Traffic

My job requires me to drive over an hour each way on the second day to go to a training about creating a unified English Language Arts curriculum for all state juvenile detention facilities. I hate driving long distances. I find curriculum meetings mostly pointless, often meant for nothing more than to say we did. It is shuffling paper to check a box that will appease a bureaucrat, gaining skills that will never be tested or utilized.

And I am content. The instructor, Laura, is wonderful, funny, and charming, which helps my appreciation, but this is not the whole. I am happy because I am doing this instead of going to my facility and because I feel purposeful for the first time since school resumed. My intelligence is not only not underestimated but encouraged. I have answers and input and am not shy about sharing these. It feels close to possession to care about this. Is it worrying I have most felt cheerful when I have not felt like myself?

It is not the first time since school began again that I have wondered if something else is inhabiting my body. I ought to worry somewhat about that.

I have worn out recounting that I work in a broken system, an underfunded juvenile detention facility packed beyond tolerance. The former governor closed others, claiming he only intended to balance a budget that was not unbalanced--though it was actually for ideological/political clout in hopes of riding COVID to the White House. Had he not been called out in the press for inflating numbers and contributing to the deaths of the elderly, it might have worked. Though Cuomo left in ignominy, it didn't countermand his edict to mortally wound the department.

Given this, those at my facility cannot operate as a team. How could we? We are bailing water from a sinking ship while the state sprays us with the hose and exchanges our buckets for leaky Solo cups.

Coworkers assure me these facilities once worked far better, but too many cooks decided to meddle in things that worked because they had their pet theories. They did not have to be the ones to employ these; they were only too happy to let others dirty their hands and suffer the consequences of the failures.

The system is now almost designed to be this broken. We cannot keep youth support specialists (guards) because we overwork them with mandates--we have so few that we must overwork them or have no staff at all, and the cycle persists. When a job fair results in twenty hires, it is no exaggeration to say maybe one will remain in six months. Some quit their first week after training at the academy--again, this is not hyperbole. Of those ten who followed from my former facility upon its closure, none remain--and these were YSSes who had a decade or more working for the state. This facility either burned them out, compromised them, or attacked the moment the YSS exposed their underbelly from misguided optimism.

Sequestering myself in Albany and going to curricular meetings with this trainer is not a job--and likely, I would not want it to be if it were. As a respite, though, it is welcome as a reminder that one can be a teacher and fulfilled, that the material one teaches has relevance and that one's students can learn something other than the shape of a spoon and the keenness of a knife.

At my facility--for these reasons and more--I border dissociation at times, walking through my day without much active thought. It is not that this mannequin isn't me, simply an effortless piece of my brain that assumes control when I am too exhausted to feel fully conscious. "Thomm" is ailing, nursing sleep deprivation and depression, and unsatisfied. Something trained on the algorithm of my life responds so I don't have to. It does a good job, though it lacks all the memory and features; it could do trivia and anything I know by rote, but I only expect it to know your name if I have forced myself to learn it before. I acknowledge there is something existentially unsettling with this defensive programming, but my job barely requires higher brain functions most days; it is not as though I am ceding hours to this automaticity that I would otherwise wish to cherish. It eases social interactions that border on the phatic anyway. So, I am slightly a non-player character. No one knows the difference; I don't need those memories as much.

It is like having my own Tyler Durden, but he is the Narrator in Fight Club: a bored and boring businessman capable of asking with a smile the equivalent of "Working hard or hardly working?" I navigate around the social mores of my job without focusing on what is proper. It's better than trying to start an international terrorist organization, but it's a bit dull for an ongoing dissociative episode.

With Laura running this training, I am present in a way that is nearly impossible in my daily job. I am activated and actualized. I do not know how I would replicate this milieu, though it could not come in a place where I am only tasked with fostering basic literary and scientific skills for the adjudicated. When I taught gifted kids at Vassar a near lifetime ago, I remember this purposeful feeling, part of a learning community that meant something with charges who would never be charged with a felony. That long-ago program wasn't worth the money, and bureaucracy got in the way. Still, it is easier to like children whose most significant trauma is being adopted by loving, privileged parents.

I am not as bothered by my job as this may seem. It supports my lifestyle with enough left over to put in a high-yield savings account, my Roth IRA, and I-Bonds. (I have become an exceedingly dull adult, as I hope has become evident.) If I pinned my identity--or whoever comes out when I am not dissociated from the day--to the outcomes of my apparent career, I would be miserable. However, I am sitting in the back of my head, writing little stories while some Eidolon in a sportcoat tries to get a kid to answer basic questions about the water cycle. I know this is other than sane--but I have abandoned the idea of my perfect sanity. It feels better than my inherent and likely genetic depression and anxiety.

last watched: Fargo
reading: Why Buffy Matters