Bureaucracy, Desire, and Why People Never Lead With the Real Problem
She called about the job. That was the whole reason for the call, as far as the call was concerned. She had lost her employment, she needed to report it, and she needed to know what she had to send us so the report would count. Verification. A letter, a final pay stub, something with a date on it.
Somewhere in the middle of explaining why she couldn’t get that letter, she told me she was sleeping outside.
She didn’t stop to let it land. She said it the way you’d mention a bus route, as context for why the mail was a problem, and then she went right back to asking about the verification. She wanted to know what would happen if she couldn’t get it in by the deadline.
There is no box on the form for what she told me. That’s the part I keep turning over. There’s a box for loss of employment. There are boxes for a lot of things. But the thing she was actually living inside of had no field, no dropdown, no attachment slot, and so she handed it to me sideways, as an obstacle to the paperwork, and then she moved on.
I have thought about her more than I’ve thought about most of my cases. Not because it was the worst thing I’ve heard. It wasn’t. Because of how neatly she’d sized her request to fit what she believed was available.
What People Ask For: The Presenting Problem in Life and Literature
That’s the thing I want to say about it, and it’s the thing I’ve spent a whole book on without realizing that’s what I was doing.
People don’t lead with the real problem. Not because they’re hiding it, and not because they don’t know what it is. They lead with the version of it that the room can receive. In clinical settings, this is often studied as the presenting problem—the initial symptom or surface issue a person brings forward because it feels safer or more manageable to address. She knew the system had a slot for “I lost my job.” She either didn’t know it had a slot for “I have nowhere to sleep,” or she knew exactly what happens when you say that out loud to a state agency, and she made a call. Either way, the ask she brought me was calibrated. It told me what she thought I could hold.
My debut novel, She Will Become, is a story about a woman who asks for sex. She asks for it plainly, repeatedly, and with more nerve than most people have. What she wants is to be loved and stayed with and looked after when she’s ugly about it. She doesn’t ask for that. She asks for the thing she thinks she’s allowed to want, the thing that won’t get her turned down, and she asks for it over and over, and she keeps not being fed.
I didn’t set out to write a book about a presenting problem. I set out to write a book about desire. But the mechanism is identical, and I don’t think I could have written it before I started answering phones for a living.
Writing Characters the Way People Actually Behave
The discipline, for me, is refusing to let her ask nicely.
There’s a version of that character who says the true thing in chapter fourteen, in good light, in a complete sentence, and cries in a way that reads well. That version is a lie, and it’s a lie that flatters the reader more than it serves the character. Real people don’t disclose. They leak.
They tell you the enormous thing as a footnote to the small thing and then change the subject before you can respond, because responding is the risk. They get mean right before they get honest. They ask for the wrong thing on purpose because being refused the wrong thing costs less than being refused the right one.
So I write her ungracious. I write her asking for the smaller thing while the larger thing sits in the room. I write the delay, the deflection, the moment where she almost says it and then makes a joke instead. That’s not me being dark for the sake of it. It’s the only way I know to be respectful of how people actually survive things—a mindset heavily emphasized in modern trauma-informed care frameworks that look past behavioral walls to understand real human survival. If I clean it up, I’m cleaning it up for my own comfort and calling it craft.
What We Can Actually Do: The Intersection of Empathy and Systems
Here’s the part with no good landing.
At my desk, I couldn’t do anything with what she told me. There is no verification document for homelessness that resolves a question about employment. The deadline stayed the deadline. The system’s clock and her clock were not the same clock, and only one of them was in my hands.
What I did was keep track of her. Called back when I didn’t strictly have to. Remembered the case number without looking it up. That is not in the job description, and it is also the entire job, and I’ve stopped trying to make those two facts agree. The system is built to run without needing any particular person to care, which is a feature, and it means the caring is extra, which is the cost.
So: is naming what you see an act of care, or a violation of someone’s right to stay unnamed?
I think it depends on whether you can catch what you’re asking them to drop. She said the true thing sideways and kept moving, and I let her keep moving, because I had nothing to hand her if she’d stopped. In the book I can do better. I can give her twenty more chapters and someone who stays. That’s not a comfort. It’s mostly just the difference between the two desks I sit at, and it’s why I keep sitting at both of them.
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