[917] Succor Punch

 

Considerably more needs to be said on this notion of “helping.” I felt it when I ended my last blog, but I knew the phrasing was incomplete. I've criticized vague notions of “help” in the past when I watched Kristen in particular seem to come home, daily, exhausted and suffering her shitty work conditions at Centerstone. I think it's one of the fiercest drives of evolution and most exploited if not misunderstood as well.

What does helping mean to me? Help is differentiating between what I think I want and need from what someone else may tell me. Help is working in service to proven modes of being that exist above or beyond current turmoil. Help is attempting to be prepared for things we will all inevitably need help with. Help means to not cripple myself with bad ideas or behavior before I even begin. I can't help if there is no coherent notion of what “I” am bringing to the table. I can't help if I couldn't pretty quickly come up with a comprehensive account of how help manifests. I can't help if I can't recognize or acknowledge when something isn't helping.

I think it's really easy to see when you look at social work contexts. The difference between a seasoned, hopefully not jaded, case worker and someone just out of college is their notions of what can and can't help. Sending service providers to the door isn't a quick fix. Berating or chastising someone in crisis is a chosen punitive naivety too many feel unpersuaded to stop. What helps? Your word choices, body language, and ability to recognize who or what you are actually speaking to opens the door to helping. Your ability to remain healthily skeptical verses insecurely judgmental keeps you on a helpful path. Can you hear a genuine cry for help or specific need without imposing one you think you're most situated to employ?

I've been tasked with “helping” at a couple food pantries. Food pantries exist because of presumptions about food insecurity, guilt over lazy mishandling of waste, and no doubt the people volunteering feel some kind of way regarding the help they are providing. The vast majority of the food gets thrown away. The waste, potential compost, might go into raised garden beds installed around the properties from which a handful of people nibble. Is it broadly a “helpful” thing to do? Is it helping the “right” people in the right way? When the pantry has an overwhelming amount of fruits and vegetables, no one's eating them.

A thinking person might get the idea to hold food preparation classes on how to make fruits and vegetables into something palatable to the American diet. Maybe the compost fuels flowers or native species conservation efforts. Maybe less ambitious, there's a tweak that ensures the disabled aren't forced to inch back to their homes in the rain, spilling their food in the yard and struggling to pick it up. You could go your whole life given narratives around what people need and hearing of the organizations tasked with helping those in need, and miss the underlying issue completely. It's only recently dawning on us the extent to which income inequality has ruined basically everything. While a system overhaul appears needed to help that, how can you localize your effort to remain helpful up and down the layers of your potential influence? I think a lot of basic income experiments are currently speaking to this awareness best.

Help comes not just “in” defining a problem, but how you do so. For the longest time, I conceived of my problem as a lack of money. While, factually, I don't have the money to snap my wildest dreams into existence, I feel I've grown up and can better define or drop altogether my notions of the “real problems.” Am I dreading the ever-crushing fascism? Sure. Does it have anything to do with the extremely dirty house I helped clean or disabled gentleman I helped carry his shit for in the rain? In probably the most abstract way possible if you don't have a solid conception of “us” and how we treat each other. I'm currently providing counseling to anti-vaxers. I've fought persistently to prevent or close DCS cases for Trump supporters.

I don't think the problem of persistent existential crises are solved begrudging any one ignorant individual. I think you have to identify the drivers, both internally and externally, that instantiate the behavior. I think Bezos knows considerably more about what drives our suicidal gilded consumption than the poor person who “prefers” instant macaroni to cucumbers. I think the hard task is sussing out for ourselves new notions of help before we lose ourselves in “passion” projects “assisting the needy” through countless hours of bureaucracy or power mongering.

For most of my life, I've had very little idea of what I might actually to do help myself, let alone anyone else. I get criticized for my advocacy of writing and touting its cascading benefits. “I don't like to write!” “It doesn't work for everyone!” “No one wants to become a blog!” I think these ideas are quick to miss the point. It's not the writing in-and-of itself that's useful. It's that I go into it looking for what to do. Bezos doesn't just organize a factory a certain way, he's looking to become efficient in his exploitation and process. He's trained our “now” impulse to track with buying shit, so “help” looks like the myriad layers that go into facilitating that. I've certainly thought that in order to feel better I just needed to buy that next thing.

If you look at my actual spending though, I've done a lot of work to dial back action in service to that impulse considerably. “Toys” and “Entertainment” have accounted for around 6% of my budget combined over the last 5 years. My understanding of my biggest problem was not having a long-term affordable means of stabilizing my entrepreneurial impulses, so, functionally all of my money has gone to “Home Maintenance/Utilities,” “Automotive/Gas,” and “Restaurants” in the same period. If you're lost in conceiving of your own problems, look at what you're spending.

I've tried to turn my life into a question of efficiency and what it might speak to. I wanted to “hurry up to slow down.” I was constantly, feverishly, trying to “work” or “help myself” with things like the coffee shop. I wasn't making nearly enough money. I wasn't giving myself any time to enjoy anything. I was becoming hyper-aware that energy is not an inexhaustible well from which a body that's not sleeping or eating right can draw from. I had to train myself not to feel guilty about being stuck in “on” position, whether it's my brain nagging or just being up and out in the world doing something.

Learning how to engage or cope with “now” is the infinite task. I'm all of me that ever was or could be in this moment. It's changing. It's overwhelming. It needs to be attended to actively, patiently, and with the grace and civility I would grant a child learning something new.

I haven't quite felt right all day. I'm in a role as “assistant” to the resident coordinator for the housing authority. As far as I can tell, it's my job to babysit a printer, and help unload a pallet for a shanty food pantry. It's 12 hours a week at $12 an hour. The idea was to use the role to be on the front line of public housing's transition to not-so-public housing. I would be an on-site service provider, either doing case work in helping people get signed up for things, counseling, or more intensive engagement like DCS prevention. When half a dozen people want to skip right over the dirty home, if I can wrap it into something that Medicaid would pay for, I can comfortably and confidently just get to work before the problem gets bigger or your children are removed.

It's been about 3 weeks of...office. I sit around. I've had 5 or more discussions about my calendar. It took 2 weeks just to get into my email, where no relevant information resides, besides questions about my wackadoodle schedule. I'm told they have a general purpose or mission to get all of these metrics recorded about the neighborhood and records put in about what we helped them print. They have on-site volunteers who regularly do the pantry. I'm supposed to be moral support? We throw out several hundred pounds of food at the end of each pantry. People aren't hungry here.

In any event, I'm struggling to keep myself oriented on all of the little things I could be doing in service to the actual small service provider business we started. You know what's hard to do when the schizophrenic non-resident shows up to speak to herself in front of the computer for hours at a time? Parse through Medicaid policy. There are people who need transportation. There are people who need signed up for disability and SNAP. There are people who threaten their ability to stay in their home because they associate with violent offenders who have been banned from the property. There are people on the verge of getting kicked out for cleanliness. Why am I babysitting the sign-up sheet and peaches?

I'm also in the middle of watching this lecture series on the “meaning crisis.” John Vervaeke explains the history of how we came to all of these notions about ourselves and how or where we fit into existence. He discusses the ways in which we can bullshit ourselves around compelling sophist rhetoric and remain unable to map our thinking and behavior onto the actual world. In practical terms, it's my struggle with constantly having to navigate and play to people's feelings verses speaking to and working with people on the “real” page able to articulate and move towards a shared goal.

You see a dirty home as “administrator” and file a report, send out an inspector, leave a threatening letter, and wait. I see a dirty home and say, “We should clean the home and learn why it got that bad.” I can hear all of the trauma-thoughts and rationalizations from the home owner, and remain non-judgmental nor paralyzed as I see how it fits into greater and more comprehensive contexts. You can arrest your action because of limited license you think your role boxes you into. I'm a person who takes as many things as he can, and works them into higher-order working models of how I think you should be.

That is, when I actually can. Right now, I can blow $15 going to town, hit plasma donation in a mild-panic for the time constraints on my lunch break, then sit and sweat on the patio as people saunter in dismayed there's only fruits and vegetables and high-end organic milk or cheese they'd never touch. I come home, and I'm alone. The call of “chill” or sleep is increasingly loud. I'm trying to take back my space for all of the tension and fervent energy I was constantly trying to turn away from resentment. I'm unhappy at how relieved I'm able to immediately feel that I'm not coming home to a fight. Being alone isn't great, but it's better than fighting.

My head hurts. I've got little energy. All of the little projects or house chore I might do aren't disordered enough for me to feel bothered nor of any immediate impact once they're done. I don't have the brain space for more lectures as all of the new terms I'm hearing aren't settling in nicely. I barely want to watch TV. I'm worried that were I to try a video game, I'd find a way to piss away the next three days straight. Did I mention my head hurts?

I'm working with this family that has seemingly done everything in their power over the last two years to enable the worst behavior of their 18 year old. He was a month away from graduating from the army. He doesn't have his license. He's got his own shitty background with a negligent mother, but today, he weaponizes his personality and his parents' weakness to be generally shitty and entitled and emotionally destructive. I'm there to be the “bad” guy who gives them license to take away his video games and get him working, get his permit started, and have him eventually out of the home. I don't know that I trust the parents to actually holding the line and sending him to the homeless shelter if and when he does not meet his obligations.

This family has a dying mentally handicapped daughter they have to center their world around her care. The daughter has breathing issues. They aren't vaccinated and “have their reasons.” The absurdity really knows no bounds. I feel considerably less guilty at whatever rate we may be able to bill their Medicaid.