This afternoon, I got this letter at the front desk at the Pine Street Inn. It is from the director of the women's side of the shelter:
_________
"Dear Lena,
I received your voice message from last night. I'd like to offer a time for you, (a psychiatric clinician at the Pine Street Inn) and me to meet in order to avoid any miscommunication. It was not my intention for you to think that you should not reach out to me. I'd like to make sure we have a good plan in place we can all agree on.
If you are available (date and time) we can meet then. Please let (the psychiatric clinician) or me know if this time can work for you.
Thanks,
(The director of the women's side of the Pine Street Inn.)"
________
September 3, 2015
The psychiatric clinician that she's mentioning is someone to whom I have spoken throughout the summer about the male employee who persistently stalks and harasses me. For a while, she got a bed saved for me every day so that I could avoid him and avoid the shelter. That was helpful, except that I started to feel isolated from the parts of the social life at the Pine Street Inn that are not hostile to me. When you live with a lot of people, and you're all going through the same things to a certain degree, you do get to know people. I also felt that I had to think of ways to be out of the shelter all afternoon, to justify that I was getting a saved bed. I did spend some afternoons at the library, studying for the science program that I was hoping to attend this fall. If you're homeless and not at the library, though, you have to be somewhere in the afternoon when the weather starts to get colder, and almost everywhere costs money. I didn't think that not having to do the bed lottery even though I wasn't working or in school would help me socially, either, and it was definitely causing resentment toward me from the supervisor who is a personal friend of the male employee who stalks and harasses me, and from some of the other staff. The saved bed didn't seem to me to be a solution that would continue to work. It seemed to me that what needed to happen was that the man be made to stop harassing and stalking me.
Copyright L. Kochman, September 3, 2015 @ 3:06 p.m.
