Malcom

Malcolm

“If I don’t come back in tomorrow, just throw all of my stuff away,” he remarked, somewhat sadly but also soberly at the same time.  These are just not words that you want to hear a youth say.  Malcolm had court in the morning and we all realized there was a possibility that we wouldn’t be seeing him again the next evening.  Or any evening after that for a very long while.  He didn’t know what the outcome would be and suspected that he might be detained.

I waited the next evening with bated breath when it was time to open the doors. But I heard his voice from around the corner before I saw him coming, walking and talking boisterously with all of his friends.  I inwardly let out a huge sigh of relief.  Apparently he had beat the case and he was free!  And, as usual, Malcolm would always come in with a bang.  In celebration, we made sure he got a large plate of his favorite thing, home-made spaghetti, even though it wasn’t on the menu that night.  

In a way, Malcom sort of reminded me of an adolescent lion: playful, curious, and very social but you can still sense their (developing) power.  He wasn’t aggressive really or even physically imposing.  He was mostly just extroverted with a lot of natural leadership qualities, gregarious, and opinionated-particularly with respect to whatever he felt like was injustice.  Many of the residents looked up to him and enjoyed having him around, primarily, because he just knew how to make the atmosphere lively and fun for them.  Staff, on the other hand, found him to be a handful and were having a lot of difficult interactions with him.  He seemed to always be doing things that tested boundaries of staff members.  Often, if he felt rejected or threatened in some way, his tendency was to push back with verbal aggression.  On occasion, he would lose his temper or resort to petty acts of intimidation to re-balance what he might feel like is a power dynamic.  

Malcolm wasn’t very trusting of authority figures.  We didn’t know a whole lot about his personal history, but in the context of his system-involved background and his experiences out on the streets, I had at least a basic understanding of why he didn’t trust easily. We were certainly never unsure about his enthusiasm and gratitude about being there.  However, we were unsure about how long he would be able to stay there with consistent inability to comply with program rules and to get along with others. 

Unfortunately it wouldn’t be long.  One night, he ended up getting into a heated argument with another resident late one evening and threw an object in their direction.  No one was injured and the argument didn’t escalate into a full-blown altercation, but because things had gotten physical, he had to be asked to leave.  The result would be a suspension that would stick for a while.  And given the fact that there simply weren’t a whole lot of other residential options available for him to access, I felt tremendous worry for him.  So he left that night.  And it was difficult after that to try to track him down directly.  

Then, thankfully, after a while had passed, I got some news about his whereabouts.  We had a partner agency that would often work with the youth who stayed with us to get them into permanent housing.  It turns out that he had been placed into a unit of his own through an emergency housing program that they were running, and that he was living independently and doing well.  Once again, I breathed a huge sigh of relief.  And this time, when I exhaled, the emotional weight that I’d continually felt seemed to be released right along with the breath.