CEO StoryTelling Project

 

 

Like many of my fellow classmates, I feel as though I was thrown into my work at CEO without knowing what to expect or even what I ought to be doing. To this date, I am still somewhat uncertain on the matter. However, I feel as though I have become a lot more comfortable in the ICCS environment. I have never been to prison and have not interacted too much with the incarcerated. Prison life is a pretty foreign concept to me, and I definitely had no idea of what to expect on the part of those with whom we are working. I was not apprehensive in the sense of being intimidated by CEO’s clients, as I have dealt and interacted with people from all walks of life in my personal experiences, which I do not need to delve into, but was certainly very apprehensive of what was to be expected of me. I am just an average college student who grapples with my own issues concerning employment and basic life skills, how am I to help others with problems I myself struggle with? I felt like I was going into CEO totally blind, entirely unaware of what kind of work I would be doing and uncertain of the value that such work would hold.

 

My first day with CEO, I was working with a man in his 40s who could barely read, which was in and of itself somewhat of a shock to me. I began to grasp the severity of the situation I found myself in. This was overwhelming for the first few weeks at CEO; I felt utterly helpless at the feet of a problem far greater than myself. How could I possibly even approach an issue as great as adult illiteracy? Moreover, I felt highly alienated from those with whom I was working. There was simply no connection. I would show up, go through the motions of trying to help tutor them, awkwardly stand around, and then leave. It was if I was never there in the first place. As a somewhat introverted and quiet individual, I suppose such behavior would be expected, but the thing is, nobody I was working with knows me on a level where they could possibly understand my perspective. I am sure that I was coming off as disinterested and pretentious.

 

Thoughts such as these remained in the backburners of my consciousness, but inevitably came into my active thought process a couple weeks ago. I began to realize that it was not others or the institution I have been working with that make me feel alienated and as though there was some sort of barrier between me and CEO’s clients, but rather it was myself. I had inadvertently put a guard up to cover my own inadequacies. With this thought in mind, I began to go into ICCS with an entirely different perspective on the situation at hand. It is not my own personal task to alleviate something such as adult literacy, but rather it is my role to assist in a large-scale dynamic process. Thinking this way, I found it much easier to open up, at least as much as possible, to clients and found I was no longer anxious about my Monday afternoons.

 

All of my interactions with CEO’s clients have been far greater and more productive over the past few weeks than they were before. For example, I was one day working with a client on reading skills. At first, he was very distant and did not seem to want to be there. That is another thing; many of the individuals at the facility I am working at seem to only be there because it is required of them.  They put on the façade of being “hard” and not caring about seemingly trivial skills they know that they are very unlikely to use in the “real world.” I am not sure of what prison does to the psyche as I have never experienced it, but I can take some guesses and assume that perceived “hardness” and disinterest would be necessary traits one must acquire to even survive in a prison environment, but I digress. Anyway, this man I was working on reading with had the typical demeanor I have encountered and was pretty reluctant to do any work. He had an air of intelligence to him, though, and had the handwriting of an artist. Maybe that is too broad of a claim to make, but I feel like visual artists can typically be spotted by the way they write. There would be no harm in asking if he was an artist, so I did. At first he said no, but then asked if I wanted to see his drawings, which he said were not any good. Of course I wanted to see his them, so he showed me a few of the ones he had with him. He told me he mostly did his art on the inside, it helped pass the time. To be honest, I found his work to be quite good. He is a very talented artist. Of course, it was not the kind of art that one would see in a museum, but that made it all the better. It would be fantastic to see him do murals in the future.

 

I believe that it was this interaction that provided a turning point for my collection of experiences at CEO. It provided me to opportunity to realize that the people I am working with have their own insecurities, their own talents, and their own stories that I was previously bracketing out. Interpersonal interaction is a two way street; I cannot expect to simply let the other individual do all of the work, nor can I simply put myself out in the open. Since this experience, it has been far easier for me to gain meaningful interactions with others at CEO and moreover, it has become easier to tutor. I go in to situations knowing and telling those with whom I’m working that I do not by any means know everything that we are going to go over, but that I’m here to help if they need it. And really, I feel like I have been more helpful than I was before because of this.