In this 3-part series breaking down quasi-unexpected shifts in the direction of my life, I'd like to potentially explore some perhaps positive direction now that the errant panic got most of its due.
Part of me forgot that I set up my life for precisely this situation. With the cash I have now, and if I had to use a credit card, I'm good until around September. I should be able to find an odd or pointless gig before then, no? More to the point, the idea that an “odd” or “pointless” gig is all that would be available to me is something I find disheartening. As a lover of statistics and data, it doesn't matter how many times I read of the number of “career changes” people my age have been through, it still feels wrong. It will never matter how much room I give myself to fail or adjust to something new. What will always matter is what I perceive as the broken backdrop and general trend.
I'm, still, constantly looking out over traffic. The other day we watched Koyaanisqasi and the movie Human. Transported to scenes of thousands of people inhabiting high rises or living in abject poverty. Close ups into the eyes of equally complex and anxious and intimately involved and woven into their culture individuals. And yet I always find a way to return my attention back to me. I can't feel part of it. I can recognize humanity. I don't hate “the other.” I want, even the dumbest, people on the planet to have access to things and feel like their lives are worth something. But I always return to me.
I can't get the line out of my head, which means there must be more to say about it, “don't try to fight someone else's demons.” The things I want to create or provide would presumably be focused on doing just that. Try to alleviate the struggle for someone else that I didn't like going through. Try to instill the responsibility and make the call to action where no one else would. Show them how to do things because they're hard, because they induce anxiety, because you're deathly afraid of the consequences and are never sure you'll figure it out. But can that really be done, or do you have to live it? Do you have to happen upon someone who’s been through the same thing in order for any real message to get across?
What are society’s demons? Is it a list that ever ends? Is it possible to sum up as one big singular failure of thought related to responsibility or consequences that is the poison at the core of the human animal? I find myself going back to questions like, what is it all for? Why do I care so much? How do I reconcile a species, or at the very least culture, I see on the rapid decline, with meager self-sacrificing punches up? Why am I convinced that something, anything, eventually has to even out and make sense? And worst of all, why, if I'm not the special snowflake constantly plagued and bitching and testing and fighting with this shit, why in the ever-loving fuck is the only thing I ever see fucking memes and bullshit happiness photos? Why is it never, NEVER patience and understanding? Why is it NEVER experimentation or new calculated risks? Why is it NEVER cooperation? At least in my corner of the world. At least with the people I at one time tried to surround myself with.
All I see, time and again, is people running. People making excuses. People acting like just because death comes for us all, might as well be right now. Every opportunity to try. DENIED. Every offer to get involved. GET FUCKED. Every discussion trying to probe out the mangled heart of the manner in which we're living. STOP WITH THE NEGATIVE HARASSMENT ALREADY! Like we can't make decisions. Like certain things aren't worth sacrificing. Like our backs shouldn't feel up against a very specific kind of wall facing the sort of problem that fixes burst forth from our desperate creative desire to live.
For the amount of times I reference the anxiety that kicked me out of studies and that still traps me into thinking I'm never going to figure out problems after giving myself less than a day of even bothering to explore them, I don't say it out loud as often as it feels. I'm responsible for the world. It's my fault for when poor kids don't get fed. It's my fault we're in ridiculous wars. I didn't write the right piece and send it to the correct place to start changing minds and starting the right discussions. It is always and forever my fault. I got myself fired. I allowed the general business environment to get so perverse and exploitative that I provided every excuse for those dumber and weaker than me to adopt everything they needed to fight against themselves. I already allowed it, sometime, somewhere, in something I said or did, and the butterfly effect of reasons culminated in every time I want to cite my “out of control physiology” as the problem.
That's the wrestling match. I used to actually believe in what I was doing. I was nervous and skeptical as hell for my first drug study. I was asking myself constantly what the fuck it was I was doing. You couldn't tell that to my heart rate. Now? I see the entire world resting on my capacity to get into a study. I see the next 12 buildings on the land. I see the parties celebrating my effort. I see trips to the doctor or dentist without a care in the world. I see myself on podiums talking about all of the shit it took to get here, and how it's completely unreasonable to believe you can too without a mountain of help I'm here to provide. I see it all. I see it right now. I'm there right now. And I have no idea when or how it's going to happen.
When I went to do studies, just like when I first started to do Biolife, “it just made sense.” I wanted (x) amount of money and security, so I did the thing that was required of me. The future was even more abstract. The money was maybe going towards alcohol. Now? Everything I've been craving to do like a puppy who's pissed the floor in excitement IS RIGHT THERE! There is no several months wait. There is no paperwork or permission. Show up, get poked, sleep in communal room, pop out and get a fucking driveway! Build a property to rent! Fix your truck and start a new business! It's all RIGHT THE FUCK HERE! And I can't touch it!
This is my version of depression. I feel I have no control, but feel all the weight and responsibility. I'm to blame, and I'm just affected. That's it. It's just there, I don't know what to do about it. I can talk about it for days and never find the words. I can remember the happier times. I can recall when it was dramatically worse. But it is what it is. And I can wish and pray until the cows come home, and I'll still find myself scrolling the classifieds for an understaffed desperate department somewhere to trickle in funds as I navigate the hopeless aging overweight “adult” world of bureaucracy and complacency.
I don't think people stress enough that you don't really have as much time as you think. Especially if you go to college, I've had around 8 years to “be an adult.” What happens in another 20 if I can't monetize the land? 49 writing a teenage angst blog about how I should have figured something out by now? Lamenting I should have met “even 1!” person with the same kind of desires or agenda? Beating myself for still not finding the time to reconnect or visit friends, an alleged end unto themselves, because the timing and funds still weren't right? Yet, to talk of next week sounds foolish when your fate isn't in your hands, let alone the next 20 years.
That's the balance though, right? It's between everything you can't control, and the things that keep it in check. Working for someone else is fundamentally chaotic and insecure. No matter what, no matter where. You've given a huge portion of yourself and future over to whatever your endeavor is, and if you're not figuring a way to get the world from it, you've sacrificed your own. But in a society in decline, where everyone is doped up and sad or busy and desperate, what can you, another poor person provide? Moral vigor and inspiration like Jordan Peterson? Some new stupid gadget or toy? They don't want your space, or at least not yet. You give your useless ramblings away for free.
I want an escape. I want to sell everything, move somewhere poverty-level cheap, and run a banana stand. I want to be like the Kenyan guy I read about who had 500 family members he kept in regular contact with. I still have the focus and desire, but I've co-opted them towards shit like trying to pass the time across my interests more evenly? And then a house party gets thrown over the weekend, and I lose my shit job, so I blow up my routine after a week. It was pointless to start. It suffered a pointless end. What I learn, what new connections I made, all would get funneled into references no one I knew was familiar with and pretend to underlay projects I don't have the time or resources to start. One useless time-killing move after another.
“If I could just find the time, then I would never let another day go by. I'm over getting old. And maybe it's not my weekend, but it's gonna be my year. And I'm so sick of watching while the minutes pass as I go nowhere. And this is my reaction, to everything I fear. Cause I've been going crazy I don't wanna waste another minute here.”
“I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king. I've been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing. Each time I find myself flat on my face, I pick myself up and get back in the race. That's life.”
The last time I felt desperate, I picked up 2 jobs at opposite hours and proceeded, as I do, to work myself to death. I don't want that to happen again. I consciously pulled back on the hours I was working at CT, espousing the idea that it's still definitely not purely about the dollar amount as it is how and why you exercise your time. I have enough time to apply to several hundred jobs if need be. I have less reason to believe my car is going to die on me at any moment. I have leads. I have someone who's still supposed to contact me about starting something on the land tomorrow or Tuesday. I have shit I don't even want that could be sold if things got insanely desperate. I haven't even tried going back to Biolife, the thing that, at one point, actually paid my rent. I was considering looking for more work even while I was spending too much time at CT, so the ground floor mental place is somewhat established already. There's still an infinitesimal chance I enjoy whatever next thing I move into.
I'm going to try and prevent myself from feeling guilty about even mildly freaking out. I think it's okay to consider the world as resting on your shoulders. How else do you become someone for which it actually does? I don't think you have to love the struggle or grind. I don't think you have to make the picture sound rosier or more self-assured than you are. Let it sink in, I'm not even upset I don't have the job. I'm upset that exactly the thing that could or was bound to happen did, exactly as I've talked about, and for reasons that it should have. I've already been here, back whenever I've written about it, just like I'm already in my future. Even with the path laid out behind me, I still struggle with how exactly “I,” let alone “it” all played out like it did. Why I couldn't do better, but can imagine a million ways I could have been worse. How I watch every day how a million people are the million ways I consider worse, probably unfairly, but distinctly.
It's never getting better and I'm fated to feel this way forever. Precisely the kind of positive direction I should end this with.
