First person plural disabled.
Once upon a time, I was the world’s worst social worker, or at least felt like I was the world’s worst social worker. I knew for a fact this wasn’t true: in fact, I knew many others who were demonstrably worse, or spent their days wandering around the office setting the copier on fire, walking around on fire themselves, or driving company vans full of newly arrived refugees into poles and thus setting them on fire.
It was a good time in my life in some senses. I learned the exact length and degree of my own emotional crippledom, since working with refugees tests your ability to manage your emotions in a semi-healthy fashion. I’m somewhere between your average English person and a Swede in that sense: steady in crisis, but only because none of it really registers until the breakdown hits, and you burn down your house and run to the pub. I learned that if you want something done and done forcefully, you point an African woman at it, get behind her, and enjoy the crunching noise things in her way make as she runs roughshod over them. I learned that I was too hopelessly scattered and annoyed by people to ever succeed in the job I did, as I always lost the paperwork, and often found myself holding back screams in my throat when discussion of any topic went past the fifteen minute mark.
(This is not an exaggeration: I would go in the bathroom and scream into shirt out of sheer frustration in the middle of meetings. I’m sure someone heard this and assumed I was having some kind of intestinal Ragnarok in the bathroom. Apologies, random whomever–you didn’t have to hear that.)
I did manage not to screw up the program I ran too badly, an accomplishment of sorts in the non-profit world. I managed not to get fired, though not without management noting that I was “spending a lot of time doing something else.” (You’re looking at it.) I also inadvertently started the whole series of events leading to this:
Warren wrote the article, then the book, and now it’s two and a half years later and there’s three hundred-odd pages on my desk full of Clarkston, Georgia, refugees, and a community I dipped in and out of over a three and a half year span of my adult life. (more…)
I mean, of course he is. If this coaching staff had anyone left in their corner at all after treating a reeling, gutted fanbase to a full quarter of Jonathan Crompton, I’d love to hear from them.
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