A Lack of Interest

The obsessions I look into the least in session are those centered around true crime. Call it countertransference; call it a lack of professional curiosity. Label it what you will, but what remains is an utter absence of interest in the very stories that keep many of my clients perched on the edge of their seats, breathless as they recount a tale that has captured their full attention that week. Inevitably, bodies roll across the narrative like a boat skimming across the face of choppy waters. In moments, they've rounded a bend and are out of sight, out of mind, out of session. The climax hurtles forward, and the bodies become a number, a jail sentence, years and children left behind.

Still, I couldn't help clicking on an article in New York Magazine two years ago, well beyond my graduation and into my tenure as a therapist, about the Woodson Houses murders. When I read through the article, I recognized not only the halls I'd walked alone as a social work student but the serial killer's last victim, a woman whose sweetness and idiosyncrasies were out of a Southern Gothic novel.

Hunter College's field placement program is chaotic at best and utterly dysfunctional at worst. At some point in the fall of 2017, I ended up in a minivan with five other social work students, shuttled between sites in East New York and Brownsville. When we landed at Rosetta Gaston and the Woodson Houses, I felt the nerves of the students beside me ratchet up. The housing projects were vast and the center imposing with its cages over the windows and its large, nearly empty dining hall. When it was announced that I would be coming there to work alone, the Japanese student with whom I'd become closest over the course of the day squeezed my hand gently. “I'm glad it's not me,” she whispered.

When I left work, the clients would occasionally tell me they prayed for my safe journey home. I dreaded the time when it would be dark before I left the center at 5:00 p.m.,