[1123] Be All End All

I don't know what it means to accept something unless it's being put to work.

I'm not above getting into an internet pissing match. Most often, it's going to be about a TV show, or who is a literally-defined fascist with a stranger. In the past, I've lost "friends" arguing about religion, trans stuff, sexual assault, or pretty much any topic where there's a cultural wave of bullied undue confidence that the conversation is settled and "everyone knows" how you should or shouldn't respond. If I were emotionally invested, I know the 3 "friends" right now who would be happy to never speak to me again if I brought my concerns related to Israel/Hamas to their memes and shares.

I believe in conversation and argumentation. I believe in debate. I believe in freely exchanging ideas in a way that doesn't see you silenced, ignored, or shunned. I believe it so much that I've functionally alienated everyone who might, but only in theory, profess to believe in the same things, until it gets real. They don't want to work to defend their position or get more articulate. They want to feel correct. They want their definitions of words to hold without scrutiny. They want to be validated by the tribe who can't be bothered to think any deeper about the topic than they care to, and not suffer the fate that I've chosen.

The breakdown happens the same way regardless of what you're talking about. I've been going on several 3 or more hours-long drives over the last few days consuming over a dozen Peter Boghossian interviews and street epistemologies. His experience appears to be precisely mine, whether he's discussing abortion, trans, academia, cultural statistics, or anything that we've been insisted upon to stay quiet about because of the "harm" that's allegedly caused by even talking. The concept of "woke" gets put through its paces to see how it manifests and the real consequences of following the logic through, once you've actually defined and boxed in what you even mean by "woke."

We can make it easier, maybe, by thinking about a TV show, like Star Trek, which kicked off my desire to write. A few weeks ago I responded to someone criticizing Discovery for "not being Star Trek" and I asked them what they meant. I ask them, and probably a dozen other people because "this isn't Star Trek" is the most ubiquitous "criticism" I see when I read posts unhappy with any given Star Trek series. He responded, and then I responded, point by point raised.

It took only 3 responses for the breakdown to happen. No longer was he entertaining my answer or evidence as a response to something he specifically said. If I tried to refute that updated camera work "wasn't Star Trek," well now he introduces a point about the way the Klingons look. That's not what we were talking about, but it feels like it to him. Something changed about a look he didn't like, so it's fair game to bring up whenever it feels appropriate. He instinctively doesn't want to acknowledge or simply disagree that unless you shoot modern shows the same way you shot shows in the past, you're missing part of the heartbeat of Star Trek.

It doesn't have to be "serious" or a "hard" point. But the same move is made. It's pretending there is no potential for a shared truth, definition, or understanding and insisting in iterative ways that your feelings can cohere more than you're willing to work to reasonably justify or translate.

He argued Star Trek doesn't have "a main character." I told him Picard exists as its own series. He told me he hasn't seen and won't even watch Picard. He doesn't need to for the point I'm making, right? Some characters are certainly more "main" than others, and you can perhaps arrive at what constitutes that main-ness. But that's not his goal. His goal is to vibe on hate for Michael in Discovery. When she's featured, too prominently for his tastes, therefore "Star Trek doesn't have a main character."

The thing you need to accept is that you, not only can be wrong, but are infinitely wrong about everything. You're missing details and subtlety. You're missing an appreciation for the stress and work of incorporating difficult and conflicting pieces into your worldview. In developing my land/space, it started more idyllic and hopeful. Until you spend the day digging up saplings, dealing with heat exhaustion, and improvising tools you can't afford yet, a desire to move "off grid" doesn't really translate. What I had to accept about my ideas were that they were going to take a whole hell of a lot more time, work, and help than I had, nor ever have, in any given moment. But then I get to work anyway.

If you're going to be understood or taken seriously, the same rules are going to apply. There's someone with the power and resources who are making an incoherent point that feels right. You're not going to logic them into submission. You're going to have to build your own resolve and asymmetric approach. You're going to have to work in ways you didn't realize were going to take so long or so much effort and sacrifice.

My Star Trek guy doesn't speak my language, and my "goal" is not to persuade him. My goal was to try and understand if there was serious concern/criticism about what constitutes "Star Trek" altogether. As with most things, again, the answer is "no" to "not even fucking close." We start with radical, in their selfish minutia, opinions. We recoil and lash out when they can be shown as paper thin.

[1122] Innit To Win It

What motivates you?

Increasingly, I've been thinking about incentives. When you move away from the idea that everyone is immediately and personally culpable for "the way things are," it opens space to investigate their environment. Indeed a major portion of my counsel to people is to spend a considerable amount of time examining who and what they are plugged into. If you have no context or underestimate its influence, you can take on unnecessary guilt and stress. You also fail to frame whatever your problem may be in a way that allows for it to be fixed or a real solution to be discovered.

Money appears to be one of the biggest incentives for an array of questionable, if not downright abhorrent, behavior. In fantasy, how many plots are motivated by the antagonist's greed? Cash wildly flying through the air as a masked bad guy flees a scene with a giant duffle bag are ubiquitous whether or not you've seen that actual scene somewhere. It's not a secret. It's not hard to understand. They want money, so whether it's fashion a complicated Ocean's 11-esc plot, or put a gun in someone's face, they go in and get it.

A deeper-layered story starts to unpack that antagonist's relationship to power. They often have money. A supervillain will be super smart, or maybe have a super team, and none of them can put their heads together to figure out how to live well and leave things alone. What's their motivation? "Power," in and of itself, is incomplete. Even the ones that do manage to take over the world or achieve their goals, are they ever depicted as "happy?" Was it "enough?" Thanos didn't keep fighting to preserve his "perfect balance."

The story you tell yourself is the foundational incentive. The ability to maintain a familiar, predictable, and, even if it's self-destructive, reliable self-conception. There's so many things built into the formation of that story, and almost zero cultural cues to attend to them, that you maintain the unhelpful habit of pretending "that's just who you are."

I'm someone who has been told his whole life he's smart, good looking, talented, yada yada. That's certainly a story I wish to keep. Who wouldn't? Younger me felt very alienated by any commentary related to my looks. I cut off my hair. I never wanted to be in pictures and definitely wasn't smiling when I had to. I've never been a particularly "cut" or in-shape person, so even a little fat made me think I was "too." I resented the narrative otherwise until it started manifesting as success with girls. I didn't start growing my hair out until college. It took a while to realize I wasn't fat so much as surrounding myself with runners and rock climbers.

There's a running story we have to maintain. At least, it feels that way. The nature of your sacrifices. The goal at the top of the hill. The things about you that mirror your loved ones or echo what you want to believe deeper about yourself, but might struggle to. The closer your behavior and your words match that story, the more you carve out a "safe" psychological home to live in. Whether or not the nature of that story is more or less true doesn't even enter into the discussion foundationally.

What disrupts the story? I observe the consequences of chronic punishing conditioning. I have a friend who's so stressed, he can't lift his left arm above the shoulder. He can't sleep. He ruminates and repeats stressful events dating back years and takes on new things he can't get organized and achieved. I have a friend who habitually takes on more work than she has to. (That's the most common thread I see across friends and clients.) They say, "I wish I had time for…" or "It'll be fine if I can get to next week/month/August" or "They're counting on me! I have to!"

The lie is built into the foundation. You don't "have to" do anything. It's instantaneous the moment you go from the language of potential agency to helplessness. The presumption when you tell someone you "have to" is that they'll nod along knowingly and throw up their arms in concert, because we all know what we have to do. Of course, we don't. We don't know shit about shit. We don't spend any time trying to. And when someone comes along pointing that out, we seek to punish or silence them.

So, I ask again. What's your motivation? What incentivizes you?

They aren't the same question, and each is their own big bag of words the closer you look.

I'm motivated by the idea of scaling up things that have worked for me. I know the visceral experience of less stress and more freedom, and the conscious long-term deliberate acts to get there. I know what I had to focus on. I know why I chose to focus on those things over others. I know what I'd like to enjoy as a result of seeing the efforts and practices carried forward and manifested through others' interpretations. I'm curious about what that looks like, and I don't think it happens often. I like believing I have both the capacity and awareness to achieve something many find it hard to even conceive. I feel good about that story. I can draw practical steps along the road.

I'm incentivized by feeling understood and being communicated with. Those things generate positive emotion and a feeling of being engaged. Even if I'm feeling "unmotivated," when you have something to communicate to me, or you are making a genuine effort to understand something I'm saying, I can engage in that exchange almost indefinitely. If I'm in an environment that's force-feeding me bullshit, I need to leave, like so many past jobs. If I make a genuine effort to articulate and seek empathy, and you ignore me, I keep my distance. I'm, by default, a major turn-off to those, and this includes friends, who are "too tired" or disinterested or distracted to genuinely communicate and seek mutual understanding.

Thus, "friendship," by itself, isn't the incentive nor is it necessarily a "motivator."

You can frame any relationship this way, be it to your child or romantic partners. If you're unclear with yourself and are unduly motivated by superficial things, you'll find the deep dissatisfaction of introducing as many of those unhealthy relationships into your experience as you can find. You'll spend a lifetime developing apologetic language to justify the abuses. "Hell is just a fun way God shows us he loves you!" "Well, he pays the bills and I get fancy vacations, what's a backhand and shout now and then?" "My friends and parents tell me how lucky I am; surely I'm just confused about how much I really love my child, boyfriend, job, circumstances…" etc.

If you don't know that you're motivated by confusion and fear significantly more than a desire to own and understand, you'll grow the plants of confusing and terrifying consequences instead of taking pride in or capitalizing on your garden. If you engage the narratives around the nobility and utility of money, fancy products, and fantasy posture, you might be well-consumed by the idea that you give a fuck what strangers on the internet think. You might align your morals to an imperative to post, lie, and curtail a raw opinion, if you bothered to form one at all.

I, always, feel the pull of "normalcy." Every day I spend consumed by media, I think "I could be…" What? Answer the question. Driving to work? Wearing down my car? Sitting around waiting for a meeting to start? Resenting getting paid half or less of what I'm worth? Spending time taking direction or instruction from someone wholly captured by corrupted systems, obligations, and narratives that bleed into your awareness and make it hard to believe in anything? What could or should I really be doing that isn't patiently waiting for the narratives I truly believe in to get their time in the sun? I think you should be bored more often. I think when you work, it should feel meaningful and useful, not obligatory. I think you should write songs, and talk with me all day about TV or who's left that can reliably report on the world. I think we should be building something together.

But, I know my motivations and what incentivizes me. I don't trust that you do. I mainly don't trust that you do because you all sound the same. And if everyone is saying the same shit, where are "you?" Is it where you belong, or where you've stuck yourself? Are you fighting the correct fight? Are you fighting at all? Or are you laboring under a narrative of your victimization and circumstance? Are you suffering the delusion that tomorrow is guaranteed? Are you pretending you don't matter?

I've started to go overboard in my TV consumption having mildly shifted my approach to it. For how many hours I've spent sorting and separating things, it dawned on me that I don't want to sit for hours and just watch cartoons or sitcoms. Each story or style registers in approximate lanes of intrigue or interest, and my motivation for engaging heavily depends on what my environment is otherwise incentivizing.

If I need to "kill time," it's a stream of shows I have either a passing familiarity with, or ones that have been popular that I never cared for at the time or don't interest me anymore than a random painting might at a gallery. I'm not anticipating an episode of NCIS or Law & Order is going to put me in a particularly thoughtful place about compelling narratives. They're safe and familiar, that's why they never die, and are wholly uninteresting.

If I want to challenge myself to think deeper about why something is catching my attention or what makes it different, I put on a different set of shows. Maybe it's cast chemistry, the joke timing, the way it's shot, drawn, or paced. Maybe it's having a compelling heartbeat and message. Maybe it's an individual's kick-ass ability to sell what's otherwise unsellable. Maybe I'm delusional and certain works just click with those delusions. I think shows like Legion and Scavengers Reign flirt with transcending the medium entirely. I'd feel absolutely brilliant if I could achieve the humor of Shameless, The Great, or Airplane!. If I could transport you like I've been transported to Cinema Paradiso and Dogville, I'd feel I've put in the right kind of work.

I think I connect with creators who tap into the incentive space that can barely pronounce "money" or the words "I don't have enough." I think there's a craving and unyielding desire to connect and be understood at a transcendent level. It's a level that exists only when you start from the right place and weave together all of the pieces that inform the message. That's the music, the glances, and other gritty details that are both absolutely necessary and hopelessly insufficient on their own. "I would have made a better movie, but the budget!…" "I would have called you for dinner, but I've been so busy!…" 100 million dollar movies have been made for $15,000. I can eat in 10 minutes, if that's what you really need from me.

I separate my desire to feel useful and needed from what the evidence needs to look like in order for me to claim I actually am. I'm not a good counselor when I can juggle 150-200 people on my caseload. I'm a good counselor when a plurality of those people say something like, "When I started practicing what you said, I felt better, people noticed, and now I'm able to do this next thing." I'm not a "good person" through merely refraining from going out of my way to cause harm or a few bucks I might toss to a charity. I define "good person" as a useless concept first, and focus on being comfortable existing altogether in whatever manner my personhood brings forth. I then try to notice when what I do or say makes me feel good or seems to result in what I deem good generating from others.

Christians think it's good to indoctrinate contradictions and capitalize on mental weakness. Muslims think it's good to ignore the consequences of normalizing radical hateful mantras. Conservatives think it's good to control women and enshrine greed and grift. Liberals think it's good to pretend they don't have their own totalitarian compulsions that have destroyed important pillars of speech and science. Most people think it's appropriate to use as broad and incoherent ever-changing labels like "Christian" "Muslim" "conservative" and "liberal" to race away from any real discussion about how any given individual abuses the terms to their self-serving narrative ends.

Every layer of your life incentivizes you to speak and operate in a manner that protects you from crashing too hard against normative practices. Right or wrong, good or bad, true or false, useful or useless, constructive or destructive…familiar binaries that arrest our capacity to investigate what's underneath or beyond the traps they set. It's a place of your subjective and yet removed observation of your experience operating under their spells.

The more "normal" I try to be, the angrier I feel. The more I've tried to be like the "friend" people wanted, the more alienated and like a liar I felt. The more I was begged to "love" as others professed to love, the harder things crashed when the truth was finally allowed to be spoken. The "work" I took so much pride in was never recognized or rewarded. The things I was "afraid" of had nothing to do with their actual consequences or my deep understanding of their nature. The people I thought I looked up to were brief ideals painted upon the infinitely fallible. The expectations I built for myself were bred from spite, naivety, and insecurity. The story I was telling myself was stuck, and I was pretending I wasn't obligated to continue writing it every time I needed to.

[1121] The Friendly Ghost

Today feels like a day that could be described as "crazy-making."

Am I sick, hurt, or otherwise dramatically impaired? No. There's been a theme and a confluence of forces though. Let's go.

This week, literally everyone has canceled on me. For work, for fun, for things I was anticipating to use to feel useful and good. I spend pretty much all of my time alone, talking to no one, blazing through TV, playing my instruments, reading, or getting myself into some trouble playing with something I shouldn't because I can't stand feeling idle and useless anymore.

I lay this at no one's feet. I could, theoretically more than practically, invest a considerable amount of time attempting to connect to other people, organizations, or things to do so I don't feel as reliant upon others and their consistency or capacity to manage. And, in fact, that's what I've done in getting started with CASA, and hopefully seeing that spin-off into more first-hand interactions with clients, other volunteers, and the inevitable messes that will bring.

First, one of my attempted hires to fundraise ignores my outreach. I thought she was on the verge of stealing $1,200, tracked her down, got a brief invitation to her life's blow-up, and she's since refunded $500, on what she's proposed is a schedule to refund the whole on her paydays. In the meantime, I patiently idle and refrain from catastrophizing her silence, and now 6th missed scheduled discussion, and who knows how many ignored texts.

Ok. I got an early text that client 1's phone is broken and needs to be rescheduled. I attempt to call client 2 around our meeting time, no response. I text if they are okay. I get a "Not at all, can we talk later today?" I text later in the day, no response. That whole day was designed around another person supposed to come out and talk about plans to upgrade my space. They had other life complications with family illness to deal with, so the project lingers.

I'm left with more idle time. We need to be incredibly clear that whatever I feel about that time, it's not being laid at the feet of "everyone" or anyone I refer to. I do not blame a single person ever for focusing on their sick loved ones or deprioritizing whatever we had planned.

I proceed to go about my days. I go to the symphony for the live music playing of Star Wars as the movie runs. An entire section of kids talked, crinkled pop cans, and just generally made it about them for the entire film. No usher told them to shut up. No seething patron closer to them said anything. They just took what could have been a pretty straightforward enjoyable experience, and my inability to mute them turns them into a few aggrieved lines in another bitching blog.

Before the show, I walked around the continues-to-be-miserable city a bit. There's "cowboy" bars with country music that mostly surround the symphony. There's healthy servings of homeless people ranging from decently aggressively shouting to sleeping in places it's hard to tell if they've closed early or closed permanently. At one point, I'm almost certain a dude was following me. I'm in a "major" city, wandering, feeling isolated and arbitrary, and oh, look, there was also a pro-Palestine protest on the circle where they're screaming an anti-semitic chant and parroting empty party lines.

On the ride to the city, I was listening to some of Peter Boghossian's videos. He's known for setting up hot-button questions and agree/disagree lines he asks people to stand on and defend their position. He's, in a world that made sense, simply trying to remind people that we're here to engage ideas and should have a remote sense of what we're talking about or what might change our minds. Overwhelmingly, the people who brave his exercises are not that articulate, nor claim they can be moved, at least in the moment.

I'm now back home, where a comment I wrote on, arguably one of the worst places on the internet, reddit, was removed because I described getting into a "pissing match" in a comment to another person who was asking for feedback on what people might want in a new TV-related website. The term, in and of itself, I was told is the #1 rule that's not allowed and the person wrote "p - - - ing" like that as though it's particularly aggressive language or like I said, "I'll piss in your face, cunt!"

It just echoes that ideological capture and perverse power dynamics that I feel plague pretty much every level of my experience.

I know, as much as I know anything, that no one holding a sign on that boring and sad circle is persuadable. I know that no elderly usher at the symphony feels they are obligated and empowered to insist and correct inappropriate behavior. I know those who are eager to belong, be it through their status as a victim or the oppressed, are going to die on a hill that transcends parody when mocked up against real life. I know that my clients who cancel have a vastly different concept of "get better" than I do. I know the "innocent enough" obligations and life circumstances that relegate time someone might spend with me to be practically incidental.

I also know that I feel that I need to escape this overwhelming belief that I can't trust or look forward to things. It's a feeling that stifles my capacity to invest both in myself and in what I can only speculate others get to feel for what's captured them. I don't believe it's worth it, whatever "it" might be, that I'm going to plan, try, or work on for more than a day or so. It's a hollowness that haunts whatever I might do to prepare, or when I stifle one thing and rearrange another, trying to be there and be present and not suck you into this ever-hollowing sense. I can't fill it with the manufactured drama and concern that appears to fuel so much of other people's experience.

Whatever I do or think I can create, I can't erase the context I'm working within. The world's best talker in a country where they don't speak the language is flirting with homelessness and starvation. The shared values and understanding that comes with an ongoing relationship or dynamic of cultural expressions and sets of experiences I just don't really have. It's not "never," but is 6-10 times a year I might get to spend time with my dad or a friend doing something fun count as the kind of fabric I'm trying to weave?

I'm like a ghost. I feel like I just kind of haunt things or memories. You have to think, I'm drawing on my experience of the last decade. It's not just been a particularly lonely or disappointing week or something. This week was just the same record blasted about as loud as I can take. But also, I clearly don't know how to "fix" it. I don't really believe it's a thing I can fix because my efforts to do so only seem to teach me ever-nuanced ways in which the problem compounds and reinforces itself.

You can't afford it? I'll pay. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about being able to afford it. You don't have the time? I'll come to you, work around your schedule. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about not having time. It doesn't interest you? I'll do whatever you want to do, I'm open and amenable like that. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about their lack of interest. When you're feeling good and fun and free, I'm not the one on your mind to call or invite. You were desperately waiting for that window so you could "catch up" on the "fun" you're otherwise indefinitely denied. Every moment where you can feel remotely human or "free" is not one you're trying to interject a bunch of Nick P.-ness into.

There is no striking-up conversations with strangers and informal friends anymore. Maybe that's just a problem with me? Feels bigger, but I don't know. My "best friend" I gave my terms to and they still haven't been met, so I'm not lending myself to get back into his spin. My business partner, who I also see maybe once every 3 or so months, has been barreling towards a crash for probably over a year at this point, refuses to slow down or establish better boundaries or utilize me in any way but to - very maybe - decompress an inch when he bitches about something? I have to tell clients all the time there's a difference between indefinitely complaining and still being a ball of stress and actually coping and incorporating whatever it is that's getting at you and changing your behavior.

I have another friend I see maybe once every 2 or 3 months whose dad might be dying, and she has her own health issues, so it's like where would I get off thinking we should bowl more often? lol I don't know, it's this weird thing where you're invited to pit your desire to feel like you belong or have a friendship against their given tragedy or circumstances. It feels like it would be infinitely unwise and unfair to "blame" as though they're any less stuck within their contexts than you are, but you happen to be the loudest example of anyone you know on how to defy circumstances and work towards what you might actually want and need.

Blame language is overwhelmingly a move to adopt nonsense framing, but emotionally, you're like, am I just supposed to kinda glide through the air until I happen to crash into you? To be extra clear, this feels like an existential thing with everyone to some degree or another. I do not get the sense there's any remotely deliberate care and focus to cultivate and protect a mutually beneficial dynamic. It's like every hangout is getting away with murder or their mind is physically unable to be present because it's been captured by the superficially "chosen" drama.

I mean it in a more damming way than that, which implicates this litany of sick family members. I think we're also gluttonous. When you're not choosing the drama, you're feeding on the familiar sensibilities of your relationship to it. Aren't you needed? Doesn't that maybe scratch the itch that I'm taking 9,000 words to articulate? I'd like to feel useful and needed and like a "good boy" for doing what I'm supposed to by way of expressed care. I don't. No matter how much people tell me I help or what I say makes sense, it does nothing for me, and I don't think a single person has even tried to articulate to me they understand why.

It's pretty easy to disregard everything you're not doing to gain control or a sense of personal responsibility and agency by attending to everyone else. There's also the unyielding irony where I'm witness to what appears to be people who will go to the ends of the earth for especially the ones who don't deserve or can't truly receive what's being offered. Almost like each party knows what's on offer isn't made of what either of them needs, but this perverse Munchausien bargain is struck. What kind of massive deserves-to-be-alienated cunt would try to turn your lovingly devoted heart into the problem!? You're right, I see it now why no one wants to hang out lol.

[1120] You Gotta Work

As someone who has earned the privilege of an excess of time, if there is such a thing, it can be hard to make peace with how much of that time I feel is doing "nothing." It's the worst possible phrasing and first pass at the idea, but I think it's what we collectively feel instinctively when we're not "busy." Whether that busyness is accomplishing anything meaningful, fulfilling, worthwhile, or helpful is another gigantic question after we succumb to the compulsion to be "doing something" regardless.

If you try to analyze the tea leaves of memes, there's a bigger sense of pushback regarding "grinding" and "hustling" and "enriching shareholders." Whether that's translating effectively through "quiet quitting" or exercising some muscle of infantilizing nostalgia is anyone's guess. The pull of chasing the next dollar, or title, at bottom, feels absolute. If you're not trying to "provide for your family," or "prepare for the future," or "capitalize on the trend so you don't get left behind," there's something wrong with, or at least missing, about you.

We've heard our entire lives about "productivity" and having more resources than we know what to do with. You can read about how much food gets wasted and the next industry to do away with people as A.I. gets better (or doesn't, and no one knows how to argue otherwise.) Proposals for a universal basic income are getting their experimental time in the sun for different small pockets of people. We've absorbed the nature of the wealth-siphoning to the rich, paying more in taxes each year, getting price-gouged and scapegoating "inflation," and swallowing Ticketmaster fees because we never know when our favorite artists are going to die so why argue with the greed machine?

It's one of the most counter-intuitive things to do to attempt to pull out. Almost no one is doing it. You need gains! You need growth! You need norms of doing business and modern human, so low, expectations to anchor yourself to. In all of my time to plot, sleep, watch, or otherwise, it can be easy to forget just how long I've played the "normal" game. Was I ever paid "enough?" Hell no. Was my effort ever recognized in a way that didn't get me exploited? Not once. Did the vast majority of my bosses or supervisors care, in any real tangible way, about behaving in sensible and decent ways? Were they going to fight for the right things? Their whole working model to sustain their lives incentivizes otherwise.

This isn't abstract. Recall, I'm currently a counselor. I get word from clients or colleagues about how other counselors conduct themselves in group. I hear of their mental health issues getting laid at the feet of their clients. I hear of their laziness. I hear from the counselors themselves how little they're willing to take responsibility for what they bring, or don't, into a group. A new mom supervisor will hire the deeply unwell counselor to fill a gap if that counselor can perform the dance of saying the right things. Being long-term accountable to what they say? That's not the job or obligation. Unfortunately, that's precisely the the work you have to do if you want to maintain sober thinking. Good luck.

Sober thinking. It's not about refraining from substance use. It's about building, maintaining, and exercising an informed perspective. Once you get out of your own world and recognize the extent of your potential or impact, you find a way to maintain a standard of behavior and pursue goals that show yourself and the world you know what you're talking about. You need to build trust in yourself as much as you might wish to be able to trust anything else. If you can't figure out how to trust yourself, you can't maintain the right expectations that protect a sober thinking environment.

Most people are not thinking from a self-reflective and sober place. They are addicted to the pursuit and ridiculously unfair and captured expectations of modernity. They are addicted to levels of immature emotional drama because there's little else that feels equally as accessible and personal. They're addicted to some version of the same conversation every single day about what they "have to" do because they're baked into the cake of their insisted upon obligations. Little "escapes" here and there are pre-prescribed as well. Your few-days vacation fits neatly into the begrudgingly-allowed request off allotment. Your indulgent bling matches business casual.

It's not your fault until you know better, so there's an endless loop of narratives and distractions to justify pretending not to know better. You could watch a 20-hour set of interviews from old people insisting you shouldn't be so laser focused on sacrificing your life for xyz. That's too long, no one's gonna watch that! I can't tell you how many times a colleague has complained about the absurdities they've witnessed only to default to something like switching roles, giving advice to just ignore or avoid - it is what it is! - or finding some cliche about things evening out over time. Of course, they don't even out. They compound and embolden and normalize iterative ways of self-destruction.

I'm seriously perpetually struck by just how much time there really is. If you feel like you never or don't have the time, here's your sign that you're spending an inordinate amount of it doing or on your way to doing something that isn't serving you like you think it is. I struggle to figure out what I "should" be doing in any moment, often as the residual fallout of otherwise guilt-tripping myself if I don't feel "busy." What's the adult functional equivalent of always being in a classroom? My instincts seek that out. Is the teacher good? Am I learning anything? Am I actually getting prepared for what I'll need later in life? Shut up, sit down, and listen.

I get frustrated by influencers who say things like, "You really can change your life. You just gotta"…fill in the blank with their vague and empty prescription. We've just as egregiously been tricked by ideas of virality and interconnectedness as we have by the velvet bars of normalcy. You exist in a constant state of change, influenced by a literally infinite amount of forces. The "change" needs to come in how you observe those forces, not pretend you can become master and commander of them all. The person so enthusiastic about making a personal brand out of fortune cookies is overwhelmingly hot, already kind of rich, or otherwise plugged into the kinds of infrastructure that would see them having some measure of success had they chosen a different path. They're also almost perfectly corruptible and content with doing or saying whatever it takes to maintain your attention.

To them, and most people, every aspect of their life is a story of their decision-making, not their luck or capture. I do believe we need to be responsible for our decisions. I do not believe we have any grasp on the nature of how we arrive at decisions. I do not believe we have any grasp because I spend inordinate amounts of time looking for the myriad things going on in my head that speak to why I live in a shed, pursue entrepreneurial frustrations, or find myself interested in the music or TV shows that I do. How often do I like a given piece of art more than my sense of novelty in my experience of it? I'm constantly seeking novelty. It speaks to my attitude towards relationships, why I have dozens of half-completed projects, and why no job, ever, will be "enough" for me to feel at home or like I fit if it doesn't change and challenge me.

There are a lot of familiar beats being a DCS assessor. Every household is different. Every kid or tangentially relevant adult a new variable. I don't know who is about to call. I don't know what horror is about to be unmasked. Whether I do or don't have a "passion" for social work (I don't), you don't get a more novel environment than trying to plug into the minds of other people. My pursuits in the social work realm are the evolved drift of my novelty-seeking and trapped circumstances. Some of my goals are to protect the time I have to wake up when I please, sit down and write, hold a counseling session, and then decide on what to do with an absolutely beautiful day. If I can do that in perpetuity, in this field or otherwise, that's going to express my values and demonstrate my sober thinking about how to act on my priorities.

[1119] Improvised & Explosive

It's been a struggle to write the last few weeks. I've started, stopped, erased, and just moved on 6 or 7 times. Almost nothing I've done or thought about has felt "worth it." I've had annoying things happen. I've been mildly inspired by a handful of things I've watched or read. But, what's the point? I usually write because I need to feel better. If I'm not really feeling one way or another, what then?

I've been considerably more observant of myself. I'm watching each beat of a situation as it might elevate. When I'm hungry, begging to get even more frustrated about my dead car, annoying service agents, and prices to fix things, I'm feeling each decision on the way to saying something shitty to someone who can't shake themselves out of call-center mode. When I think I want to be social and interject myself into a random conversation at the bar, I pull out immediately when the polite signal to fuck off shows up, then go home almost as quickly as I decided to try being out.

Yesterday, I went to a comedy show. I drove my truck, and was quickly reminded of the gas cost disparity against driving my Scion. I get parked, and Parkmobile with it's defaulted to my Scion information, takes my $7.25 and does not allow me to change the vehicle I get parked. Of course. Their chat "person" cites policy, kicks the can to Indianapolis parking, and when I called them, they told me to email someone else as they also couldn't be bothered. I get a response this morning that says they can only refund with a confirmed meter malfunction and that it's the responsibility of the driver to indicate the correct parking spot. I did indicate the correct parking spot.

It clicked with me the nature of the shitty soup we're all swimming in. How quickly and "reasonably" we take these kinds of scenarios for granted and "normal." Of course, it would take nothing for an entry-level program to let you select the right license plate, but 1,000 or 10,000 oversights a day or week or month is capitalism. In a world with common sense or decency, this would never be a conversation I needed to have with anyone, let alone 3 or 4 people over several days, and only likely getting them to capitulate through some level of fraud or exhaustion. The "peace" I make with losing the $7.25 is going to look like a measure of ongoing property destruction or defiling of Indianapolis.

That's my bargain. I refuse to go quietly into the night of getting taken advantage of. You want to talk about the immaturity or disrespect, save your breath. I'm not choosing violence, I'm forced to contend with the policies of violence that are designed to make us all feel like we're helpless. Institutional theft and laziness is not a standard I'm willing to live by.

Any time I get a cog to break, you might be tempted to call that "hope" or a win. But the point is that I shouldn't be prompted to and training for how to break people. Yes, I've, fairly routinely, exhausted people into doing the right thing. That's not sustainable.

I think I feel perfectly desperate to live along some pretty basic lines of fairness and common sense. I know how complex that "simple" statement really is. To this day, the incidents from my life that I'm most incensed by, I never get push back on. You don't want to pay twice for a parking spot, whether you "have the money" or not. I, technically, don't, having been in debt the last few years, or my entire adult life, depending on your frame of reference. How can a college-educated single person who lives in the middle of nowhere be in debt? We've normalized the grift. Those with the power feel entitled to capitalize on your innocent missteps, ignorance, or desperate circumstances. You're too busy, tired, or blind to bother with how deep the hooks have set in.

I'm not. I have the time. I have the autistic superpower to make the "trivial" my number one priority until I'm satisfied. Again, it's not sustainable, but it is possible, and I've succeeded enough to feel like it's worth it every time I try. Also, trying in and of itself speaks to the broader principle and point. We don't lose the world through millions of people just turning evil and burning everything down. We lose it through negligence. We lose it through taking things for granted and refusing to protect timeless basic shit. That battle is never over.

I'm in the nonprofit business of teaching "coping skills." The catch in attempting to teach such things is that they need to be translated into your own individualized language. I write, for example. But, if I write to "feel better," I'm the only one who knows whether or not I'm writing in a way that gets there. I'm writing with a purpose to expose myself to difficult or trying thoughts and circumstances and hopefully get them incorporated. I want to think about and find the focus for the hundreds of things I care about or would prefer to do. A large or chronic problem has a habit of totalizing my awareness. Instinctively, luckily, I was able to discover the light at the end of many meandering tunnels into my thoughts.

If I conceive of the world as a series of chronic and unhelpful problems, fixes range from elusive to impossible. I observe the consequences of what I perceive to be chronic conditioning, and I locate courses of action within my agency. You don't want to provide a reasonable refund? Ok, I can choose to behave unreasonably and in a reactionary way until I'm satiated. It's not the preferred fix, but it's on the table. I've bemoaned "capitalism" and the pathologies of American myopia as much as anyone, so I rearranged my entire life to spend more time in the void and in search for asymmetric attacks.

Coping is complex because you don't even realize you're doing it. I see people who have next-to-zero capacity for recognizing how they are or aren't coping. Then, I see people who are utilizing refined and specialized versions of basic coping skills ultimately against themselves. Say you have a supportive family, money to indulge indefinitely, are well-read on the chronic behavior patterns you emulate, and exercise, eat right, and sleep just fine. Great recipe for working yourself to death and downplaying how much the capitalist machine is eating you alive. This appeared to be the fate of all of my smart-enough middle-to-upper-middle-income and management types I lost contact with from college. Why pay too much attention to a thousand injustices 5 days a week, when 2 you get to sip expensive whisky and climb a rock!?

I think about all of the paths I didn't follow as a result of my demonstrated classroom ability I hesitate to call "intelligence." I read a lot. I read about how people succumb to the miserable echoing trends culturally that manifest in unique ways for their field. Previously "sacred" or "exalted" paths riddled with horrifying modern realities. Doctors experiencing a suicide crisis. Researchers publishing "popular," and unscientific, crap to keep the grants flowing. Nurses getting screwed by traveling nurses who essentially function as scabs who get paid more to eschew long-term benefits and undermine unions. A lack of leadership in the trades selling out members and cutting corners. Lawyers living 3 and 4 deep and still barely affording rent. "Teachers" not even needing degrees. Pick an industry, you'll find the rot immediately. Anyone else still mourning what DeJoy's done to the post office?

How do you cope? How do you learn that's what you're currently poorly doing? Who tells you that all of the best things about your have been weaponized against you and exploited past the point of you even being able to recognize how they were supposed to function in an environment that wasn't originally designed to kill you? First, you have to accept it's your responsibility to listen to and respond to the persistent antagonizing voices. You don't have to become obsessive and compulsive chasing down your $7.25, but this paperboy understands the principle in demanding his two dollars.

[1118] But, Like, What Do You *Do,* Exactly?

My first instinct is that this will sound like an errant complaining session. I hope that's not the case, but I don't know yet.

Very bluntly, I do not believe we give a shit. I don't think we care about each other. I don't think we look for ways to account for our worst tendencies and behavior. I don't think we have any instinct or take any time to denote what those worst instincts and tendencies may be. I think we carry on each day essentially apologizing for the way things currently are and we presume will always be. It's suffer, share meme, desperately look for an out in the form of an unfulfilling vacation or expensive toy that never fills the void.

Now, none of that description matters to me. I don't need "us" to give a shit in order for me to. If I think we live in an insane system that is greedy, tired, and deliberately blind, I created a way to live in contrast and work to scale that up. That's all well and good and easy to understand.

But, I am still a cog in the overall system. I need those people who control the money, or who work for the institutions, or who consider themselves as shit-givers with their own agenda on how to address or fix anything to understand where I'm coming from and compliment my effort.

I, literally, could talk or write for hours about the impact I've had on the people I've worked with. I could do the same in talking about Hussain and his clients. It doesn't fit in "neat" 5-minute videos. It doesn't have a fancy program name. In fact, the more I try to elevator-pitch it, the cheaper it will register and the less you'll understand it. Why? People are complex. The nature of fixing their issues is not something you should pretend is happening in a back-of-napkin-esc kind of calculation.

Also, the things people need and praise are fundamentally abstract. If you love that I "hold you accountable," how does that translate as a specific line on a grant application? Seriously, do you have any idea? Because I can claim all day that is the nature of the feedback I receive, but is that a "specific outcome" the money wants to see?

I saw a work-a-holic get better at structuring his day so he could spend more time with his kids.

I saw a client stop speeding on his drive home from work and go to a concert in Texas he never would have previously.

I've seen a dozen people start making lists to help them stop getting overwhelmed.

I've cleaned hoarder homes.

I've seen people lose weight and start hobbies as we focused on self-care.

I've seen people bridge conversations with family regarding chronic stressors.

We've helped many people not lose their children to the state.

I've helped give people the courage to taper down or off their Suboxone.

I've connected people with resources to get home supplies, baby stuff, and emergency funds to account for bills.

I've provided ways of breathing and topics for writing about that people report back helped them stop spiraling.

I've given people ways of engaging their children that allow for conversation and avoiding pointed judgment.

I've connected people to mindful practices that encouraged everything from drinking more water to refraining from yelling at their family.

I've helped people budget and get a direction out of credit card debt.

I've helped people set boundaries with their work environments.

I've helped people realize that difficulties they're having today coincided with traumatic moments or shifts from their past.

I've helped people make career shifts and build confidence in creating things they enjoy artistically.

I've helped people joke and laugh more deliberately.

I've talked people down and got services to people who were suicidal.

I've built and organized meetings/teams to address the needs of children suffering the lack of communication and organization.

I've supervised visits and driven 5+ hours for months just for one family in service to them being able to see their children consistently.

I've been counseling for functionally free to ensure the incentives and expectations can stay pure.

We've helped people get off probation earlier than they anticipated.

I've helped people understand and drop the guilt of things they did as children to survive growing up in the unhealthy environments they had.

I've graduated people through RWI and helped them get released from prison sooner.

I build confidence. I make it okay to talk about chronic and painful things in ways that start to feel accessible and like things you can be accountable to.

I've helped people navigate the DCS landscape and know their rights.

I've helped people stop qualifying what they say or think with, "I know that sounds dumb" or "I'm such an idiot," or "I'm sorry" about things they shouldn't be sorry for.

I cheerlead, remind, redirect, and celebrate - consistently.

I show people what it means to be approaching things in a deliberate, non-judgmental, and accountable way that is better than chronically complaining or getting complacent.

I know the difference in what it feels like and practically when you either are working on yourself, being honest about your constraints and strengths, or aren't. I clue you into your contradictory nature and point you in the direction of what it looks like to feel better and do more than you currently take for granted. THERE IS NO FUCKING BUMPER STICKER FOR THIS!

[1117] Down!

I'm something of an angry person. That statement alone doesn't mean much, but it's the one to kick off with. I have a standing steady state of anger that's waiting to be provoked. I've learned where it comes from, so it's infinitely easier to name and manage as an adult, but it's no less there. I think it was a School of Life video that helped round out my perspective of the underlying "hope," so to speak, that lies underneath it as well.

I'm someone who is very quick, and keen, to see the potential in something. I can see the catastrophe just as quickly as the celebration and implications of doing something well. It's "obvious" to me like watching someone's muscles grow from consistently lifting heavier weights and maintaining a proper diet over time. There's also an intuition born from experience either physically attempting something, or in speaking with thousands of people. Over enough time, I consider myself to, literally, "never have a good excuse."

Yoda said, "Do or do not, there is no try."

I think of the many lessons we're abjectly failing at culturally, this is one of the biggest. I don't think we see our potential, good or bad. I don't think we're living for something. I think we're reactive, addicted, and compulsively doubling-down on inadequate responsibility-obscuring coping methods.

I don't care how old you are, "professional" or "educated" you consider yourself, accomplished, monied, or socially ingratiating you may be. I care about what you do and your ability and willingness to account for its consequences. You either lock the flood victims out of your church and unironically beat your Christian chest to hear a righteous tone, or you feed, clothe, and house people.

I'm not a "dreamer," per se. I draw a straight line from the available funds, opportunities, working backs and tools until I reach a place the resonates as "healthier" or "stable" or "feeding even more potential" into my life. I hesitated for a very long time to even use the word "hope" because I never felt that's what I was doing. I was working. I wasn't "trying to work," I was literally working. I was stating my goals, putting up the money, putting in the time, and piecing together each part of a greater whole.

You can do that every day as an individual. You can account for something. You can build on questions you ask yourself about your fears, anxieties, or behavior. You can act as though everything you do and say is "just," or you can recognize how you're not living up to your potential and act definitively to contradict.

Much of what used to drive me was pure spite. I, compulsively, needed to refute your opinion of me. At least half of the drive to get good at my guitar was an off-handed comment from an acquaintance in high school that I'd never be as good as him. Teenage me can be forgiven for not recognizing his myriad drivers of behavior. Adult me would have a serious problem if I had to "one-up" everyone who lazily threw a faux challenge or comment my direction.

When I evaluate spite deliberately for its potential, it eventually runs dry. If I give myself permission to ignore people, particularly unreasonable and immature ones, it's silly to invite them into the disingenuous internal fight I'm looking to have to get something done. I must ask, can I feel good without riding this spite wave? That wasn't clear. Thankfully, the answer is yes, because I do in fact feel good doing a wide array of things.

What if you don't feel good? What if you're depressed? What if you're trapped and antagonized by an environment or family that undermines your capacity to pursue feeling better? What if that doesn't feel possible from the jump, let alone the wildest possibilities of it compounding? I think this is precisely where the majority of people find themselves, consciously or unconsciously. I think this is the entrance to an unhealthy spiral and compulsive reiteration of our exhaustion, confusion, or fear.

If you can tap into and anticipate a pattern, you can break it. That's the potential. You can tap into patterns through speaking about them, writing about them, reading about them, or literally just recording each instance you notice "the same thing" is happening. Every single feeling you have operates this way. There's an infinite list of occasions that might provoke the pattern, but at bottom, it is still a pattern. My anger pattern runs when my hope is betrayed. My anxiety pattern runs when I'm thinking about wasting time and money. I get sad the more I'm inclined to talk about the big bad abstract "world," and all its failings, instead of practicing asking myself what my responsibility to it might be that day. I practice contentment in watching shows, playing video games, playing music, and reading. I can get excited getting drunk and going to an energetic or funny show.

To the extent I feel any given thing is the interplay of my standing health, the environments I plug myself into, and the actions I take in any direction. I can't control whether I wake up with a headache, but I can stretch the muscle that likely antagonized it, take the Advil, and write about how the headache is making it hard to consider what I wished to obligate myself towards that day.

What I witness people do doesn't look or sound like that last paragraph. I witness people "blame God" for their headache. That is, it's often "just the way it is." Period. Or, it's so-and-so's fault because of what they said last night. Or, it's because of a dozen perfectly hallucinated reasons from the weather to 5G. "Why, me?" They ask. "How could my head deserve to suffer such a fate?" It is not that a headache is a human universal to be handled in stride. It is the latest thing to be used as a weapon, an excuse, to not handle it effectively.

We're dual creatures. We're infinitely mysterious, and nearly perfectly predictable. We're our best stories of care and accomplishment, and genocidal. If you choose to accept the project of piecing together your dual nature, you must be prepared to accept every level of superficial contradiction. It's superficial because if you actually contradicted, you couldn't exist. You're alive or dead, as far as we understand life and death. Your feelings and your words will be indefinite gross approximations of where you're "really coming from."

To act is something I consider sacred for this reason. Barring all else, you get a chance to leave an indelible mark on the world that others can utilize or be scarred by. You can't know for certain what your impact will be, but you can know as well as you know anything that planting an apple tree is going to be better than slipping razor blades into apples. If you don't know that, you're lying, and you're practicing a disingenuous self-serving game to stay smug and sarcastic in your complicit laziness. And you live in a time where you're one click away from a whole family of people who will make you feel good about that. Then you've an algorithm that recognizes what to feed you so you can seek that feeling unconsciously indefinitely.

As much as my betrayed hopes might piss me off, I act to contradict and defy the automatic places my feelings may land. If I catch myself saying "I'm too tired," I get up. If I know the process is going to be complicated and take "forever," I ask myself what I can do in the next 5 minutes. Sometimes that looks like doing an initial search or opening a spreadsheet. Sometimes it's 2 or 3 few-sentence emails. Sometimes it's digging one hole in the remaining daylight, staring down the barrel of 14 more and incoming inhospitable weather.

I'm not powerless. I, always, have a choice. Sometimes that choice feels as impossible as anything ever has. The next action resolves the contradictory feeling. That doesn't mean I feel "good" or "happy." It just means I set an example of my potential. If I was conscious and deliberate, the example speaks to my values and hopes more than my words ever could. The more I'm objective and articulate in those values, the more potential they have to survive in a world that is otherwise forgoing to express and defend what I think we need to survive and live well.

A real example that highlights this for me is around "pro-life" ideas. I don't hear pro-life arguments that concern themselves with what the science says about embryos. I don't hear pro-life arguments that care about DCS or adoption statistics. I've not heard about longitudinal studies pro-life people tout regarding care and consequences of unwanted pregnancies. Pro-life doesn't entertain your life as an individual woman once it believes you've loaded yourself up with their concept of a baby.

If I was "pro-life," here's all my choices. I choose to flatly ignore the science. I'm going to choose to call that ignoring "disagreeing." I'm going to choose to ignore statistics. I'm not going to adopt myself, but I'm going to choose to use someone's story of adoption in my argument. I'm going to choose to "blame god" for your whorish nature, but not for the neglect inflicted upon the child throughout its life. In fact, I'll choose to co-opt that suffering as even more evidence of God's plan. I'll choose to vote for politicians who bankrupt social services. I'll choose to decry the importance and sanctity of my deep and personal feelings about this issue, and treat you as though you don't have deep and personal feelings.

This is a caricature, as all mind-reading exercises are. But, I don't have to mind-read the actions these people take and consequences we're currently suffering. It's the exact same self-justifying process that empowers and emboldens them as disables you. It's riding the ambiguity of disquieting feelings into an abysmal abyss where anything can happen because we're all pretending choices aren't being made.

I promise you, in more ways than you are paying attention to, you're locking flood victims out of your church and calling yourself a Christian. You have a lot of complicated fancy ideas about your value and potential I challenge you to draw a straight line from your day-to-day actions to its realized manifestation. Closing your eyes, and crossing your fingers, and wishing real hard is getting us all killed. Whether you want to call someone like Putin pragmatic or psychopathic, anyone willing to exploit how we condition ourselves will, and literally is, killing everyone in their path.

People accusing Israel of "genocide" are decrying "That's God's baby!" like a pro-lifer about the jizz in your uterus. How do I know this? They aren't interested in the actual definition of genocide. They aren't interested in what Israel is or has been fighting against since its inception. They aren't going to let things be complicated and comprehensive enough to talk about religious extremism and psychological conditioning. They're at the mercy of their spite engines, compulsively reacting to a visceral sense of indefinite and inflammatorily defined injustice.

Big and small, hot or cold, an infinite list of issues can all be scrutinized similarly.

"What emotional pattern does touching on [this issue] kick off in me?"

If you don't understand or can't define that pattern, you're at the indecent mercy of propaganda and "arguments" that fuel your preferred emotion. If you don't care to understand that pattern, you'll compulsively double down on it until you're exhausted, interrupted, or forced to abstain. Broadly, we imprison indefinitely repeat offenders and punish harshly those without the means to control and account for their most violent potential, especially if you're poor. Shittily trained dogs bark at any and everything for no reason, except the barking feels like the right thing to do.

[1116] Cornholio

Today has started out with a decent potential for the presumed ADHD to "win." It's a perfect day to work outside, I've slept well, and the tasks calling out to me, from hole digging to starting a new job training and evaluating A.I., are feeling accessible and not too taxing. I've also, for the last few weeks, been having "the universe speak to me" with lines from songs and television shows speaking about friendships, relationships, and the things you should hold dear. Today, I reached out to my "best friend" who I haven't meaningfully spoken to in months after I landed on a few conclusions.

I'm exceptionally eager to cut bullshit people and unproductive soul-crushing lies and games out of my life. I haven't spoken to my mom in at least 10 years. I didn't wish my brother a happy birthday a few days ago. Living alone in bum-fuck cornville has proven to bring more relief and focus than any day I've spent with any amount or type of roommates. That fact alone means I should build in a check when the instinct is to cut one more person off.

I have another friend who said, almost word for word, "Even if you tried to rape me, I'd probably still be your friend and forgive you." Talk about setting the bar simultaneously and unreasonably high and low at the same time, but I understood and appreciated her sentiment.

My "best friend" and I are statistically 2 of the least agreeable people on the planet (we've taken the test) and aggressively manipulative. We're either both/and autistic or psychopaths. Not necessarily mean-spirited or evil ones, but ones with the capacity to wholly uncheck where those propensities might lead us. Until recent history, it never bled over into me feeling at the no-mercy end of his propensities. We've been friends since 5th grade, and we're in our 30s now. It creeps up on you.

That said, it means I've never necessarily set a particularly strong boundary to help refine and determine our dynamic. Most people would understand this in terms of "family." I've dispatched with most of my family, and the ones who remain I'm mostly civil towards in service to my dad. As a counselor, it's, of course, people's families who provoke and inflame their addictive poor-coping tendencies. As a former DCS assessor, it's your family that's touching you inappropriately, beating the fuck out of you, or defiantly donating you to the State when their lack of personal accountability gets particularly egregious. I have no respect or innate positive feeling for "family," as such.

So I set terms. I don't really carry ongoing emotional animous, but I've been fucked financially. I would give, and still do, all of my time and funds that I could to real family and friends. No one who I'm going to designate that way "owes me" for that. When that dynamic gets exploited, thrown in my face, or taken for granted to such an extent I get scared I might die in the dumbest way possible? I can lament so far something I had previously taken for granted, cut it off completely, or set terms for repair. I'm not going to present terms to my batshit mom. I'm not going out of my way to make my brother feel better about his unresolved anxieties and resentments. I'm not going to kiss any of my thieving aunts' or uncles' asses.

My "best friend?" He's been more adrift, than deliberately malicious, in my view. I'm not entirely sure he recognized anymore than I had how much the dynamic had shifted. It took me literally popping off emotionally not wishing to be dead potentially crashing at 135 miles an hour to kick off this latest saga. Some of the chickens regarding his dynamic with the kid seem to have come to roost, but I'm not privy to details, just the grapevine. Ultimately, if I have a handful of friends, each finger I might cut off deserves above-average or beyond base-instinct doctoring.

My job is to set and relay the terms. I talk to enough people who say something like, "Well, if they don't already know…!" about their fights as if that person is thinking about them, mind-reading them, or you told them anything remotely achievable and coherent. I reach out. 99 times out of a 100, I get silence and the chance to imagine how "weird" and "awkward" I made it for someone who thought they'd never hear from me again. I'm considerably less inclined at this stage in my life to hold a grudge, at least with any emotional weight precluding any action steps to bring about a preferred resolution. I'll still cut you off completely, but that doesn't remove my obligation to listen to the universe, do and say what I can, and weigh the balance of my dynamics.

This is the work. This is the living by example. I don't want to be isolated, resentful, and unreasonably angry. That said, what I want rarely, if ever, jives with how people treat me or what they want for themselves. Oh well. There's a reason we get paid to do the work no one else wants to do. I'm not going to continue choosing for myself unreasonable and unnecessary financial or emotional burdens by downplaying or making excuses for an unhealthy relationship. I'm not going to let the pull of "normalcy" or "familiarity" playact as forgiving and forgetting.

[1115] Count On It

I'm a big believer in cutting out noise. My house, and much of the improvised things I've build testify to that. My car doesn't need a bumper to drive. When I get it in my head that "this is the thing to do," I spend the money, get up and out, and make my future working reality a measure of incorporating the new piece of information. I don't "wish" and "hope" and wait and stir things that prove to be unhelpful or impractical. This highlights not just my approach to counseling, but my experience of the barriers in translating my approach to both clients and the ones who hold larger dollar amounts.

You only think you know what you're talking about. You only think there's a relatively narrow lane in which you can walk or operate. This fact proves controversial. Practically speaking, this means if you look or sound like something that the person you are speaking to is unfamiliar with or unrehearsed and learned about, there's a fleetingly small chance you're getting any information through. If they "need" an expensive professionally produced and scripted elevator-pitch video with cliches and smiles in order to give you money, if you submit anything less, you're unworthy by default. It's as much a class thing as it is a basic translation thing.

When I worked at DCS, supervisors who respected evidence and the sovereignty of families were easy to work with. They never suggested I needlessly harass and question or re-question to the point of destroying rapport. When I attempted to explain to aggressive and presumptive supervisors what evidence was, why I get more compliance not acting like a dick, and the basic morality of treating people with respect, it didn't translate. Every day I'd get some kernel of advice or direction that, had I complied, would step me over the cliff of maintaining self-respect or effectively doing my job.

Drug addiction, counseling, mental health - there's a whole pop-up industry of cliches, happy-sounding videos, testimony, and opportunistic "harm-reduction" platforms eager to bill your insurance. They all look and sound professional, but 2 pointed questions to any of their clients obliterates the veneer immediately. They aren't giving you specific work to do. They aren't interested in your individual story. They don't care what you accomplished, how, or whether you're developing habits that are self-perpetuating and translating across different struggles you will encounter in life.

The reason the statistics around addiction look so bad is because there aren't enough people who are accountable and consistent able to demonstrate and encourage what's needed to maintain sobriety. There's a fundamental people issue at bottom. People aren't accountable, it's not just those with a substance abuse issue. People don't understand the language of day-in-day-out that isn't emotionally overwhelming struggle and insecurity. We have literally trained ourselves by the millions to accept the worst possible attitudes and platitudes as it pertains to healthy behavior and thoughts.

I want to scream every time I'm asked what my "mission" is. I believe in being clear and specific in your goals. That's not what they're asking of me though. They're obligating me to degrade and make vague a pleasant-sounding propaganda-adjacent and familiar thing that they can comfortably pass off as agreeable and allowed to perform. Every individual is different, but they rhyme. if you tell someone, "My goal is to get to know someone intimately enough that I can point out their thought and conversational patterns that interfere with their ability to act on goals as "simple" as doing their chores or as complex as managing the testosterone rushes that got them imprisoned." That's not, "I want to support those struggling to succeed!" But that guy gets the money, because it translates, and it's familiar, and it doesn't "feel" like it's "too much" or "all over the place."

Evidence only matters to those who understand and respect evidence. If their concept of evidence is numbers they're not going to investigate, or statistics they're not going to contextualize, or surveys they're not going to concern themselves with who answered and why, then you have "nothing" by telling them individual accounts of growth or problems solved. Why, didn't you "help" 100 people like the large organization next door who sees 200 every month? I promise you, and they know this too, that large organization may physically see people pass through its doors, but it has no idea who they are, its "help" is infinitely broadly conceived, and there is zero accountability until someone dies, and then probably not even then. This has literally been the case at a methadone clinic I worked where 4 people died, and nothing changed.

A good portion of my life has been the struggle to translate. I know, daily, what it is to be dispositionally overwhelmed and perpetually misunderstood. No amount of work I do gets across unless you're on the receiving end. I can't explain enough. I can't sacrifice enough. The words mean very little to almost everyone I've remotely tried to get involved. They do not understand what it means to bond and encourage and establish boundaries and expectations. They just don't. They swim in waters that are incidental. Recovery and growth and counseling are about ongoing conscious decisions and reflecting and accounting for success or failure. Your familiar codependent relationships aren't that. Your fluid privileges and colloquialisms that explain away your doubts or guilty conscience aren't that. Your too-comfort betrays the entire life-long process and habits. Addicted or not.

I can't tell you how many people, almost boastful and proud of themselves have asked me, "Well, why don't you apply for grants?" As though I am not currently, haven't invested in alleged professionals, or didn't also have that as my first idea. I can't tell you how many people hold seminars spending hours telling you information or advice you'll find in the first 5 pages of any book on the topic they're pretending to be informed or insightful about. I can't express the frustration of trying not to scream, "I just want to fucking tell you the evidence and show you the work!" As though the project is magic and convoluted. But it is, by those who don't understand and don't care to learn how they're shitting in our collective cereal with their power or victim complex.

I want you to tell me each week how many times you noticed and recorded when you were getting unnecessarily shitty with your child or partner. I want you to tell me how many times you caught yourself getting exhausted or frustrated with your work environment. I want you to tell me how many times you qualify the things you say with "I know that's stupid" or "I'm so dumb." I want you to figure out what you've been avoiding, how it affects your thoughts or actions, and to notice there's a direct line between how you feel, and whether or not you actually do something. I want you to do that until you have as many words explaining your emotional and behavioral patterns as I do so that you don't need a counselor to point out when you're doing it again. I want you to understand, because you've practiced, that confidence is earned and a learned behavior. I want you to trust your system for evaluating new or difficult information.

Can I fit that on a bumper sticker? Fuck no. Can I "neatly" explain what it takes personally to be the kind of person who can engender that in someone else? Hell fucking no. Anything remotely good about me or that people recognize as "I want to be more like" or "I want to live a similar way" I've worked though literally thousands of pages of self-reflection and arrivals at next courses of action. I didn't rest on a cliche. I didn't deny until I got so comfortable denying I forgot that I was even doing so. I'm still doing the work. That's the fucking point. It never ends. I've arrived at a certain comfort with the discomfort that I did not have in the past when I was more obsessive and compulsive and poorly coping. I talk about what is currently working for me, or not, and why.

We need to explore together what your story looks like. I'm not in the business of just talking at you. I'm not just going to read through some random psychology material and pretend like you "get it." I'm not going to blissfully ignorantly play out my unresolved trauma and ignorance through you because, ya know, I got into the field cus my own life was crazy and now I wanna help people! Cool. Help them what? Overcome your blistering blind spots and inadequacy now licensed and running wild? No, really, cool.

I hear more than anything from people something like this:

"Well, my counselor/therapist is nice, but…" Nice. There's polite, well-meaning, maybe even decently informed people all over the place. But. What is that but? They don't handle the running rotation of poorly managed groups. They don't get to know you and your situation, your language, your habits. They don't have the lived experience, nor overcoming and learning from message, to translate something purposeful and meaningful into your language. They don't charge less than $100 an hour. They're "nice" people who are "smart enough" to read a book and get a degree, maybe, and then greedy over-eager exploit machines keep them just happy and comfortable enough to not think too deeply about their actual impact or complicity. Your counselor read about this breathing technique, do they use it? Never. They're "non-judgemental," so they just won't speak when their judgment might make them say something that conflicts with their patient's "comfort."

I should not hear, routinely, "You seem like you actually care. You actually give me things to do. You ask me about my life. " That is a fucking travesty and shame on our entire system, not something special about me.

If you have "values" that don't translate or you refuse to account for their practical fallout, they don't amount to shit. Think every dipshit "pro-life" consequence we're dealing with right now. Think every "loving" family that routinely exploits and emotionally abuses because, "That's how I was raised." Think every negligent cultivated attitude that keeps us hateful, afraid, exhausted, and proud of how little we know or attempt to fix. The hard part is admitting just how full of fucking shit you are and how not powerless you are. Coping with your growing awareness and obligations is the adult human thing to do. The rest is reactionary animal bullshit. Try explaining that within a culture where we already believe we've arrived and understand things as well as we need to. Didn't I mention my age, degree, and perfectly suited experience?

[1114] A Mild Infection

A theme about what constitutes "healthy" is bubbling. Health is at once abstract in the positive, but explicit when it goes negative. It's hard or impossible to say someone who can do 105 push-ups is "healthier" than someone who can do 100. Conversely, we can pretty much say anyone without cancer is unquestionably healthier. Again, the opportunity to get specific beckons.

I just got done accidentally watching TikTok Murder Gone Viral. The people killed came from "happy" families, or were literal influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers. They were as superficially "healthy" as modern society can get. They're artistic, funny, well-connected and outgoing. They had clear and present futures and were infinitely consumable. The influenced-to-kill influencers in the first episode had millions of followers and money coming in.

How did these families get implicated in murder? How did they enmesh their lives with the darkest corners life has to offer?

To my ears, there was a fundamental dishonesty. The show resonates as extraordinary examples of perfectly ordinary realities we use to keep pretending. The "fun" Insta-lives that betray our lived experience. Our insecurities regarding our "healthy family" get pushed into their ultimate conclusions. The show interviews "best friends" and grieving parents who all wish they could have "done more." At one level, it's altogether another opportunistic dive into murder porn. At another, it's a chance to examine the stories after-the-fact.

I don't pretend to have a great grasp on some objective sense of "healthy." I do know, personally, that it feels particularly unhealthy to treat my thoughts, words, and actions as analogues for cancer. If what I say and do starts to eat at me or multiply uncontrollably, something needs to change. I'm as stuck in the world of biases and familiar self-destructive patterns as anyone else. I'm not going to notice them without efforts like these. In fact, some of my very first attempts at writing were explicitly trying to resolve my perspective of abusive and controlling boyfriend dynamics carried out on the girl I liked. Whatever healthy was, it wasn't what they were doing, and her description of it didn't match her face and body language.

We know smokers who live to be over a hundred, and people who run ultra-marathons and die in their 60s. We know perfectly blood-pressured people who eat nothing but junk, and those who will shit themselves for days if they eat the wrong things. The contradiction over the word "health" is in every anecdote, and every detail from your life that betrays the worst-sounding examples.

I said I watched the show "accidentally" because it happened to be on the front page of The Pirate Bay, so I added it to my queue, and once I saw it was only 3 episodes, and I could watch it at 3x the speed, I thought "why not." By the numbers, my TV habit would suggest "unhealthy." It doesn't seem to make sense. How can you watch, according to Trakt, the equivalent of 13 or 14 days worth of shows out of every 30? Details like speeding things up, watching things that don't require looking at the screen while driving, not watching intros, credits, or commercials, doing so primarily at night, or doing so while playing a video game or waiting idly start to make the picture clearer. One trip and back to my dad's house is ~12 hours worth of content. Drive into and back from town, 4 a day.

I could imagine my TV habit going into "unhealthy" space if it became compulsive. It would be unhealthy if I had wild swings of emotion were I interrupted or unable to locate what I wanted to watch. Anything, TV just feels like a good analogue, can be the avatar for a set of unhealthy behaviors. The internet and scrolling is normalized to the point that we couldn't measure how many hours we're on our phone if we tried. There's programs for it, and we're not downloading them. They had to literally quell a budding mass hysteria about facebook going offline for less than an hour.

But back to murder. None of these people's tragic behavior or fates happened in a bubble. They whispered something to a friend. They posted their intention. They received praise and attention for their "off-handed" remark or for the example they were setting. Yet, the legions of fans and followers, loving friends and family, remained powerless to keep them alive. Something vital was missing, that I think starts with the story of honesty, and ends with the nature of accountability.

What does that mean?

You might argue that a social media influencer isn't obligated to "tell the truth." In fact, it's regarded as something of a media job. Coke commercials don't advertise how much they contribute to microplastics in the ocean. Leaving aside the assumptions and ethics of big business behavior (and fuck is that a lot to leave aside) the role of "influencer" feels almost too appropriate. They influence as they are influenced to produce the kind of content that fuels a certain form of engagement. It's not engagement that's concerned about how many hours it's engaging or the consequences of its content - at all. Occasionally, you can get Coke to act like it's recycling or cleaning up a waterway.

Is it "healthy" to be an "influencer?" I suspect most people would react to the question with at least a mild disdain because it's "obviously" something we all kind of want, right? Kind of like celebrity. We don't want fans ripping our clothes off or bothered while we're eating, but to strike joy at the very sight of us? To get paid for seemingly no reason beyond our winning personality and talent for talking? Stories of stars being driven mad be damned, you'd do it better. Add to that the story of your current mental health and conception of yourself, and anything that upped your prospects or battled a sense of loneliness and being lost is going to feel perfectly healthy.

I liked when people called my name from across the park because my parties in college reached a certain level of influence and popularity. I did not like being pulled into a random dude's video, after being kicked in the head by several crowd surfers, at Warped Tour after Less Than Jake invited me on stage and I made out with a stranger, making me concert-famous for a day and a half. Whatever "just enough influence" to gratify me is, is somewhere between those examples. I like when people in my field have heard of me, because I take pride in my work and they know I don't fuck around. I don't necessarily like if people feel they have to "warn people" about me in advance of us meeting.

Every abstraction asks the same thing of you in order for it to make sense. Can you ask specific questions about how you feel or behave? Can you then answer those questions honestly? Is your family "healthy?" Yes and no, it's not a good or specific question. Do you respond appropriately to the asks or demands of any given member? Now we're getting somewhere. If your mom's anxiety provokes yours indefinitely, your behavior relative to hers probably needs to change. If you find yourself making excuses and acting in fear when you think on one or more of your dynamics, ding ding ding, you've found a relationship to explore! Almost no one "gets away" from the pool of relationships and habits that groomed them. Why? Well, who's bothering to ask the questions, and when has the cultural influence ever trended towards real honesty more than performative "realness?"

I'm not suggesting you need to be "too blunt" or lay every grievance you've ever had out. I'm saying you can measure the relative "health" of your behavior, environment, and words in these kinds of conversations with yourself. If I didn't get my ass up and do things regularly in service to my other goals, feeling bad about myself and uncontrollably drawn in, I'd have a TV problem. If I surrounded myself with people who make me feel like shit or practiced apologetics for abusive dynamics I have a hard time recognizing, I'd need to work on getting myself as relatively isolated and refocused as I currently am. My goals for the business, my land, or my relationships are all subject to the same scrutiny and can become problems in complicated ways the less I bother to identify patterns and evaluate how I feel.

I don't think it's healthy to seek attention for its own sake. Functionally begging for codepency erases the path to being accountable for what you're putting out and whether you can navigate the attention it is attracting. It strikes me as emotionally immature. It's healthy for a baby to scream for "no reason," not you. I don't think it's healthy to treat a performance, which all social media is, as "normal," cramming the connotative baggage of "good" and "healthy" and "obviously so" into the weight of its consequences. It's healthy to share things that make you laugh, or think, or that you're proud of, but not when it's compulsive or you feel unduly obligated. Most of Prince's music sucks, and has gone unreleased. He's a dead drug addict. If you're moved to conflate his fame and influence with his health, you might have his same problem. The walking dead are still walking, getting those steps in!

[1113] Click, Click, Pull

As I "accidentally" stayed up all night completing the campaign for One Piece Pirate Warriors, I was listening to episodes of The Why Files. Any marathoning of media makes it easier to recognize patterns, and this was no different. The host talks about different conspiracies or cultural mythologies, relaying the story as you're likely to hear it from someone who believes what is being said. Most often, the answers to a conspiracy question land on aliens or government disinformation.

He asks in each episode, "Is this true?" and the reports on any debunking information or explains the criterion that would lead him to sympathize or trust what's being said. Maybe it's a trusted impressively careered professional being consistent and composed, not looking to profit, relaying their story and it corroborating with information from FOIA requests.

Today, I got another "basic" response to one of my blogs saying I was either an AI bot, or need psychiatric intervention. The thought that sprung up as I reflected on this comment, predicted in the post itself, was, "The fight is the point."

We want to hear ourselves talk. We want an adversarial identity. We want the noise of exchange. That means something in and of itself. That's why we maintain or viciously fight for our unhealthy relationships. A body - to fuck, to drive around, to talk at, is what we "need" first. If they can be bothered to share our interests, listen, "love" us , or refrain from causing undue harm, that's a bonus.

I think I underestimate this at my peril. It's framework that explains the fakeness in polite exchanges about hopes and wishes and excitement. It's even a thing you could use to understand animals fighting or playing with each other. You don't ask "why" the cat bit the dog's tail. You know. You know you bite tails all day, and you love it. I think this sentiment helps inform why there's so much moral fogginess and unnecessary "grey" on things that are pretty well figured out. It's the standing predilection to "two-sides" issues.

It's more insidious and deeper than just our brain trying to take shortcuts for the sake of condensing information. It's an animating force. How many times can I describe myself as a "spite engine" and not see myself deriving motivation from fighting for the sake of fighting? How much do I "really care" versus how much do I wish to be understood as someone who will fuck you back, harder, and well past any grasp or memory you have as to why?

Our platforms are default uninformed, hateful, combative, judgmental, and addictively exhausting. They're also overt tools of propaganda and control. That's the point. The point is algorithmically defined engagement. The point is if Trump pisses you off, he gets all of the attention points, packaged in any way that predicts that much more.

The point is explicitly not to make peace, get smarter, get connected, or share anything in earnest. It's to consume and be consumed by a level of emotion that keeps you clicking, arguing, or scrolling. The Why Files points out that NASA or "the government" doesn't even need to "disprove" its knowledge of aliens or "impossible" technology, they just have to keep you confused and arguing about it.

There's only so much room in your head. This is especially the case if you make no habit of attending to what gets in there, how long it stays, and what it's turning you into. I had to slowly recognize and make peace with the fact that my brain was going to operate in a "nag me with a blog a day at least" kind of way. I recognize that my baseline operating condition is overwhelming and exhausting to most people by default. There's a certain "fight" I'm in with my ideas and my next course of action that I'm actively navigating from almost the moment I wake up. Every day. I can't turn it off.

I also refuse to pretend like I'm not thinking. I can't smoke or drink my problem away. I can "flow," sometimes, a few beers or mixed drinks in, a little easier, but the brain doesn't stop swinging. My underlying animating force needs direction, explanation, and attention. It needs A LOT of it. I'm never convinced any moment I occupy, good or bad, is "enough" or "the truth" of what I "should" be or be doing. Unless it's this.

I think we'd rather have a diffuse, unsolvable and undefined, problem, than none at all. Not having a problem betrays conditioned "common sense." You still don't have enough money, right? You're not in perfect health. Your body in the next room has something to say about your attitude recently. You're still a laborer and can't exude the excruciating values of the leisure class. With the point being to keep the fight going, the invitation to reframe and consider "problems" as more "opportunities" or "evidence of your awareness or potential" feels empty or like it's missing something vital.

Actors might ask, "What's my motivation?" to learn how to fuel an embodied act. What's yours? What motivates you to maintain your "deepest" convictions? What are you really really acting like? What do you want your audience to believe about you? Or, what does your audience expect?

I'm driven by a great deal of hatred and sense of powerlessness. I resent how hard it is to look or sound "respectable" in what I find to be exhausting and insincere exchanges. I start more sentences with "I fucking hate," at least in my head, than I do any other way. I hate the idea of ever getting so tired and complacent that I wouldn't find the words, or take the time, or do the work to avoid acting like all the things I hate.

I'm not a man of "conviction" insofar as, if you have the better argument, I'll change what I think and work to alter the behavior. I'm committed to asking questions. I'm committed to practicing patience, with myself, and with the vast majority of people I'm prepared to bite their head off in an instant. For me, the point isn't to fight. It's to search. It's to account. I'm invited to fight by default. Fight for my attention. Fight to not be afraid to say or try something. Fight for the ability to exist in a standing state of qualified evolution.

I can't say what I'm "really acting" like because I don't feel like I'm acting. An actor is pretending, maybe tapping into an old real memory to evoke "more real" expression, I'm not pretending. I'm literally taking action when and where I can. I'm not "more hateful" than I profess to be, nor "more stressed" than the height of whatever needs to be written about next. I want my audience to throw "beliefs" about that, or me in general, out the window and see or contribute to what I'm working on.

Unfortunately, I don't think I have much of an audience, nor that if I did they'd have any real expectations of me. The 4 people who might consistently read me likely expect I'll continue to write, hang out with them, work with them, and beat my head against walls of indifference and confusion, but I'm happy to let them speak for themselves. My "secret" audience certainly doesn't.

I think you have an incredible amount of work to do on yourself, that won't be done, if you can read a digression like this (or pretend to read it,) tell me you "skimmed it," and the proceed to dole out nonsense "advice" about my "needs." But that's your point, to keep the "fight" going. It's to say your piece, because everything exists for you to engage with it in an inflaming way, not a sincere way, or patient way, or with a eye and ear towards meaningful exchange. Is there any real way to escape? Would you even want to?

[1112] The River

There's a theme from Star Trek, Buffy, and Angel that is sticking out to me. The whole crew is under a spell, and maybe one character isn't affected or is the first to see that something is off. Because it's TV, that character devines a way to gain allies, break the spell, and explain the anomaly. No matter how many times it happens, whether the arc is resolved in a single episode or over several, no one ever seems to remember that this precise thing has happened before. They can't seem to build it into their wisdom banks and offer it as a first hypothesis about what's happening this time. They don't build systems or protocols that anticipate it happening again.

Exploring that narrative arc or the pitfalls in the people afterwards feels like it could be its own short-story. I think part of the reason it's sounding bells in my head is with each "random" or "lazy" response I get to my reflections about my nonprofit efforts. My blog auto-posts to reddit as I must be something of a curious and lightly masochistic beast. Invariably, there's someone who says one of the handful of same things over again. "You sound manic." (or other armchair diagnosis) "I didn't read all of that." "I don't know what to say, but here's a lot of words anyway."

It's instinctively dismissive, reductive, condescending - - the internet. But also, it's the same attitudes I encounter in social work. The people who beg for court intervention or involuntary confinement are the ones who adopt the same attitude about their perspective and behavior. They occupy a "safe" or familiar and protected universe where their actions and words make a certain kind of sense to them, and in fact their whole crew, and you're the only one who has a problem with them. The elixir, unfortunately, often came in a compellingly-worded appeal letter to the judge and sometimes years of involuntary therapy before we could put a child back in your custody. For some, the spell is absolute, and they fuck up large enough to stay incarcerated or lose their parental rights altogether.

As with everything, there's a spectrum. We're all under different spells and happy to reinforce them well past a healthy point. I've read the Vulture article on Joss Whedon which discusses the power of fandom. Joss is a person, complicated, "good" and "bad," and not everything he's done in 57 years is perfectly respectable, mature, or with a deep appreciation for his experiences that drive his behavior. If you're wearing a "Joss Whedon is my God" T-shirt, you're likely going to find every excuse one does for any god to dismiss or situate their divine behavior.

One thing that never works against the spell is to just call it out. That, by itself, doesn't understand the nature of spells. It's to create a wholly different world of meaning from whatever you might say about a truly universal or objective and "mathematical" conception of existence. If you talk normally, and the rest of the cast can only understand you through song, "You're all singing, and it's crazy," literally doesn't translate. It can't be interpreted anymore than white noise. Moreover, when you're talking about spells people adopt in the real world, they have a deeply invested interest in denying there's anything else to be said or learned. Every pissed off democrat decrying republican "hypocrisy" has no conception of the nature of the problem or the irony. Neither lens on the world can even imagine what a "crack" is.

Writing is me calling things out. It's received predictably and I don't expect that to ever change. I call things out that I need to better understand as "cracks" on my lens into the world or spells we're all under. I want to know what I can build into my anticipatory framework. If I think I see the same kind of meme too often, the same kind of show, hear the same punditry and propaganda, hear the same excuses, or silence, or not-so pleasantries I want to know if there's a way to navigate it so I don't suffer in ways I don't have to. I'm going to suffer, as anyone who's read one of my "manic-sounding" posts delights in pointing out, but the nature of it is intentional and incidental more than wanton or irreconcilable.

I don't know all the spells. I don't come from a place that presumes to intimately understand how compelling every narrative can be or the infinitely intricate ways it can be weaved together to preclude action or change. I just know there are spells. I know their nature. I know some of their patterns. I can't figure those patterns out "just thinking" in anxiety circles. There's no actual bell that rings once you've used a cliche enough times to constitute literally not thinking or maliciously antagonizing.

If I had to point to one culturally-compelling spell, it's denial. I think I'm the millionth person to speak to it, but there's an infinite list of things one could wish to deny in any given moment of their life. It's a sublingual instinct, "NO!" to keep yourself "safe" and "comfortable." If you experience revulsion or disgust, you've got a millions-of-years instinctual legacy to respect that or follow-up mechanisms for weaponizing it. We deny our capacity and potential more than anything.

When I first started writing, you would not have "persuaded" me that I would be doing it for 20 years. I didn't have the tools or the language to discuss the utility of writing. I was dismissive and judgmental to my own writing, let alone if I would have been presented to anyone else's. I was under spells of immaturity, hatred, desperation and loneliness. I was at the mercy of the cultural norms I grew up in. I had no concept that I could even have my own words or perspective and understanding of a situation. I could only suffer everything I didn't know or the rules I took for granted.

I knew I needed something "more," but I had no idea what that looked like. I think it's precisely here that people "find god" or "get spiritual," because the cracks amass, and you're alone, and you're incoherent, but you still crave the certainty and "perfection" of your perception that your doubts betrayed. I didn't become "autistically obsessed" with reading about religion or scientific refutations of religious arguments unless I was fighting against an all-encompassing, and wrong, series of notions about myself. Notions pertaining to the girl I liked too much and the assumptions about my inevitable future given my academic performance, looks, or demeanor.

What did I really need more of? Meaning. I needed things to make sense. I needed to see a consistent cause and effect relationship that helped me keep my mood and behavior oriented. I didn't understand the depth of the crazy-making contradictions of the sea of nonsense words I was swimming in. I didn't understand how we break ourselves along the rocks of generational trauma and unarticulated responsibilities. I had no idea what my role or "purpose" could or should be, let alone the notion that I'd have to dictate it, and do it persistently, alone, in evolving ways, or it didn't really exist. That's a fucking huge undertaking.

If I connect with anyone, ever, it's because piece by piece, over decades, I'm trying to puzzle together the nature of these stories we're telling ourselves and needlessly suffering. Are you really an "addict?" Is your "loving" relationship serving you? Are you "just saying" a series of empty or hateful epithets you can't even recognize as such? It's always yes and no, and it's always changing, and it only gets better when you can label the spell with your own words and trust that when you say them you mean them. You were the cause, and you expect a certain effect. If you're not getting the effect you desire, you have the power to recite a new spell, stop casting them altogether, or look for the intended effect to take place elsewhere.

If you fundamentally deny your potential and power of your words, so it follows the story of your actions. You don't understand the harm. You don't understand the conditioning it takes to carry out the meaningful work to maintain or improve. This is as real to me as it is the physical exhaustion I do or don't feel in attempting to work on projects on my land. Week 4 of hauling scrap, fence building, or rock dispersal feels dramatically different than days 1 or 2. It's easy to describe any task as fairly simple or straight-forward, until the weather isn't perfect, or the tool breaks, or you get sick, or literally any reason, or excuse, arrives for you to deny what it's going to take to get the job done.

Your posture matters. You need to demonstrate for yourself in a consistent way that walking "like that" is going to cause spine issues. Using the wrong tool is going to get you hurt. Making the same appeal to the same people in the same way and only finding yourself resentful and exhausted is a you problem. You're caught under the spell singing a very personal song only you can hear and the rest of the world thinks you look crazy. Can you even wake up from your own spell? Can you resist the urge, redirect the craving, to join someone else's? Yes and no. Can you exercise the process and language to identify and dispel versus deny regardless? Yes.

Welcome to the work. Each time you affirm and say "yes" you inch in a chosen direction more than you suffer one you didn't. Yes, I can. Yes, that may be true. Yes, there's a road to explore here. Yes, I grant that is your perspective and yes I hope we can both respect the limits and potential of perspectives.

"I am whatever you say I am. If I wasn't, then why would I say I am?"