Earlier today, I wrote another redundant blog about the nothing of my day to day. I was sitting in the hospital, killing an hour, after an appointment fell through. You know the story, not enough time to focus on anything particularly meaningful, long enough waste to stoke perpetual guilt over all that I’d rather be doing. It’s not even worth sharing, and will likely be a hiccup I throw on my chain on Blogger, biding its time to waste a stranger’s.
Now, I’m occupying a highly anxious state, listening to questionable sounds outside of my house, as I resent the things in my house mocking me. Right now, I don’t feel like I can “have it all.” I feel like I spend an inordinate amount of time playing catch-up and justify. There is no song in my heart that provokes me to play my instruments, even as I can be as loud as I want. My space, being mostly organized and a thousand percent cleaner, doesn't beg me to plaster over screw holes or sweep up the dust in my bathroom corner.
I come home, mostly eager to sit and watch, maybe get through a chapter or two. My horizon has collapsed into the extra early I have to be up to go to court. My prospects continue to lay in one more paycheck than the week before. It all feels very bleak, very meaningless, and very lonely. This, of course, is in direct contrast to my experience over the preceding 5 days. Wednesday was the day I got to pull the trigger and make the drive I’d been looking forward to. It was one long continuous day until driving home on Sunday where things fluidly went from one impossibly worthwhile and valuable experience to the next. I was sharing time with someone I cared about. What else is there?
I’ve brought it up before, but it bears repeating. My fancy house and dreams for the future were all about filling them with people I gave a shit about and living it up. My ideas to collaborate on “anything” were because it doesn’t matter what did or didn’t succeed more than we would be tapped into something together. You can do anything when you’re doing it with someone or for something greater than yourself. You find the energy. You create the means. Your instinct revolves around “yes” and “how” instead of comparable complacent terminology.
My anxiety stems from knowing in my bones how little I matter but for the relationships I keep. I don’t treat my body well until I need it to behave as an example for someone who wants to operate theirs better. I don’t invest that much in the myriad things I’m watching, until you want to talk about it or suggest it. I don’t play music unless it’s a part in the band, and even then, the band should want to say something besides “I’m old and lonely, but super friendly.” I want every single second, bitching second, suffering second, to speak to the achievement of the long perfect moment you can inhabit when you’re doing something, anything, with the right people.
To that end, it speaks to why I last longer in jobs where I don’t hate coworkers. It’s not an “in the trenches” sentiment, as much as it is literally, without YOU, I don’t really care to come in, make my coffee, offer a tired sentiment, and pretend what I’m doing is that complicated or dramatic, even on the days babies die. One of my coworkers went on vacation, and I started applying to different jobs. Culture is what’s sticky, and the more intentional you are about the form and personality types you want to be a part of yours, the dream-adjacent scenarios can then manifest. I’ll never stop referencing my parties for that reason. Everyone was invited, and then got whittled down.
Something I need to stop doing is putting arbitrary obstacles in my way under the guise of being “busier.” I was flirting with taking a night shift job for a month or two. As if you can do my job drowsy and keep the proper demeanor. As if I did it particularly well at 23, better at 28, and now 31 is going to show you what it’s really made of. Asking my boss to explore overtime options is the same kind of thing. Might I get a 5% version of something I really want to do? Sure, possibly. Will the amount of time I spent fretting over looking like a jackass be worth it? It’s already been a joke learning experience as the help, again, I try to enlist ignores me, and skills I need to do it alone require enough uncompensated time to be all-but useless, saving sentiments about every little thing mattering eventually.
I could focus with my dearest. I was there watching the movies, on the drives, at the pool, in the bookstores, at the night market, walking the streets, at the parade, sleeping the morning away, sharing dinner, and discussing ideas from the books we’d like to read more of. I’m still there. I’ll know my life has reached the highest goal when I’m in that kind of space indefinitely. Time marching on, but, work will end and new questions will feel like opportunities instead of obligations, and we’ll move right along together. I suspect this is the kind of fantasy romantics entertain, less articulated, as the details of how to achieve such a state get subsumed by “love” language and well-wishings written on the wedding boards.
I wrote that terrible blog, a waiting and bitching reduction, and emblematic of my state of mind as I carry out my pragmatic duties each day. I certainly can find myself hating the sound of my voice hard enough to choose silence, but then I provoke a kind of steaming pot scenario. The one thing I say many hours later becomes a kind of devastating hopelessness that some annoying chirping could have teased out politely. Or worse, it internalizes as my jaw clenched that much harder, brow furled, and posture cramped and cranky. I want to remain open and excited at the prospect of how to engage my time. I don’t want to live off the memories of a week here and there. I dismiss the idea that life is this painful negotiation of choking down and coping no matter how often I find myself in that state. We’re forged from the eruption and expansion of what may be described as an infinitely clenched universal jaw. We should be infusing with life and internally combusting constantly.
Even when I disappear for a few hours, I miss myself. I miss looking at my wall of instruments and thinking I could be more than passable at them all. I miss thinking it was the most important thing in the world to play very fast and very clean. I miss thinking I could single-handedly build or learn anything if I just took my time, and no matter how terribly defined the directions (goddamn you shed plans). I miss thinking I would come home, and know that by the time I got to the bottom of the hole, I’d be ready to fill it with wood for a raging fire, pool liner, or layer for an earthen build. When I’m not around, I’m tired. I’m too contemplative. I see only the things left undone verses what’s made it this far. I see how it can be extinguished and what I’ll be left to pick up after. I’m no longer my own cheerleader after I realized there’s no team, stadium, and my ass isn’t flattering under the frills.
I think mostly unconsciously, this not-secret thing involving genuine human connection and basest desire at the heart of all self-contained existence speaks to why social work and social life play out in predictable ways. Gotta find someone, right? Love the one you’re with. Find the group identity within your range of attractiveness or status very regardless, if not specifically so, of their actual value as individuated human beings. Pick your poisoned passion. Hang in there, baby. Forgive and forget as long as you promise to never do either of those things, and drone on about the importance of your cultural or familial ties. What a show indeed.
It’s important to me that you know all of the mess in between. Whatever you think about me, I didn’t get there without getting through; and that through is my endless torrent of horrible terrible thoughts before I stumbled into something barely respectable. I don’t get back to playing my instruments without all of the terrible blogs, and lesser terrible ones. I don’t make it into work tomorrow until I’ve read this through half a dozen times and decide I can put myself aside a few more hours to make a little more money and help keep a 4 month old out of the hands of a meth user. I need constant dives into the well before I find drops of life-sustaining water.
I want your process to be as humbling, terrifying, and accountability-seeking as possible. I hate that I have to sound like I do when things aren’t going how I think they should. I hate not being able to carry on and feign any more appreciation for my regal circumstances than I have. I don’t want it needlessly complex, or easy, or disingenuously isolated and selfish. I want it meaningful. I want it tapped into energy and intention that circulates and reinforces. You don’t associate “explosion” with “eventually,” and the fact that I can go from dreading, clenched, and plodding to dialed-in, calm, and contented by mere good company is as large a hint as life can give you. What are your friendships, your crowd, or your family speaking to? Is it the story only you could tell together, or the collection of basic-bitch Bed Bath & Beyond plaques for you bathroom?
I’m not special, but I’m asking you, begging you, to allow me to be.
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