I’ve realised something working with a kid who suffers from mental illness for the past year. There’s a lot more to him than just mental illness, but it’s the best way for me to label him in any way, so that’s what we’re going with for now.
I’ve been working with this kid for 12 hours a week between March and August last year and again from February this year. Except from the period of time where I wasn’t working with him, that’s more than I see my family in a regular week. We’ve bonded pretty heavily, and he’s like a little brother to me.
That said, relationships are a blast when they work, and a real pain in the ass when they don’t. Right now, we’re in a rut because he’s not sleeping properly, and I go over there to wake him up and take him to school every morning. That is, a tired teenager that previously hasn’t been going to school for a year and a half. You can feel the tension there in the mornings.
And he doesn’t seem to care. I caught myself getting angry with him a couple of times, just to realise that it’s not that he doesn’t care about our relationship, he doesn’t care about going to school. Like most other teenagers. He’s not too keen on waking up early to go to a place where he dosen’t see any future.
That got me thinking about how we treat most relationships. We take things personally when we really shouldn’t, because it isn’t. His anger is taken out on me because I’m in the immediate surrounding at the time, and I’m disturbing him in his sleep. I’d get mad too.
The hard part is communicating this in a way that brings change about. As in all relationships.