[885] Stop The Tape

I get so worked up.

To be sure, this is not going to be walking back what I wrote earlier, but bringing a few more pieces to it.

There's an idea I entertain about all conversations being about the same thing. You may start out discussing your relationship with a friend, pivot to a restaurant you drive past together, and it reminds you of a memory growing up. Weren't you focused on the relationship conversation? Didn't it matter? What did that restaurant have to do with anything? Where did some distant memory figure it belonged?

Your brain is just processing, or not, the information. How it combines and condenses, or what's forgotten, is a product of too much to calculate. What can remain constant across ideas or memories is your awareness of your ideas and where they are moving. “You” can still observe that one provoked the other, or the infinite sea of a certain kind of emotion conjures seemingly otherwise disparate moments.

I'm aware that I can't be helped. That is, how my head works, how forcefully I speak, how angry I may seem, and all of the baggage that comes along with it is mine. You can't fix me. You can't make it better. If you have one idea, that you disagree, I'm left in the familiar realm of abyss screaming, life goes on, maybe I quit a job or crash a car. I suppose I can understand why it would feel unsatisfying to simply accept such dramatic or unconscionable outcomes so well in advance.

Part of the reason I can't be helped, especially in fervent blog form, I'm having a dozen conversations at once. I'm reminded of a series of injustices. I'm forming thoughts in real time that associate with a feeling. I'm searching for a word that triggers a mini diatribe as I recall for whom and what I generally save that word for. It's almost confusing intentionally. I don't have things figured out. Writing is me facing the severity of my feelings, so I can move on and eat dinner or laugh at the movie I put on.

I try to write one line at a time. I try to ensure that when you are predictably confused, exhausted, or bored with hearing me say the same things, maybe one line sticks. No matter how many books or articles I read, it's a few lines or paragraphs I ever repeat or consistently think of when I write. I know it won't be a line where I'm asking a question that can hardly be answered. I doubt it will be any calls to arms. I know you're the hero of your own story and modesty or privacy are fair enough reasons to never bother sharing, the problematic nature of social media aside.

I'm worried, but I'm selfishly worried too. I worry that I'm living in a failed state. As “big” or broad a topic as that may seem, it seems as real to me as turning a key and expecting my car to start. I struggle to know what the purpose and meaning of words or history are if I'm not supposed to be feeling credible ongoing fear about how to respond to that. I'm worried if you're not worried. I'm worried if you're more worried and feeling as helpless as I do. I'm worried if you're all of that and quiet, leaving me to carry on like a budding genuinely crazy person (ahem, person struggling with mental health).

I'm selfishly worried that for everything I've attempted to cut out of life, in spite, by investing, by sacrificing, by negotiating with my worst impressions and judgments of “the system,” I'm never going to really enjoy it. My mind is going to wonder about whether I should have been *more dramatic* or brave. I'm gong to miss people I've never met. I'm going to feel like I skirted by because of my convenient circumstances. I'm going to think about the walking dead waiting to invade. I don't want the stories that have been written by following rules or orders. I know death will take you whether you're full of pride or shit just as quickly.

I'm angry. I'm not the kind of angry that comes in the door, slams things down, and begs an aneurysm to pop. I'm the kind of angry that's been told to be a leader, with no one signing up for war. I'm the kind of angry who has watched systems he's been a part of degenerate one after another while he's tried to work incredibly hard mentally and physically to account. My mind races through the times I've offered to do more, organize better, save time, save money, or shuffled between “authority” who shit the bed so hard I can't find the words. I'm angry that I don't know what you believe in beyond the status quo.

Then I just feel dumb. Why get angry about what I don't know? Everyone's fighting their own battle, right? Why am I not comfortable it's a worthwhile and important one on their own terms? I'm not a man of faith, and if I were, I'd say faith is dead without acts. I think some people are doing their best, most aren't. Fair or not, that's my napkin calculation just based on the “professionals” I meet regarding the safeguarding of children AS A JOB. I don't need to inflate or become hyperbolic about what I've seen there. I don't struggle to praise and point out when it goes right either. Literally, by the numbers, we have reason to at least voice the worry.

So it goes with anything else you can count. What else don't I have to play make-believe about and get all worked up in my feelings over? 73 million. DCS going from 8-10 supervisors/managers to 3. Ireland having perpetually 7-10 families that aren't getting regular visits because the number of staff can't meet the demand. $50,000 contracts to keep families out of the system, but not enough money to pay case managers nor discussion about how poverty compounds their issues. 6 months the average tenure of someone at DCS or social work broadly (honestly, this could be an “all jobs” thing, but I haven't checked in a while). Pushing 300,000 dead. 0 states you can afford the average rent on minimum wage. What about compound interest on student loans and the number of years you've been enslaved for trying to learn?

How smug and self-satisfied should I feel about my next build on the land? Am I “fixing” anything but my gaze just past the dumpster fire? Should I continue to indulge my dreams or fantasies and write off everyone not choosing to be like me?...like so many entitled generations before me...like so many possessed by their first and last ideas?

It's big and small battles, all happening at once, all talked about in confusing or contradictory terms, and all particular to the humans, the individuals, involved. We can submit to our animal instincts or we can be human. We can't linger in-between as the forest burns.

I'm *trying* to say exactly what I've said in every line. I'm *trying* to say what I believe in by creating what I have on the land. I'm *trying* to say that I don't believe I know enough individuals fighting worthwhile battles. I know some, and I know what 73 million people would say or do to keep them in whatever polite, mature, safe conversational box they're in now. I'm saying that I am, in fact, *trying.* I'm failing, nauseatingly, unceasingly, to find things that align with my biggest and smallest conceptions of my being, but I'm also grinding my teeth and feeling sick to my stomach about what I feel all but forced to do for money, in service to people who think it's polite to offer me a chance to take off my mask.