It must be hard to have someone like me for a friend. I say this because I not only do not suffer fools gladly...I do not suffer them at all! There are reasons for this. I am a mental health worker and I have become so good at exposing and popping other people's bullshit excuses that I can often sense some people actually tremble at my approach. This tendency of not putting up with crap, by the way, has for me a long history and tradition. It all begins with my mother, whom people who knew her often say I resemble.
When Mom died in early 1991 from lung cancer, I fully embraced one of her qualities that I most admired in her. This would be her sense of clarity and transparency. Even if she wasn't fully forthcoming with me about some things about her own life, she was incredibly, almost embarrassingly honest. She hated hypocrisy. She could be harsh, but that doesn't matter. She taught me to love truth and that for me is her undying legacy to me.
When I became a Christian, I was surrounded suddenly by the most incredible sweet and intense love I had ever experienced. This love of course comes from God, who is himself love (sorry, I don't do politically correct pronouns! I also acknowledge that God is not defined by gender). Love and truth became for me the twin pillars as I was already building at the age of fifteen my present and future life. Truth finds its origins and very substance in love. Love is formed and constructed in truth. I came to love truth, and to be true in my love. I am not referring here to romantic love but the Agape, or universal and unconditional love of God. This is the love that embodies truth and the love that is informed and sustained by truth.
Despite the difficulties in getting academic credentials, I have managed to work consistently in fields and professions that honour truth and love. When I became a home support worker at the age of twenty-four it opened to me the difficult and beautiful pilgrimage of caring for the dying and the most destitute and unwanted people in my city. Then everything became subsumed into the critical mass of street and bar and coffee shop ministry as God led me into the gay and trans and survival prostitution communities, taking great care to be present as their brother as I learned more than I could ask or imagine from a huge diversity of people. Many were afflicted by AIDS, which in those days was a death sentence. I became part of a new Christian community and much good that I am still trying to unravel and discover was forged in my life.
I later worked for a year in a homeless shelter, and now, for the past sixteen years I have been a mental health support worker. I would like to be able to claim that I have developed incredible compassion and patience for others. But I'm afraid that those capacities are still very much under construction for me. I have become very skeptical towards people when they are even gently nudging my bullshit metre, and this does happen frequently.
With my CV in care giving and pastoral care and support, I sometimes feel that I have to give others as they become friends or near-friends this caveat emptor:
In my work and experience with individuals who have had to survive by their wits, who often have to lie in order to get through the day, be they hookers (as I was saying about politically correct terminology...), drug dealers, people with addictions, and devil worshippers. Not to mention some of the most egregiously two-faced and hypocritical and apostate Anglicans I never thought could exist on this side of the Spanish Inquisition. I have become very good at identifying lies, dissimulation and dishonesty, and in my practice as a mental health worker, I am particularly adept at exposing and popping people's lame excuses for not getting on with their lives. I don't care who you are, your social position, how much money you make, or how big and lovely and expensive a home you live in. You have all been warned. I will not stand for duplicity, or dishonesty, or lying. Whatever you tell me, I am simply going to file and categorize as what you would like me to believe. I will not call it an outright lie. But don't expect me to swallow it either. Consider yourselves warned. And, no, I don't expect you to invite me to lunch or dinner, and really, darling, I have a headache tonight.
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