority, the main funders of the organization I work for. But even nurses in this province (legitimate health care professionals, unlike myself) are trying to fight the flu shot policy, but to no avail. Last year, I buckled from the pressure and got my first flu vaccine ever, almost hating myself for letting policy dictate what I put into my body so explicitly against my will. Thankfully it is a tendency of mine, when shit really gets to be too much to turn my anger outward and latch on to social theory. This bs has got me thinking about power again.

Healthy Mind, Docile Body: Bio-Power:

According to Michel Foucault, a key thinker of the 20th century who probably influenced me more than anyone including my own mother (except maybe for Marx!), power is everywhere. It circulates through the institutions that organize our lives, it conditions our experiences through forms of knowledge that constitute and validate a "consensual" reality, it resides within the language that we use and governs how we use it. Power is research, documentation, dissemination, conversation: it is embedded in everything that we do.

We are not simply oppressed by power, we are also vehicles of power who not only regulate ourselves through the internalization of specific ideas and norms, but regulate others. Just look at the guilt mongering that goes along with the flu shot campaign. I have had a certain number of people tell me to just get the shot, that I work with vulnerable people, that it doesn't matter if I am healthy I could be a CARRIER (a vector of disease). You see, power functions in a way that upholds the individual. Through interventions we are pushed to "take responsibility, " to better ourselves while seldom looking at the bigger picture. For example, throughout this push-to-immunize, nobody is really asking why are the people we work with so vulnerable (i.e. sub par living conditions and a political economic system that upholds inequity).

In this era, a key means through which we are regulated (and regulate) is through the internalization of ideas of health (the epidemic kills!), the seldom unquestioned notion of scientific truth (everyone does it and its proven to help!), and the subtle and not so subtle penalties we are subjected to when we try to question or go against what are considered health givens. Yes science is our religion! And this ideology penetrates our very being through a vast array of interventions. This health-conscious matrix of control is what Foucault calls Biopower.

Just Another Day at the Office: 

Working in a mental health facility it is no surprise that biopower prevails and that it is not just the clients that are affected. Occupying a space that is such an extreme example of the mechanism of power (Foucault wrote A LOT on psychiatry), it is easy to forget that consumers of the psychiatric system are not the only ones embedded in the matrix of power. Each day I witness (and am part of) an extreme means with which biopower is exercised on people from the inside out, day in day out.

We are part of a regulatory network that involves the mental health team, the hospital, forensic psychiatric services (a hybrid between judicial and health authorities) and the police—connected satellites that function to enforce behaviour that fits certain very well established norms. We share individuals across our specific nexuses: though the same individual could be referred to as a criminal, a patient, or as a client by their first name, they are embedded in a particular system. For example, if one of our clients is late for his monthly shot, we receive a call from the mental health team and are to keep him occupied (and unaware of the imminent intervention) until someone comes down to administer his meds.

If our client has missed quite a few shots and is on a rampage of bad behaviour throughout the neighbourhood, the forces really come crashing down and shit gets real as often the police are on high alert with quite a few agencies likely having witnessed behaviour that does not fit his documented and observed "baseline." Often those in the mental health system have extensive "deviance careers" and their cycles are well known. Phone calls are made, sightings are reported. If we come across the individual we call car 87 (the police force that deals specifically with mental health) and they come down to assess and certify the problematic person. Often, two months later this individual will return a docile, compliant body from the ether, “stabilized” after a stint in the hospital, or at the very least fattened up, after a stint in jail (in this climate of funding cuts to legitimate mental health facilities, jail often works as a makeshift asylum and “mental illness” is increasingly criminalized.)

The old adage knowledge is power is central to Foucault’s conceptualization. A key means through which power functions is through the establishment and documentation of norms that are supported by diverse forms of knowledge (what Foucault referred to the disciplines, a nice double entendre). When it comes to biopower, codified conceptions of normal versus abnormal, sickness versus health, exhibiting symptoms versus asymptomatic, compliant versus non-compliant are central to the effective regulating of bodies, not to mention the network of educated professionals to re-enforce these.

As I have tried to show with both an extreme and an everyday example (or one dealing with the “abnormal” and one dealing with “respectable, functioning” folks,) biopower does not only regulate those that obviously clash with established norms, such as those deemed mentally ill. Think of the latest self-help book or diet trend, shows on television like Dr. Phil, campaigns to get young women vaccinated against HPV, the Canada Food Guide (are you drinking your 3 servings of dairy a day?), the push to compost, recycle and consume organic produce even. Think of the extent that words like safety, risk, prevention, responsibility continuously circulate in our social world. Think to what effect. 

I guess I don't care, that I am a non-compliant vector of disease. But the infuriating thing is that I will probably end up getting the damn shot again this year, completely against my will. 

An Ode to Working in Social Services

Where I work is more than a testament to psychiatric deinstitutionalization (aka the shutting down of "legitimate" mental hospitals), it is a testament to how easy it is to be lost in this atomizing, broken society. The space I occupy professionally represents a general malaise that is rendered invisible by a deep class structure that positions us all in an overarching hierarchy that legitimizes some, while rejecting others. It is a microcosm of the bigger picture. There, the rejected and the legitimized not only co-exist, but enable one another to exist.

It is a known as a drop-in centre for people with diagnoses of mental illness. It serves as a makeshift asylum for the "unhousable," the "non-compliant," the "deconpensating," the "concurrently disordered." Many of the regulars are abjectly broken: they are known as under housed, addicted and medicalized bodies. They are viewed as the unproductive members of a capitalist society; they are labelled individuals who are considered at once victims and con artists.

Everyday as staff we come face to face with the hopeless realities of many human beings. We are intimately acquainted with the symptoms of a broader problem: from bed bug infestations, slumlords and chronic illness, to suicide threats, "disordered" thinking and drug abuse, violence, the effects of lives spent in institutions and filled with trauma, and a lack of food and shelter amidst so called plenty. But we cannot solve these problems: there is no solution only grey areas. There is no housing, there is no justice despite humanitarian rhetoric, there is no room for everyone to be productive in a society that values productivity above all else.

And poverty is a productive industry.

So we “reduce harm.” We are the paid facilitators, working under the middlemen ( the layers upon growing layers of management), we are the redistributors of scraps.  We are forced into the role, implicitly, of determining who are the deserving vs. the undeserving poor: who gets to have that expired sandwich for cleaning the washrooms, and who gets turned down for a pair of donated boots because they have a history of selling goods on the street.

Yet once you spend enough time on the service provider side of the line you begin to question this distinction, provided you are fortunate enough not to find yourself completely consumed by the contradictions. You realize that we too are inhabiting a grey area, that the divides and boundaries are abstract constructions that barely hold it all together. With increasing certainty, you come to terms with the fact that we are all to some degree "messed up;" that it is the world that is insane, that you were fortunate enough to land on the right side of the divide because you were able to pull it off, to put forth and maintain a mask of respectability. 

I love my job but sometimes the contradictions drive me to the brink of hopelessness when I start really thinking about the implications of the fact that my job exists, that I am spending my days doing what I am doing and that this is necessary, that I love my job. In order to do this job well, it seems you need to find a tricky balance between forgetting the bigger picture (because if you dwell you will go insane) and remembering (because if you don't you will become jaded and even cruel). 

Thankfully we also exist at an everyday, interpersonal level and the people I work with (on both the client and staff spectrum, but major love to my coworkers!) are some of the most amazing folks I have ever met across the board. 

The Only Difference Between Me and a Madman is That I'm Not Mad!