This is a reflection I'd written for my Fellowship class. It references Adrian LeBlanc's book Random Family, a true story about people living in the city in the 1990's. 

Final Reflection

The women in the Random Family seem to be forever governed by a fight against themselves. It climaxes with the men who leave them with children and play with other women, or the men who are incarcerated and write them threatening letters from the grave inside – Cesar’s letters to Coco had her anxiously picking at her face, hugging her arms to her body, seeking comfort from other people (and in this she lied to the people who had given her housing. Here the reader sees the ever-present tug of war between the people that want to help the marginalized person and the person who violates the boundaries set by those people, and will they ever learn and I am trying to help you and why can’t you just follow the rules).

My sympathy leans towards Coco. Jessica’s life was dramatic; between her relationships and the pain they invoked and her time incarcerated, Jessica’s life played out like a comic book. Because of that, it was easier to read about her and not get attached. Jessica was a work of fiction that I did not humanize because I didn’t see my own body pressed up against the guard, or picking up the phone and harassing Boy George’s other women. Coco was graspable, and that made her more human. Coco picked at her face. As I read, I ran my pointer finger over the pink scars on the knuckles of my thumbs and nodded along, remembering how there were nights when I couldn’t hold a pencil without feeling the dull ache of pain, because of how much I’d picked. I’d reduce myself to a bloody mess and bandage myself up, wait to heal, repeat, repeat. (Truthfully, this is why I began to wear the red lipstick – I knew that I’d get lipstick all over my face and hands if I continued to tear my fingers up with my teeth. It was a crutch masking as a statement. I know what happens if I take it off. So I don’t. Tug of war, Anna and Coco.)

I shivered as I read about Coco letting her children go hungry rather than trying to take on the rats in her kitchen, while the baby cried. I could see myself soothing my own crying baby while staying away from creatures like that. I could also see myself arming myself with a broom and taking my chances. Coco loved a man who was incarcerated, but Coco had a child from another man and lived with yet another one. Coco still felt obligated to that incarcerated man, the father of her other children. Coco asked a man to live with her on a whim. She danced in the kitchen and held onto photographs. “You are not Coco,” I’d mumbled to myself. I’m not any of the women I interact with in the justice system, nor am I am Woman Who Loves Someone Incarcerated. It didn’t matter. I saw myself.

My push and pull with Coco is the same as the push and pull with the women who both visit my office and the ones I see at the Secure Center – young girls. A memory: I am given a list of three students who were on Academic Probation. Diligently, I call the three students, receiving an eager response from the man, but nothing from the two women. I explain this all to my supervisor. “Yeah,” she says, half laughing, “you probably won’t get a response from them.” These two women dodged emails, phone calls – anything our office could do short of a home visit to insist to them we were simply trying to help them enroll in school again. My conclusions when I think about the women who do not respond to me are different than the assumptions I will make about the men who are also skirting my calls. A man will not answer me and I shrug my shoulders. What are you gonna do, Anna? He’s not answering, that’s it; stop trying. I can make peace with this lack of communication. There are others that do want to talk to me (and when I say me, I mean PRI, I mean social services, I mean relief, the relief I’m so sure I can give (and in this, I suck my teeth at myself – all this arrogance in social services is going to make my inevitable fall into concrete failure so much bloodier)). It’s different with women. There is a very tiny part of me that reacts so personally and volatilely when I watch a woman slip through our organization. “It doesn’t have to be this way!” I consider screaming – into the dead air of the office; into the void. All of these thoughts run through me, as I look at my supervisor and nod. “Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll focus on the others, then.”

I recognize my hypocrisy in seeing myself in other women to the extent that I do. I will have entire arguments with myself and wrap myself in a blanket of anxious comparisons when I consider how I am different from the people I work with and for. None of these women have asked me to stamp my face onto their bodies. I struggle to convey my feelings – it is not that I need to visualize myself in a story to extract any empathy I wouldn’t otherwise have (though I imagine it helps). When I was sixteen and working at Victim Impact Panels, taking down the names of other sixteen-year-olds who looked exactly like me, the surrealistic thought of “this could have been me” swam through my cerebral cortex but buried itself not long after. I also don’t “see myself” in the girls in my Fellowship class – maybe because our conversations, however intimate they may be, are not LeBlanc-intimate. I see myself in Coco because she doesn’t love herself. It is like seeing a character depicting who I could have been if I hadn’t gained a sense of confidence and a healthy disposition shortly after moving to this city. It’s what drives me up a wall with women who are not driven in the same way that I am. “It doesn’t have to be this way” is what I want to tell another version of myself – a different Anna. Another memory: I have turned in my “feelings log” to my supervisor, who has circled four different areas of my writing. “This is all projection,” she tells me. “Did you know you do this?”

Sometimes the girls at the Secure Center will speak about their experiences. When they do, the voice in my mind comes back – not harried and screaming like before. The voice trembles and makes my whole body shiver. “I wanted so much more for you,” my mind says to these girls – to the different Anna. By reading Random Family and examining my feelings after visiting the Secure Center, I find what I’ve curled that ribbon of sadness running through my sympathetic nervous system. It’s the sense of helplessness, the one that I may never get over – Coco is trapped on the pages, and the students are trapped in cages the moment I leave (and the different Anna sits behind my eyes, caught in a whirlwind of what-ifs that I cannot shake). There are days when I drown in the feelings. Other times I smooth them over like clay and store them neatly in a box. I sit on both sides – the woman who cannot help herself, and the woman who shakes her shoulders and says let me help you.

PRI doesn’t serve women nearly as much as they should, but I am sure this is because women simply don’t cross through our doors as often as their male counterparts. There are fifteen boys and three girls in the classrooms at the Secure Center. At our screening of 13th, I was bothered by how the film did not take a moment to address how women were the fastest-growing prison population. I wonder if this has a hand in my investment in women – no one taught me how to deal with these feelings, because women were so often an afterthought in these dialogues.

I am learning to recognize projection – this is my takeaway. I am learning to recognize projection and how to mitigate my feelings of helplessness. Tomorrow I will go to the Secure Center, and see the girls again, the ones my mind cries out for. I will listen when they talk, and try to keep my mind from venturing into a powerless state. I will grudgingly continue to write logs to my supervisor, because even though it drags my feelings out of the boxes I have put them in, she points things out to me that I could not see. I will ask my classmates how to wade through these feelings. I will try to view Coco from a more objective angle; there is nothing I can do for her. Instead, I will ask PRI what initiatives we do have for women, and how I can take a stronger role in them. Activism will clear my thoughts. A solid plan will soothe the voice. I will not fight the tug of war of Someone helping Someone – instead, I will offer what I have, and wait.