[765] Clench

I think I'm losing control. Something I never quite understood was when people would be “stressed” about things they had no control over. I've definitely found myself at the bottom of a dark and dead pit after reading way too much terrible news about the world, but I suffer from the delusion that I can do something about it. It wasn't the terribleness in and of itself, it was observing myself, day after day, doing shit like delivering food or watching the blood shoot from my arm, somehow still thinking that “just around the corner” I would be all...”it.” The many steps removed you might be from “doing genuine good” while you're engaged in the things I have for money are as despotically described per your degree of hatred for capitalism or sympathetically understood by how much we all seem to have to pay the bills.

 

Importantly, up until I've adopted these “real world” jobs, I felt in control. When I needed to drop out of my “gigs,” I could. I picked to work back-to-back shifts because, again with my delusions, I thought 2 or 3 concurrent sources of income could be maintained on fleeting hours of sleep. I was “happy” enough to make the drives 6 or 7 hours away to try and get into drug studies. Whether I used my stays to sleep most of the time or read more in a week than I could in a year, it felt like I was steering myself into chosen icebergs.

 

Now? In place of my quick spasms of grinding teeth, I appear to have a perpetually tense jaw. I'm flirting with the “headache for no reason” thing I had growing up in my mom's house. I'm getting extremely lax in my caution against ridiculous meals and the amount of money I'm willing to spend on them. The stakes don't feel as high. The reminders and the language of the “old” and “settled” are surrounding my every waking moment. I'm not “randomly” interacting with “my kind of people,” be it for their off-kilter eccentricities or hopeful and naive language about what they want to accomplish.

 

For the variety of aberrant and “crazy” I may encounter throughout the day, it all speaks to a kind of underlying sickness that needs a cultural breed-out program more than haughty middle-management.

You see, it's not just that I feel less like the arbiter of where I'd like to steer this ship, I'm watching myself play out the drama of the people's lives I engage with. Intellectually, nothing I encounter in these people's lives is “mine,” in a very important sense. Practically, I have to suffer the phone calls preventing me from getting something else done. I have to stress out about my car not making it across some backwater Indiana road. I have to take in the array of poverty and neglect scents. I have to feel the waves of denial and hatred pour out of insistent liars about how they perceive their family members and how they engage in the world.

 

I get it now. I don't want to recall my last hour explaining in detail how I managed a crazy situation, but not unlike writing, it feels like I don't have a choice. It's this, or bite through my jaw. Only now the stakes are higher. I take in too much crap into this kind of job, you can really fuck up someone's life. A fact that doesn't bother me at all, but a real consequence if I felt I was flirting with forgoing paying attention at all to how it's eating at me.

 

This is the kind of job that people can treat like they’re on a mission. I get the impression that whether they want to admit it or not, there's a little tingle in their downstairs about the power you have and it's almost throwaway amounts of good will you get from people who can't imagine what it's like to do your job. I think we should make an extra $20 every time someone tells me they wouldn't want to. But, there's a case to be made that via your “proper upbringing” and capacity for de-stressing and organizing, you may bring some good into the lives of people who desperately need it. My last meeting of the day, I caught a look from a mom who showed the mildest hope that I had told her something new and potentially powerful that apparently the legion of caseworkers and people they've dealt with before had not.

 

I know I'm a more positive influence than negative. For however terrible I may make you feel after you read something from me, I don't then go into my work or friend life and attempt to act dumber than I am or meaner than I feel. There are a fair number of people as or more competent than me in their different fields all, I'm assuming, experiencing their version of isolated personal hell as they cling to the drops of positive difference they make in the world too. Isn't that the problem? I don't operate under the presumption I can help anything. Like most things, I consider it something of a happy accident after enough probability waves can be tricked into flowing a different direction. By that same token, I can, at the very least, practice dismissing all the waves of shit that wash over me. I can function as a buoy that the errant parent or child can cling to for a moment before they inevitably drown, fine, nature of the game. I can't let all the rest start to surround me and make me okay with a level of complacency that I'm finding exhausting in a way too many work hours never has.

 

Job shit combined with that life irony of thinking I finally got something accomplished land-wise and energy wise, still waiting, doesn't make for a good “in the meantime” story either. I waited for months of good and honest work before I paid in advance to get this final piece completed. You'll note I'm not typing this from my heated and electrified home in the middle of nowhere. Is it inexplicable or egregious yet? No. Does having to “hide” my plastic drawer with clothing in it in Byron's room for apartment home inspections feel like a greater indicator as to the state of my life right now?

 

I think it's a blessing and a curse that I don't believe what I'm not doing. Maybe it's a relationship that doesn't quite click until we start talking and I realize you haven't killed yourself either in a similar way I'm attempting to avoid. I literally have my own rent-free place and land, and without the work done and me sitting there drawing inspiration about how to classy up the place, it's not quite real. I could be doing a great many deals of good service in my disposition and dishonestly-described “poor” work ethic, at least by comparison, but you're hard-pressed to persuade me otherwise that I'm not mostly going through the motions of semi-direction with regard to things that are mostly thoughtless complaints from the ignorant about the ignorant. And in the spirit of moral or litigious propriety, I have to treat everything like it's at least a touch on fire.

 

The State worries about “burnout.” They don't want your baggage to become client baggage or reflect badly on the work available to the public. They'll shuffle you between counties. They'll let you seek out different positions. The last day of training was a serious examination about self-care. I think in order to be truly burned out, it takes a level of both investment and disenfranchisement it's impossible for me to achieve. I take my job seriously, but the state of my moral soul and conception of myself is not in believing I'm doing any good or measured by the thank yous and tears. I can hate the fact that I've spent 3 hours of “overtime” in the rehashing and bitching, that my mind would do about something else anyways, but now it's consistently related to work, but not wake up 10 years from now wondering how I stayed there so long and on the verge of a breakdown.

 

As with everything, this too shall pass. Maybe next week I'll be home and not discover my stuff burned down or stolen, and you'll get a blog about how I plan to decorate or something. Maybe my mind will figure something out in my sleep about how to process and condense bullshit I don't have tonight. Maybe I'll have another sporadic removal and catch hella overtime that results in a check that makes me forget all about any particularly difficult client. Maybe I'm meant to just be disappeared for a while.