[859] It's Christmas Eve

If there's nothing else you take away from this, just know how incredibly bored I am.

I was recently re-reading a blog entitled Character Assassination. In it, I used a fresh example of the things very often levied against me when it comes to discussing difficult topics. For a number of reasons, I'm often at the end of someone's very earnest, exasperated, and insistent feelings with regard to how I argue something, discuss my place in life, or how I flick my hair or something.

I give no fucks. This is the dumb teenage way of saying, “I'm not concerned with a vast array of things regarding your disposition, opinion, or actions in the world, most specifically as they pertain to me.” My respect is for people who earn it. My good will is for people who grant it in return. Do I want to impress with the things I do or create? Sure. You'd be unconscionably foolish to believe I did it for you before me.

What seems to be lost on people is this is an expression of empathy. I literally imagine myself in your shoes engaging in something I'm asking of you. If you come to my house and your first instinct is to criticize (and not in that fun shit-talking way) all of the things I've yet to do to make this place emblematic of my larger ideals, you're a cunt. You're a cunt just like I'd be a cunt. You don't deserve the invite. You don't deserve my good will, my beer, my fire, my anything. That's easy, right? I walked into absolute shit holes as an assessor. Did I carry on like they were shit holes if they didn't endanger the child? Absolutely not. I didn't even have to use my imagination as to why their standard of living was what I came upon. (I hear it too.)

I talk an insane amount of game. Do you think I've done much beyond hint as to what the world looks like that I actually want? Is it because I'm disingenuous I haven't continued to exhaust myself every day in service? Is it that I'm just kinda dumb or lazier than I let on? What if, and this is a huge what if, I learned through hard way after hard way that there's an excruciatingly small amount of luck, good will, respect, circumstances, and money to practically do anything in life, and thus became reoriented? What if you're shit, I'm shit, we're both busy, and we've allowed any number of old cliches to bolster how we protect ourselves from engaging with the world in a more dramatic and real way?

Here's the rub. In my experience, I overwhelmingly watch as people devolve into insecure husks of themselves looking for the smallest of things to celebrate in a perspective that is otherwise degrading. I mean their perspective degrades their bodies, their minds, their relationships, their expectations, their belief in reality itself and what's possible. Do I need to remind you people that Trump is president? I'm not like alone on this uppity opinion about the shit bowl I'm swimming in.

As such, I'm extremely, probably as much as one can allow without turning it into a pathology, confident in the good things I do, and why I do them. I've done the work. I watch the examples I set and their consequences every single day. I watch my disposition to see if I'm on the border of breaking down into tears when I'm challenged (I'm not). I watch to see if the bills are continuing to get paid, and my work matches my predictions (they are and do). I ask, constantly, for reasons I should somehow think less of myself or prospects or people I'd prefer in my life, and the crickets are happy to chime a symphony.

I think insecurity is a self-indulgent luxury. How are you more feeble than a hapless animal spinning into oblivion, endlessly ignorant, and reasonably afraid of everything that could kill you instantly? Oh, you're fat too? Oh, you're scared “they” are gonna look down on you? Oh, you're petty expectations, so proud and defined, aren't going to be met? Boo, fucking, hoo. I respect that no one really gives a shit about me, that's my whole disposition. I get, intimately, that you are up your own ass too. Therefore, I only entertain the judgments you make from up there with so much salt. You're not even reading this blog! Lol, I have 5 people maybe that still catch these, and I'm pushing 900 that I've been writing for 16 years.

Be humble, insofar as you understand that it's your burden to keep demonstrating and reporting as honestly on your inner world as you possibly can. I'm 32. You don't get to just cry and breakdown when the topic is sensitive anymore. I'm not saying you can't or you won't or that I understand you trauma as you do. I'm saying you don't get to say with a straight face that it's supposed to be the reigning arbiter of your decision making or place in the world. You don't get to keep blaming me for being bored with it. You don't get to judge my confidence or otherwise as condescension and disrespect because you won't own how much you wished you felt better but are rarely willing to do the work to get better.

I fuck with people that get better and want more for themselves. I fuck with people who aren't dramatically changing how they dance around my endless slurry of pithy opinions or psychopathic blunt takes. Do I need to be more sensitive to people's feelings? This has been a central question since...about my whole life that I pretty consistently come down on the side of “why?” What is it serving, really? I'm giving you a helping hand in justifying what I think we should all consider pretty shitty behavior. I use feelings as something to acknowledge and inform, not an excuse. Be the example you want to see in the world?

One huge sign there's an incredible amount of unfair selfishness going on in your judgment is when you reach for the tit-for-tat and either/or mechanisms. When someone isn't deeply understood for the severity of their feelings, it condemns you as precisely the opposite of the kind of person who is capable or willing to bother in the first place! And wouldn't you know it, here's other aspects of your character to bolster the point. Relevant? Silly, now's not the time for questions.

You don't make me angry, I let my desire to be pissed off raise my voice and look for hurtful things to say. You don't make me sad, I allow the demonstrably sad shit going on at any one moment to steer how I'm going to write or indulge in the feeling. You don't make me happy, I've worked on how to contextualize and appreciate things for how they lie and then bolster myself at the prospect of how to make them grow or be organized in a higher order (or make them “better”). I want to remain responsible for how I engage in the world, so I try, aggressively, to contain the otherwise raging animal that wants to react react react and justify because of how icky you and your cruel world were behaving towards me.

Whether you want to believe it or not, you have precisely as much agency as I do. You often have significantly larger obligations and responsibilities than I do. Whatever superimposed games you've adopted on top of what I consider to be a basic ethic of respecting where and how you are oriented in the world, I'll never know. What I can tell you is how I'm going to react when all of the feelings you've tied into those games come into contact with me. No, I don't care what other people think. I respect that what they think has consequences, and play my cards accordingly, but the thought alone is not my concern if it doesn't impede how I'm trying to live. No, I'm not going to respond to tears. I don't want you to feel bad, and I know my advice to “don't,” doesn't work, but crying doesn't indicate that someone hurt you (even if they did), just that you feel like crying. You have to answer for why.

And just to end on a humanizing note, I've cried when I had no control. I've cried when I felt powerless. I've cried when I didn't get my way. I've cried when I didn't know what else to do. I've cried, barely, when I was drunk enough to get the directions wrong in attempting to walk 2 blocks. Does this make me “hard” or “cold?” No, its just taught me that crying can have a lot of really bad excuses, true enough, but that I've learned to take responsibility in service to, not break down over. I don't care how emotional you are, I care how you respond to it. If your first instinct is to blame me, or blame at all, pardon my red card for a foul on the play.