See? I am intelligent. by Claire Berman

He was sitting in a small enclave in the side of a brick building downtown, hands folded in front of him, with an overflowing plastic bag beside him that crinkled and rustled in the autumn breeze. It was chilly, but at the same time, unseasonably warm for November, and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. People brushed by him, talking on cell phones, talking to each other, texting – but always, their eyes were focused straight ahead. No sideways glances were afforded to him.

So he sat perched, observing a group of twenty-somethings not ten feet from him discussing how to get to a restaurant. His face was stoic, and at first it wasn’t clear that he was listening. But just as they appeared to give up hope of finding the right street, he called out to them.

“The street you’re looking for is perpendicular to the water,” he said, describing it in relation to several other landmarks. They stared. He repeated himself, this time with a hand gesture to demonstrate “perpendicular.”

“Oh, ok – thanks,” one of the men said to him, with a sidelong glance at his friends. And then they took off.

“See?” the man said to the newly vacant sidewalk before him, as if they were still ten feet away. “I am intelligent.”

I watched it all unfold as I was speed walking to get to class. The whole interaction took less than 30 seconds. But when I heard his words, my head snapped in his direction. I slowed and looked more closely. He had refolded his hands neatly in front of him and was looking off to his left with his chin held high – possibly with pride, but maybe not. Maybe it was what he needed to hold up in that moment of dismissal. The late afternoon sunlight slanted into his face and created a dark mirror shadow on the concrete wall behind him.

I felt a strong urge to acknowledge what he said – to let him know that someone had heard him and believed him, even if I didn’t know anything else about him or the situation. I wanted to show him that his words hadn’t disappeared into the abyss of busy downtown commuters. But he never looked back at me. I twisted my head forward again and finished walking the three remaining blocks to campus.

I thought about him all night in class. I thought about how strange I might have seemed for approaching him, how maybe he just wanted to be left alone, and how I could very well have been intruding on his space by approaching him and inserting myself into the situation. He might have asked me to leave him alone.

But then – maybe not. Maybe he just wanted to be acknowledged and seen. And isn’t recognition at the core of what we all want and need, when it really comes down to it? It seems like the most basic of all human rights. No one wants to feel invisible.

And this is what I see as being at the core of what we do at C4. We reject invisibility. So many see only the indistinct shadow against the brick wall, but we see the person casting the shadow. And whether it’s through training providers, writing literature reviews, or producing online learning modules, we see (and help others see) people experiencing homelessness in full color, recognizing the rich experiences that have led them here, and equally importantly, the resilience that can lead them into recovery.

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