Missing the Big Picture by Donovan, Luke (great book club books txt) 📕

though I was never supposed to be left alone with the children, it sometimes just happened to turn out that way. Once when I was supervising, three girls who were supposed to be engaged in quiet hour started dancing to music. Quiet hour was from four to five o’clock each day, and the children were supposed to spend it reading or doing homework. I found it frustrating that the schools never let any of the children take books home. Most of the children went to a special school for emotionally handicapped children that was operated by the same service provider as the Sanchez group home. When I would tutor the kids in math, I would encourage them to use their textbooks, which also helped me verify that what I was remembering from high school was correct; however, the girls would often tell me that they weren’t allowed to bring their books home.

One girl that I spent a lot of time tutoring was Sage. Sage was sixteen and often suffered from delusions and extreme paranoia. At first, many of the staff members were alarmed that I was working with her because they suspected that she had a crush on me. She was very paranoid and would often tell the other children not to eat certain vegetables because the staff was poisoning her. She tried to escape from the van when it was running, and if she saw that the staff was having a meeting, she would often wonder what they were saying about her.

Being with Sage made me uneasy. If she didn’t understand something, she would always blame me. Like a typical adolescent, she always blamed her math teacher as well and said he didn’t help her in class. I was spending four thousand dollars a semester for a graduate degree in social work, and I would often just tutor children, attend meetings, or watch the news or some MTV show with the kids.

I was there three days a week, and each day I would count down how many days I had left. Lisa, the house social worker, attempted to teach me how to conduct therapy. All she told me to do was put my hands on my face and tell the children, “That must be really hard for you.” She didn’t meet with the children weekly, and she would spend most of her day socializing with the other staff. It’s funny—I knew I did like social work, but I definitely didn’t feed the stereotype of the social worker with the bleeding heart. I wanted to help people. I understood mental illness and the effects that it could have on the individual, family, and society. Misbehaving or disrespecting somebody is not a symptom of mental illness, nor should anybody who has a mental illness be allowed to abuse somebody without consequence. The children routinely beat up the staff, and I attended staff meetings where multiple staff members would be wearing slings.

I would often get mad when people blamed the children’s violent behavior on the mental illness. I had suffered from hallucinations, depression, and anxiety, and I never hit anybody.

At the same time that I began graduate school, I started to meet people online. At age twenty-two, I had never kissed anybody and was a total prude. Corey, my friend from SUNY Albany and Home Depot, told me that Craigslist was “a great way to get laid.” The only difference was that I was interested in meeting men, not women.

CHAPTER 8

MALE WHORE

Matthew. 7:1 Do not judge, or you too will be judged.

It ruined my life for years. When I was fourteen, I started to feel attracted to men. The feeling wasn’t something that I welcomed; in fact it just lowered my already low self-esteem. I wanted to commit suicide because of it. Before and during this time, I still felt attracted to women—just not as much as I felt attracted to men. I just wanted for people to like me, to fit in, to be respected. I wanted a regular life. I didn’t want anybody to judge me or place expectations on how I should act. Plus, I didn’t like effeminate men. If I didn’t like butter, meaning women, then why would I like imitation butter, meaning guys who acted like girls.

At one point I thought I was bisexual, but I finally realized that vagina was too confusing for me. I would just have to put up with being called a pussy but never experiencing it. The way I saw things, women were like salad—beautiful and crisp, but they didn’t fulfill my appetite. Men, on the other hand, were like steak—rough and lean, and able to satisfy my hunger.

So, at first I looked through the personals. This all started when I was 22. Now I’m not implying that all gay and bisexual men are promiscuous, but most of the ads I saw were from men of all ages who wanted to either give or receive oral or anal sex. I remember seeing a naked picture of an attractive young man, and the ad said that he wanted to give a guy a blow job. I responded. The man kept asking me for a picture, but I didn’t want to give one. I felt weird being exposed to this new, different element. We ended up chatting on the phone a few times. I knew that he owned a bookstore and later found out that he lied about his age—originally he told me he was twenty-three. So I agreed to meet him outside of a Bruegger’s Bagels. I was nervous and terrified—and then he never showed up. I didn’t know what the man really looked like, so I was just expecting some middle-aged guy to come up to me and offer oral sex. He never showed up, though, and luckily I never asked anybody. A couple weeks later, I gave him a second chance. He e-mailed that