This might be easier to read and follow than my instinct suggested as I began.
I've been thinking about "having my back against a wall" versus "having a goal."
As I've scrambled to take (nearly) any job that will higher quickly, I'm feeling the familiar waves of panic, motivation, relief, dread, and comfort - all tentative - and on rotation over the course of each day. It's not unfair to say that for most of my adult life, I've had something of a plan, contingencies, and emergency pull-switches for ensuring I could keep a certain standard and platform for my life. The plan is always lacking, but has been acutely felt recently.
Back when I had considerably less perspective, I took it for granted things would be about as easy for me in life , as it pertained to jobs or professional obligations, as it had been for me in school. I was lucky enough to be born with a big enough brain that allows a solid amount of what life asks of you to come pretty easy. It is exceptionally rare that I'm at a job for even 3 months before being ask-told to learn the next thing, take on more, or become a supervisor or manager. That is, provided I'm not trying to cross into an upper-class environment.
Here, thoughts about "showing versus telling" come up. I can get pretty dramatic in how I describe my feelings or what I think the "inevitable consequences" will be of a course of action. It's not that I don't feel intensely. It's not that I'm talking purely irrationally and just routinely predict incorrectly. It's that when I pull back and look at my behavior and pair it against my most ridiculous or hyperbolic writing, or most compelling and exhausting stomach-dropping, headaches, and jaw-clenching, I almost without-fail do the things necessary to appropriately and accountably respond to the moment.
The first of which is writing. I'm exceptionally rarely going to actually scream, hit something, or drive a little too fast a little too buzzed around a blind corner. I don't oblige people to "handle me at my worst," nor do I take some kind of secret undue pride in the amount of chaos I can embody. This is showing, to myself first, that I'm thinking more carefully, deliberately, and acknowledging each wave of feeling or choice word as it hits me. The words aren't hot, sharp, heavy, or dangerous. At bottom, they don't inherently mean anything, except to me, and except if they can be construed in a way that I calm down, pick a direction, or make a certain amount of peace with my antagonized moment.
I think it's important to point out that it's never "fixed" or "settled." I'm, forever, processing. I'm weighing the last thing I demonstrate against the next thing I feel, and am constantly balancing.
It's the first day of early voting in Indiana. My two closest friends in the area pay next to no attention, if not actively avoid politics. They aren't fascists, but they could easily "forget" to vote. I'm incredibly sympathetic to their feelings, and wholly angered by their ambivalence. I can't trust they would vote without my intervention. Whether or not they "believe" in the consequences of participating in the maintenance of the country, their actions, and the reason we're friends, suggest they don't want to sleepwalk into fascism. Materializing the consequences of ambivalence for someone is nearly impossible.
So it goes for all of us about the infinite list of things we aren't paying attention to. You don't pay that close attention to the words you choose or friends you keep? I've watched that turn into chronic addiction attempting to cope with instantiated abuses and excuses. You don't pay attention to how much time you spend at work? I've watched that balloon family and child problems because a narrative about "taking care of your family" doesn't include the time to foment emotional well-being after being reduced to a desperately-sought dollar amount. A dollar amount often explicitly not even budgeted for, so people will work over-time or several jobs and not register they are making sometimes
less than if they worked less after gas, taxes, and other opportunity costs.
Here we can bring it back to an examination of class. Rich people, significantly more often than they'll ever admit, work less and earn more. There are plenty of hyper-focused talented and particularly-skilled people who deserve every penny of every minute they spend exercising there worth. For every one of those people, there are tens of thousands more who simply own everything. They indefinitely benefit from their family history, adjacency to privileged places, or other circumstances invariably downplayed in their autobiography/self-help book.
It would be foolish, for example, for me to pretend I'm not, as measured by many tests, "generally intelligent." It doesn't mean I'm wise. It doesn't mean I'm likeable. It doesn't mean I'm suitable for your team or can figure anything out I please. It just means I'll be able to describe and execute how to navigate all of those deficiencies in a way most won't. Whether I find the will, capitalize on an opportunity, or manifest the luck that sees my circumstances improved remain indefinitely open questions. General intelligence, in and of itself, doesn't mean shit if people don't like you, trust you, or recognize and respect what you're showing them.
I can show myself the work to remain "sane" or "stable," but that doesn't mean it translates. I can work myself to death accomplishing tasks at a job, but it doesn't mean I'm emanating pride in my work that anyone looking at won't simply resent or seek to undermine. I thought, incorrectly, if I showed you could move to cousin-fuck Indiana, build something from limited resources, and then carry on describing the math and timelines for more indulgences and opportunities, people would join or follow. I've described every beat of how I've gotten to now. It is perpetually unpersuasive and uncompelling.
What is it people want to see? Themselves? Maybe, sometimes. Maybe at an instinctual basic animal level. We do pack together. Girls with about the same levels of attractiveness or similar body types certainly do. Frat bros flock like migratory birds. I feel like I can smell most pictures from a gaming conference or Comic-Con. I'm suspicious people can see at all. I think in order to be able to see, you have to have an idea of what you're looking at. We spend most of our time having the idea of what we're looking at filled in by other people.
I didn't discover I was smart. I was told it, constantly, growing up. I didn't know I was cute. I certainly didn't feel I was cute, and therefore didn't carry myself with the confidence or attitude of someone "worthy" of engaging attraction games. I was told I was cute, didn't believe it. I cut off my hair. I dug at my skin. I bemoaned not having abs. I refused to smile in pictures. What was I looking at? The caricatured, resented, and made-fun-of target of my mother who turned her weight issues and low self-esteem into lessons on how to emotionally abuse. I was looking at the opposite of the kids wearing Abercrombie and playing sports. This, in perfectly unrealized contradictory irony, as I also played sports and wore a bit of Abercrombie.
I think it's easier to conceptualize "not having an identity" or "not knowing what you're looking at" in the context of kids or childhood. We start practically feral and are at the mercy of our circumstances, genes included. So many of my clients at the prison started using things like meth or heroin when they were in their teens after being introduced to drugs while being in the single digits. Many had no idea what it even meant to be an "adult man" because they severely got their brains fucked with before they ever had the chance to learn what that could mean.
The class you're born into comes with it a certain narrative. Maybe it jives with your sensibilities, maybe not. Maybe it compliments your inherent capacity, or maybe it stands as a constant source of antagonism. Maybe you don't have the industriousness and high-achieving capacity of your parent who immigrated. Maybe you don't have the emotional intelligence to surround yourself with people who compliment and redirect your negative self-regard. Maybe you don't have the capacity for ambivalence and pretext to play politics in elite circles. If you don't know you're born into a certain vein and are described by an existing, evolving and diffuse story, you can't figure out how, or why you'd even bother, to change it.
Neither of my parents are dumb. My mom is insane, my dad is Tim Walzian. It's a reactive distinction I've felt emotionally my whole life, and took years to understand intellectually. My dad has been an iron-worker almost my entire life. When his parents immigrated, you could raise four kids, put them all through college, and retire working at the steel mill. If, like so many families in our middle-class existence, you wanted to keep repeating the pattern of my grandparents, we've watched how the systems have declined and devolved into nascent fascism. We fundamentally can't conceive of the magnitude of what we're embedded in and looking at, so a reactionary posture foments.
Back we return to having your back against a wall versus having a goal. Here is the reason so much feels like life is binary instead of probabilistic. The binary exists, but it's at the level of choosing altogether. It's not "Trump vs. Harris." It's asking what probably happens when you enable and support one version of existence over another. Do you compound the pain and absurdity? Do you make it harder to see and believe in things getting better? We can equivocate literal dumb fascism with perhaps a valid laundry list of complaints and criticisms about any other form of democratic politicking. Why?
We don't know what we want. We don't know how to articulate it. We don't practice the patience to deeply appreciate when we've gotten it. We look at our work and feel exhausted because we've been exploited and punished for trying, trusting, and caring. Our backs are against the wall, so anything we do or say as the bullets barrel towards us is justified. We're linguistically and psychologically trapped. Our concept is so distorted that the work of how to make things better is unrecognizable and takes too long to be realized emotionally. Or, worse, we've crippled our capacity to train a positive feedback loop at all, introducing proverbial meth into the system too early to fully repair.
Your voice is the most powerful thing in finding a prayer for dealing with "everything." It's the first fucking amendment for a reason. Those who had something to say were violently and perpetually silenced. I believe you have something to say, and are violently and perpetually silenced. But your goal hasn't been articulated like theirs was. Their imprecise, imperfect, ever-evolving goal was written down and given a place to start informing whatever beautiful or damning thing you wish to say about our place and country today. You hear the goals of the craziest and most vitriolic people every day. The "corrupt" part of that system is you pretending not to hear them. It's you pretending not to have feelings about them. It's you pretending you're not baked into the cake with them.
My life doesn't get better the more I hate something. I might need to describe my ongoing hatred and accompanying feelings, but ultimately my behavior has to look like hope. It has to look like I'm reasonably trying to fix the big abstract bad feelings with day-to-day exercises patching all the holes life pokes through my sense of agency and well-being. I will never not be an angry ape, raging and afraid. That will never excuse my decisions to reward instead of correct for how that manifests. I can acknowledge the infinite list of things cornering me, trying to shut me up, or attempting to hijack my attention. The consequences aren't "more true" than what probably happens in how I do or don't respond.
