7 “I Was The Only Person At Burning Man in 2020 and “If There’s No Furniture, I’ll Sit On The Floor”

00:00

So I had a dear friend, Smokey the Gentle Giant. He was the horse that all the children rode for 25 years. And he'd fallen ill because people were standing at the fence and saying, that old horse, he's gonna die. He's old. Look how sick he is. He's so old. The owner requested I put Smokey down. And I was heartbroken. My friend, the butcher called and said, shall we harvest his skull? As a treasured momento, Smokey. I'm a vegetarian and I don't.

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take to violence towards animals. I'm an animal person. But this sounded like such an honorable right thing to do that we did it. And we were caught by the security guard who then accused me of witchery. And I went down and ended my 12 year horseback riding career amid a flurry of witchcraft rumors. Still to this day, there are people who cross themselves when they see me.

00:58

I'm living in a 1984 trailer, the Hitchhiker Champagne Edition, and I've been in it 17 years. I have a very low overhead. I'm a gig worker now. I work at the Pescadero thrift store with some of my peers, two older ladies, and we have a grand time. Not much money, but community-based work that I'm finding gratifying.

01:28

really making sure that my philosophies and how I want to be treated stay intact. And I do that through humor and pushing the top guy at the top, slave and master, it's dominance and submission. It's straight up hierarchy in your face every day, unless you don't play that way, which is my game. So I worked as a waitress at the brewery, which was a young crew again, that all came together.

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award-winning brews. The couple sold the first business and once the new owners took over it wasn't quite as magical so none of the magical crew stayed very long. Then I went to Whale City Bakery and was a barista, lovely bakery that was delicious and fun. Met a lot of good friends there and then I started really gig working like

02:27

US census door to door during the pandemic. Trump decided he wanted the census to continue despite a statewide lockdown. So I was the only person at Burning Man in 2020 because it was in my district and had there been revelers I would have had to census them but there was no one there but me at

02:55

At the lighthouse, it's just a lovely tribe and it's a great community of people to be in. We're kind to each other and caring. It's visually stunning with low coastal terraces, and then it goes up about 30 feet to these big flat terraces above the ocean that are just beautiful. And then we're in a sacred Ohlone ground also of the Chalk Mountains.

03:24

make a big envelope with the white sand beaches. So it's a really sacred place from Pigeon Point down to the Waddell Creek in particular. I've been all over and then I am of Cherokee ancestry. I was born here for a reason and that's cause I love it here. I pull up there and see the ocean crashing on the rocks and people from all over the world, just soaking up that, just easy to be happy here.

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Jeff, who's been there the longest, has established a culture of positivity, number one. Like that's our go-to. We're gonna be positive with one another. No one complains about anything or says what needs to be improved. We're either in the act of improvement or we're leaving it alone. We're not, and I like that I'm working with different aged people as well. It's task-based. These are your tasks.

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own it, Kelsey put it, grow into the position yourself and figure out your own mystery and joy to how you're going to do what you do. And if you're not being oppressed and have a management style where they're telling you what to do and then watching you do it and then commenting on how you do it, that's spirit killing stuff. I mean, we're human. We know how to do things because yeah, we're there for the money.

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But we're also there to stand back at the end of the day at the hostel and go, well, all the houses are clean. The hot tub is ready. The chemicals are balanced. That's me. I did that for my people.

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05:04

Hey folks, it's Naty. We'll be back with more right after this break.

05:15

I got introduced to this beautiful office with a telephone and a computer and I got this first job working as a counselor and that was the day that everything closed. So they sent me to work from home but I was living on the boat at the time. I had limited internet, limited electricity and believe it or not I actually had limited telephone credit at that time as well. This is how different things are.

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It was a huge undertaking with people walking past on the pontoon and trying to do therapy and the dog barking and running out of internet at very key times and also having to work online and on the telephone, which I hadn't trained to do in any way at all. I was trained to work face to face. So I sort of stepped into this new world, the world had changed. So then I basically said to my manager, I can't work at home. She sort of said, OK, well, you can go use the office.

06:06

I've now got three different offices that I can use, and I can work from home, and I'm a hybrid worker now. So I've actually got used to this lifestyle that I fought against, like, to begin with, when it was, like, working from home and working online. I was like, I f***ing hate this. I'm gonna fight it every day. I want to riot. I want fighting in the streets. I can't put up with this crap. We're gonna lose our industry. And I still don't like working on telephone and working online. I will do it, but I prefer face-to-face therapy. I'm a massive advocate for it. That's kind of happened in between, but then recently,

06:36

The company that I was working for lost the contract in Nottingham. Everything has changed. Like, there's a new computer system and I'm quiet. I'm not very computer-literate. I can sort of fight things a bit and make sure I get what I need. And I can sort of use my privilege to the green. If I start stamping my feet and complaining, and people sort of go, OK, OK, yeah, all right, just give him what he needs, then he'll be quiet again. But it's not like that for everyone. Some people kind of get like...

07:05

shepherded into jobs where it's a bit harder for them. So for instance, recently they've started to encourage people to work in shared rooms, which is for me, it's just astonishing that they'd ever ask me to do that because I need to use my mind at all times, I need to have full concentration on my clients' process and they need proper privacy as well.

07:28

And for a while, they were kind of, you can work like this. And I was like, well, no, I can't, you know, I don't care if there's no furniture, I don't care if there's no heat, so I wear a coat. If there's no furniture, I'll sit on the floor. Whatever. I can work in a building that doesn't have a roof, but I need a private room. Otherwise, I can't do my job as I see it without that. But the danger is, I think, now that they'll train people to work like that. They'll make these people.

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and not everybody can fight against it. There's staff that can't work from home for different reasons. I can, which means whenever I want to, I can just disappear. I can go in, I can see my face-to-face clients. If it's two in the afternoon, I can disappear and come home. I can just work from home. It's beautiful. That's a wonderful thing. But not everyone's in that position. Some people have got difficult relationships with pets at home and children, which means they're forced into working in the office and they've got less power, I don't know why.

08:20

things have told a certain way, do you know the way things are told? Like, oh, you know, we're reaching different parts of the community, which translates to, we're watering down the service. I just don't like the, you know, the always taking the easy option. I sort of think two or three of the counseling centers closed in Nottingham over the pandemic because people just didn't make an effort to use them when they were open. People took the option of like, okay, well I can move my client base online. And you know, I understand that people need to do what they need to do.

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use a counselling centre which provides subsidised therapy to people in the community. So if I take my money out of that, then that's a lump of money every month that they get from me which helps other people to have subsidised therapy. Another thing, it's good to have one eye on that or at least have somebody around you that encourages you to make those kind of decisions. My experience is that there are a lot of people in society, if you can call it society.

09:16

that were just about surviving, you know? They were like, you know, they weren't necessarily the happiest, but they had stuff in their lives that helped them regulate, you know? Hobbyists' interests, they go out, they see their friends occasionally. Just the general stuff that seems like, you know, like a given, but like, it was taken away from them during C19. And it just pulled them under, you know? There was like people that were just bobbing on the top, and then it came along and it pulled them under.

09:40

With some people, it's like putting them into the recovery position in the first few sessions, helping people to regulate a little bit, build some boundaries, communication, cutting off certain situations that are draining energy from them. And then they start to like, they have more energy, so then they start to like, create more with the energy they have. And then you're like, you know, you can sort of like watch them and they're like, okay, well actually, I did this, and they use that energy to do something else positive that gives them yet more energy.

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One of the criticisms will be, well, don't people only get six or eight sessions? Or 10 sessions or 12 sessions? So yeah, people get 12 sessions. Rather than saying people only get it, you can say, well, people get this. You can see a trained therapist in a short space of time for free. I can't imagine it's gonna be like that forever. You know, the government will try and strip it back and strip it back. People will say to me, oh, well, you can't do much in that amount of time. And it's like, do you think I would waste my time going in there three days a week?

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and doing my job. If I didn't think I could support people, I want to help people. And I believe it's a good way to support people that you would never see them in private flats. There's no way they're spending money every week to come and do it. They can't afford it. They don't have the inclination either. They don't really quite know how they would afford it, if they could, or how that would work. They need support from services. Hope you liked the episode. Please help us out by rating us.

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