I am a shell of myself.
Of the myriad thoughts passing through my head on the drive back, this felt the right way to start. Shell? What shell? I'm still me, no? I eat the same, I get my work done. I get stress headaches and wear more than a little wanting clothing. Am I not still racked with...guilt? for all that needs to be done that I find myself incapable of bringing to fruition? Just how many things can remain the same or concurrently true while the shell keeps it all trapped?
Lately, I've been inundating myself with biology. I catch a random series of lectures Stanford put out. I watch a BBC documentary on whether or not science can make us “perfect.” I watched or read or did something else that I pointed out at the time which I can't remember now. This persistent narrative about the underlying “rationality” and “causality” and “molecular history” or “gene expression” at the root of it all. All the politicking, all the anger, all the health conditions, all the addictions and excuses and quirks a series of tried and true adaptations or mutations. As you may well know, I spent several years getting this message when I argued science vs religion. It is not new.
What I don't like is the depersonalizing effect it has on me when coupled with my self-effacing job. I can only say or do so much. There's a deliberate and cordial manner in email. I have to go into full sociopath, or politicking, mode to ensure I draw out certain truths or stave off the suspicions of entitled white trash.
But let's back up. Because along with the biology, I've been listening to the advice of and histories of Great Men throughout history. I caught a Thomas Jefferson biography. I'm in the middle of an exploration of Churchill and Roosevelt's relationship. I read a small article about what it means to be “truly educated” according to Chomsky. People, not without their flaws and prejudices, doing people things, but donning a kind of mantel on the consequence dial for the whole human endeavor. The more you learn about someone, the more accessible they feel. The more their decisions are cataloged and mythologies stoked, the more they can be both revered and forgotten as the legacy transcends even the idea of who they really were.
When you find yourself depersonalizing, it can go one of two ways. You can remove stress and anxiety as you generally go about the flow of life, perhaps consistently doing what's been asked of you or acting with a kind of sporadic selfish energy as you float from one experience to the next. The second path is finding yourself indifferent to what may be regarded as malicious behavior. Unfortunately, or not, I find myself vibing with the latter.
Let me put it to you like this. I do a lot of work “behind the scene” to organize 8 people's schedules into a weekly visit. Those 8 people have 8 or more homes where their, never less than 2, kids live. Somehow, I can squeeze them into a coherent-enough structure that gives me days off, exceeds hourly expectations, and merrily pretends the sacrifices (like quitting their jobs) people make are going to one day see them back with their kids like normal. Then, one of these “clients” will get indignant and suspicious. I control if they see their kids. I want to squeeze them to make my life easier. One client in particular sucks the life out of her children and everything these people talk about is prison, pregnancy, or a measure of delinquency related. She's under the delusion her kids are coming back in a month while she can't stop doing meth. Her “super helpful” sobriety program is getting in the way of me not having to come home at 10:30pm on Friday nights.
So what can I do? I can email her case manager and ask if there are analogous programs. This one isn't required, but was suggested by their case manager, and allegedly they are going to it. It apparently doesn't run any other day of the week besides the exact time I want their visit to go. Seems like a nice and understanding person would trust them to keep with their program, right? But you see, these people are lazy and entitled pieces of white trash shit. They were 2 days away from getting their kids back before doing meth again. Their dad refuses all services and it was explained to the mom she won't get the kids back, or will have to choose between them and their father in the home, if he doesn't complete programs. He smokes at visits, against our policy, and I could at any moment decide the environment isn't safe and cart them back home. And just as icing, the kids are rude.
I'm pushing a point where I have the caseload and wiggle room where I can just drop a “fuck it, we're done” bomb to compel behavior. And I want to considerably more than not. I want these people to bend to me, because I exercise so little power elsewhere, this little “win” would get me home, stress them out, and hopefully speed up the inevitable so I can move on to my next pieces of shit. I've done nothing but make every appointment, increase their visitation hours, and politely inform them of our roles and responsibilities, and they say not one “thank you” or are willing to work an inch while blowing up my phone with inane presumptive bullshit. I want to hurt them further than they can hurt themselves.
That's a shell person right there. Harm for harms sake. What did I need to get back home for tonight? A friend to blow me off and to start writing this. Super good reasons to strong arm white trash into extending your weekend hours.
An aside: If you want to put a baby to sleep, sing a lullaby. If you want to put a retarded white trash teenage girl to sleep, put on an audio-book about presidential history. There's a much longer joke and stand-up set in there, but that baseline needs to exist somewhere for posterity.
It still feels real, my potential, to do more than fuck with idiot poor people. But there is a measure of compelling darkness to my being that I've little recourse in letting out. And don't they deserve it? And if not them, who? Anyone? Ever? Or is it just my job to be the general human toilet for everyone's shitty emotions and feelings? I genuinely want an answer to that.
My shell self breaths before writing a feverishly defensive and threatening text. In about 30 seconds, I'm going to have the perfectly apolitical words that get you to say exactly what I need. Now I'm waiting 30 seconds, or a day, or not even bothering to get angry at all. Where have I gone? Who is this placating non-invasive everyman? Who's humbly hunched in his ill-fitting shirt over his computer pretending not to fantasize about choking everyone in front of him with the swing chains? Who's the mockery of an over-enthusiastic and energetic fool who doesn't feel defeated by the prospect of getting not only another gas can to fill up his van, a battery, and a lawn mower so that he might get power this very weekend! And instead worries he's just going to waste more money chasing another dead end right before his car shits the bed? Why am I sitting here half-expecting the rest of my shit to be stolen the next time I go out to the land, instead of fervently making my way to defend all of this invested being unto the death!?
I don't feel like anything anymore. I just am. I just can or can't. For every Great Man I read about, who's left some indelible mark on history, there's several years if not my entire lifetime between me and when they became of note. Well, they lived storied lives and traversed the ups and downs of being born white, rich, and in the West in eras of vastly smaller populations and every new accessible frontier.
So maybe it is my place to “elevate” my “mere wage slave” status and be a “rockstar” who employs incredibly shady tactics to make my schedule and abilities look as good as I know how to make them. Maybe I parlay the “wows” and “nobody's every done that's” into the kind of fortune that lets me run wild on the land. Maybe I've never known anything about how to get what I want, and after the final capitulation, just be the shell, the world will open up as I've always assumed it should or would eventually, but stubborn old-world ethic me needed to be broken like the wildest of horses. Maybe power is to be exercised where you have it, not when. Maybe the universe is punishing me for too much deference and humility and indifference masquerading as patience. Maybe I'm meant to teach the exact kind of lessons in pain that I know how to to the exact people I'm interacting with in any one moment.
I'll leave it up to you to decide if that's the kind of story I should be finding compelling about myself, and whether there's anything that should be done about it. But it is the story I'm telling myself. It feels like a window back to “me.”
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