I’ve spent most of my life looking at the dashboard. Lately, people have started opening the hood.
There is something I’ve discovered in my new job... or jobs, because apparently at this stage of life I have decided one paycheck is too predictable. I’ve met some of the most unguarded people I’ve ever known. Not realistic as in they understand compound interest or remember to rotate their tires. Real. The kind of real that makes you realize how much of your previous life may have been covered in a thin layer of professional varnish.
For most of my career in education, I was surrounded by people who knew how to present the best version of themselves. I did it, too. Of course I did. I knew how to walk into a room, shake hands, smile appropriately and say, “I appreciate your perspective,” when what I really meant was, “That may be the dumbest thing I have heard all week.” We called it professionalism. And sometimes it was. Other times, it was simply a carefully edited sliver of who we really were.
I don’t want to call people phony because that makes me sound like a modern-day Holden Caulfield, and nobody needs that kind of literary responsibility before breakfast. But there was polish.
Then I started working in addiction and faith. And apparently the dress code there is: You get what you get and you don’t get upset. Kindergarten has finally prepared me for something.
The people I work with tend to say what they mean. They tell you what they think about life, God, other people and themselves. They tell you what happened to them. They tell you what they did. Sometimes they tell you what they wish they had done differently. There isn’t much wrapping paper. No bow. Just the thing itself. It has been strangely refreshing. And occasionally terrifying.
I’ve had conversations with people who spent years in prison. Not a weekend in county jail because of a stupid fight at a bar. Years. People who know the difference between jail and prison, probation and parole, because those aren’t vocabulary words to them. They are chapters.
I knew the terminology before. I just didn’t know the stories. And stories have a way of taking information you thought you understood and turning it into something entirely different.
One man told me his story, and I honestly wasn’t sure whether to listen harder or ask someone to check his birth certificate. He started drinking when he was eleven. At eleven, I was probably worried about getting home in time to watch television. He was learning how to survive.
Before he was sixteen, he had watched ten people die in his neighborhood. By sixteen, I had probably seen ten kids in one place only because somebody had organized a Wiffle Ball game. His friends stole cars. They committed stick-ups. Nobody got a soundtrack. Everybody eventually paid a price.
Over the course of his life, he spent sixteen years in prison. He is fifty years old. There are people who have spent less time in college.
At one point, he was facing many more years behind bars when, through a combination of circumstances and what he would probably describe as catching a break, he got another chance. He took it.
Nobody expected him to make it to twenty-one. Today, he is fifty. He works. He helps other people. He has a family of his own. He cares for his parents and his sister in his home. From everything I’ve witnessed, he is a responsible father, husband, brother and son.
He’s not a large man. He’s almost springy. There is an energy to him even when he’s sitting still, like some part of him is permanently prepared to move. But he’s also a much mellower version of the person he once was. Time sanded down the edges. So did consequences. Recovery. Age. Maybe grace.
The old wiring is still there. Respect matters deeply to him. He gives it freely, but he expects it back. And when he feels disrespected, I can see something change. His temperature rises. His body knows before his mind has time to explain anything. There are moments when containing himself becomes work.
It’s not difficult to understand why. Trauma doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it lives quietly in the nervous system, waiting for a word, a look or a perceived slight that resembles something from long ago. The person changes. The circumstances change. The life changes. But the body remembers.
And yet, when I sit across from him, I don’t see the kid who stole cars. I don’t see the eleven-year-old who started drinking. I don’t see the teenager who watched people die. I see a remarkably intelligent, articulate, funny and deeply reflective man.
He is one of the best storytellers I’ve encountered. He can tell you exactly what happened to him without asking you to feel sorry for him. That is rare.
He isn’t the person he was. But he isn’t untouched by that person either. Maybe none of us are.
Being around him has made me think about how quickly we decide who people are. We see the neighborhood. The clothes. The record. The tattoos. The mistakes. The worst chapter. Then we decide we know the whole book. We don’t.
If you met this guy without knowing his history, you’d probably assume he lived next door. Maybe not Ned Flanders. Let’s not get carried away. But possibly Ted Lasso.
That has been one of the strange gifts of the work I’m doing now. It is forcing me to look again.
For most of my life, I understood systems from the outside. I knew policies, budgets, procedures and terminology. I knew what happened on paper. The people I work with now know what those systems feel like from inside them.
They know what it feels like when trauma moves through a family. When violence becomes normal. When substance use becomes addiction. When addiction becomes survival. When survival leads to incarceration. When incarceration becomes another layer of trauma.
I have heard things I don’t completely understand. Things I don’t completely agree with. And things that have forced me to reconsider assumptions I carried around for decades without examining them.
It’s easy to believe you understand the world when most of the people around you have experienced roughly the same version of it. Then somebody walks into your life carrying an entirely different map, and suddenly your certainty starts to look a lot like ignorance wearing a nice suit.
I’ve also wrestled with what to do with the stories people trust me with. I don’t want to collect people’s pain like souvenirs. I don’t want to turn somebody else’s trauma into an interesting dinner conversation.
These stories belong to the people who lived them. But I also don’t believe we’re supposed to hear another person’s truth and simply place it back on the shelf. There has to be some responsibility that comes with being trusted.
Maybe it begins with listening. Really listening.
Maybe sometimes it means telling a story with permission, humility and enough restraint not to turn someone’s life into an inspirational movie where everything gets wrapped up neatly in the final ten minutes. Because real life doesn’t do that.
The demons don’t always leave. The record doesn’t disappear. Trauma doesn’t politely conclude at the end of Chapter Twelve. Recovery isn’t a straight line. People don’t become tidy just because they become better.
I’m still figuring all of this out. For once, I’m trying not to force an answer. I’m listening.
And the more I listen, the more I realize that some of the people I once might have assumed needed to be taught something are the very people teaching me.
For most of my life, I thought wisdom came from knowing more. Now I’m beginning to think it may come from finally understanding how much you never knew.
I spent fifty-five years building a pretty good map of the world. Lately, people have been handing me pieces of the territory I somehow left off.
Turns out I knew a lot about the dashboard.
But now the hood is open.
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