Honestly, for what has felt like a building and building for months, my brain is on fire. I feel as though were I ever able to re-learn how to cry, maybe I could be persuaded to shut off the endless conversations with myself and inability to stop digging. Digging, that is, unaware if I’m trying to reach bottom, some treasure, or just to back fill a hole I’ve previously dug.
I get a lot of ideas about what I’m going to do when I’m on the road driving home. I get home, blow them all off, and then do things like start writing this, or eat when I’m not that hungry, or settle in for a sped up show I’m half-paying attention to. I have hours of my weekly work to record. I have a calendar to establish. I have details as it pertains to home maintenance to finish. I have to keep talking. The obsessive button is stuck on, and I can’t help myself.
I can’t help myself. I think this is the point of no return for people. You either reach that point and break down, or you humble yourself and look for the right kinds of help. I can’t help myself. I don’t have enough information. I don’t have the resources. I don’t have the language. I don’t have the time. I might not even have the best or most appreciable grasp of my own problem. No louder does the point of swallowing, “I can’t help myself” sound as it hits your stomach than when other people are helping you.
I panic when I need help. I don’t want to waste your time or money driving to help me only to discover I forgot it was Saturday and our plan is foiled because the shop my truck sits at is closed. I don’t want to think about you moving things around in your garage where you said I could put mine while we work on it. I don’t want to think about driving your friend-of-a-friend’s car in shitty weather or the potential accidents. I don’t want to feel this burden to pay you to bother with me at all.
The whole concept of “help” or “equal exchange” throws me. It nags the sense I’ve developed for getting taken advantage of or taken for granted. I can know full-well how eager I am to please and wish to contribute meaningfully to what someone else is doing, but I can barely cope with the idea that my neighbor would offer to let me use his tools or tow the truck for me. I have to fight to believe that anyone would just lend me their knowledge in helping get the truck repaired. It’s unfair to them and my best impulses. It’s an irrational fear that my worst most selfish instincts are getting something for nothing.
There’s very few people I think I have a grasp on what I mean to them. I’ve also invested in people who my presumed understanding in no way matched how little I in fact did. I get this wave of appreciative emotion if someone is willing to pick me up when my car dies. I expect to be left to shiver if it’s cold, pay a shit ton to be towed, and it’s probably going to be raining, so when good will or friendship enters into that disaster-construct I bring, I’m overwhelmed. I want to believe it’s not anymore of a “burden” or “problem” for someone to “deal with me” than I would if any of you genuinely needed something from me. Unfortunately, the vast majority of my relationships and experiences are based in lies.
It’s probably why I’m so moved to constantly write. I can’t trust my perspective, so I have to keep investigating it against the good and bad things that happen. I have to keep my decisions and expectations in some kind of check, or my mind is otherwise begging for an excuse to spiral. Nothing ever feels particularly balanced, which is why I lend myself to taking on too much or being hopelessly optimistic that with a banal but persistent focus and work ethic, it’ll all manifest eventually. I’m dodging people’s chance to help me as I view them as attempts to emotionally leverage or manipulate. I’m waiting for the problem to compound, and be left worse than if I just had to fix things alone. Like, imagine your friend’s tire popping in coming to pick you up.
I guess this also speaks to how little trust I have for anyone. I’m probably going to replace my tire, come pick you up, and go buy another tire. I feel at the butt of, “Well it popped while I was coming to get you!” kind of arguments all the time. Someone else not terribly well-off in a position to afford a new tire uses their dire and dramatic life to assign blame; repeat ad nauseum. Why run the risk of provoking that response? Why attack your already feeble understanding of the ways in which anybody might be allowed to help you? You can completely avoid a food fight if you never invite them to dinner.
Whether you wish to regard it as a kind of super power or extreme liability, I’m positive I’m shaped by some series of chemical flourishes and imbalances that send my spider senses into a frenzy. Most people tip me off the wrong way. The ones who haven’t then have to surmount my “intellectualizing” of their presumed living-failure state. If they’re either suffering the same kind of symptoms, dispositionally aberrant in their niceness, or prove themselves in some kind of fairytale fashion, then I might take a chance in asking for anything or “more.”
I’m tired of losing or failing for bad reasons. I make the distinction between my clients where there are those who are poor and trying, or poor and cunts blaming everything but themselves. If I broke my car joyriding or off-roading instead of side-hustling, I’d feel less inclined to argue my job should find the language or responsibility to collaborate and shoulder some of the burden. Not even my friend, my fucking job that profits 10-to-1 off the work I do for it. My job that doesn’t pay me enough to not find side-hustling necessary. People shouldn’t be made to suffer because of judgment or indignation unless it’s their own.
None of us ask for the myriad things that seek to shit on or influence us every day. We cope by detaching. We cope by downplaying and parroting. We drink or get way into our hobbies. We overburden sentimentality. We work ourselves until we’re too exhausted to think. We don’t feel helpful, and at least for me, therefore can’t trust help offered by others. We recognize the problems as bigger than our daily buckets of water against the forest fire. We know we haven’t run enough to even escape the boulder’s shadow, let alone had time or energy to ponder the size and origin of that boulder.
Knowing you need help and being able to find it are two different things. I know I need help. I know I can access certain kinds of help for certain kinds of things. I’m not entirely sure if some things related to my thoughts and compulsions can really be helped, medication aside. I don’t know that I want to be numb or hazy when calm or worked-up, the threats are real. Whether they constitute threats to your life or reduce to daily negotiated realities, they’re shaping what you can see out of yourself and other people. They’re living and breathing the ongoing reality to navigate.
I try to “think” away my panic. I try to write my feelings into a corner where they certainly consider what that good cry might feel like, indefinitely, until I’ve ground my teeth down and conjured a new headache. This contributes to my desire to compulsively act. STOP THINKING I plead with myself, GO DO. And what is there to do? March and yell? My homework? My detailed little fixes rounding out my selfish little space I’m only entitled to provided the wrong people aren’t paying attention?
I only feel “at home” in those imperfect expressions of the consistent ideals. It’s only when I’m working in service to ideas and people I believe in that the insecure doubt and panic are erased. Yard work becomes a joy, because a better future accompanies each shovel-full. You can feel genuine enthusiasm for other people’s junk as it now represents a learning opportunity or larger commercial presence. Misunderstandings or open questions feel like they deserve your attention and are capable of being brought to a resolution. The next disagreement is a chance to refine an exacting appreciation for where you’re headed together. You’re encouraged by and to figuring out what needs helped and where. The reciprocity is built in, not baselessly expected nor poised for abuse.
I feel abused. I feel like I’m made to continually explain how I could get less black eyes if you’d stop installing so many pointless doorknobs, and right at eye-level. We both refrain from saying the quiet part out loud about how many you’re regularly throwing at me. I’ve learned that when you tell people that’s what happened, they’ll let you borrow a screwdriver. Or they’ll accuse you of dragging good doorknob installers through the mud. Or they’ll tell you to crank your head back so you take the blow at a point that bruises less easily. The victim in me panics, distrusts, over-analyzes, and wants to instantly burn things down. The vast majority of the time, the victim doesn’t make the rules or dictate my response.
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