I am fucking tired right now, and again find myself writing at work. I’ve been coming to work for 24 days now. In those 24 days, perhaps understood as 6 weeks, I am still not able to access the systems I need in order to do my job. I got 3 clients yesterday, told them I couldn’t do much for them yet, and I’ve otherwise spent a good portion of the day reading Wait But Why articles and shooting the shit. Oh, and I was called into my boss’s office because someone had concerns about how I smelled.
Leaving aside that it’s become excruciatingly clear my whore-baths during negative temperatures with my still-broken unheated home have apparently not been cutting it, today has been otherwise a struggle. Coworkers getting snappy about not following their precise instruction when they haven’t given consistent instruction upon checking against notes. The perpetual half/non-answer to direct questions related to how I get going to, you know, do my job. The people I like are leaving, leaving soon, or flirting with leaving depending on how hot the fire in their burning-down personal life decides to burn.
I played a semi-useful trick on myself in calculating how much time I actually need to spend at work verses have time for myself. I came up with 5% of my time. I need to go back and figure out what math I was doing on that as there’s only 168 hours in a week, and 40 of them I’m on the clock. An hour before I’m on the clock I’m waking up, and while I’m much closer to home, I’m not “done” with work until at least an hour after I get back. I’m also drawing from a much smaller pool of hours if sleeping and being awake are qualitatively different. Now you get to about 38% of your time. In that 38%, am I doing anything necessarily that difficult or unfair? I mean, how broad of a lens do you wish to criticize capitalism? But, not really, no.
I can’t help but think about how a little poison is still poison. I practically raced into a situation where I was enthusiastic about debating policy and using State-speak because…? I’m dead inside? I’ve rehearsed my lines, so I might as well put on the play? I have my calendar put up next to my desk. Each day I dutifully X out a day. I have my future concert dates written down. I’m psyching myself up to go bowling after work to try and build in more practice and celebration of the things that make me happy. I’m trying to imagine the home improvements I can make and the spending cash for traveling. At some level, it all feels artificial.
The counselor I spoke of previously who has a fairly perilous relationship with alcohol and men talked with me today. I probed her on what she really meant by “self-sabotage” when her stories seemed to indicate the only one sabotaging things was her violent ex. She is now “analyzing” the current…fling? after his foray into hacking her phone. She’s experienced changes after her near-death experience to the tune of no longer experiencing anxiety, is proud to live for herself, and yet can’t shake this idea that she will be an agent in her own demise, choosing to find a method of self-harm for reasons she hasn’t quite pinned down.
I like to destroy too. I’ll fuck my head and body up drinking occasionally because I meet new people and find a fluidity to my jokes and being that speaks to the point of drinking. I like to drop grenades in relationships that bore or disappoint me. I don’t mean romantically, just your general acquaintance or coworker, maybe fair-enough friend who you don’t want to get the wrong idea about what kind of person you are. I like to take uplifting narratives that drag me through intolerable hours of wasted workdays and describe them as poison. 5%? Who was I trying to kid? When work seeps into your thoughts on days off, or you are desperately running to the bowling alley to wash away the stink that deodorant can’t help, how much of your time is yours?
In counseling, we’re constantly on about reframing and rephrasing. Maybe you’re not a “negative person,” as I’ve certainly ruminated on for many years. Maybe being born into a home where drinking at age 9 had an outsized impact on your ability to regulate your emotions. Maybe being molested by the person who adopted you and taught you how to read messed with your concept of trust and how or why to become attached to someone. Maybe, just maybe, you’re a dumb advanced ape who has myriad layers and influences that need at least as much of a lifetime to retrain as we’re prepared to punish indefinitely.
Haven’t I hashed my childhood baggage enough? Aren’t I pretty sure I know chaotic attachment patterns that have underwritten my relationships? Why can’t I sit pretty, collect money, regard my privileged place and mind as something to just “be” and shut the fuck up? Why do I need the wonderful chaos of how I’ve chosen to live, the ironic threat to stability, given my persistent desire to own, grow, learn, and create? Is there anything in my life remotely analogous to the trauma I’ve read or listened to from the prison population? Is there anything so glaringly obvious as “you being molested and pumped full of drugs at 11 isn’t your fault” going on in my head or with my life?
I don’t think so. I think my problems and complaints are perpetually privileged until I get violently ill or my home blows away hopefully without me in it. And even then, an overriding societal and “positive thinking” notion will kick in and life will dare me not to be thankful I still own the land, I survived the illness, or my mind can be attuned to the methods and means of creating a different kind of life. It feels like a lateral move to play games like that more than some form of earned wisdom or growth. It feels cliché. What if I’m at the bottom of some imperceptible tragedy that isn’t about “won’t,” but “can’t” be made to feel the way I “should” unless certain conditions have been met?
I do experience gratitude, but it often resides in a milieu of obscenity. I’m grateful I can be informed someone thinks I smell, and my first thought is to mine jokes and desire just a fucking heads up because I’m not naïve to effects of sweating nor taking it personally. I’m grateful money is on its way. I’m grateful I’m full. I’m grateful I have at least gotten to meet and exchange numbers with some of the people I’m almost positive I’ll never or barely speak to again once they leave. I’m grateful I can write about how ungrateful and exhausted I feel until I discover the faintest motivation to try something in service to feeling better or persuading myself that I can be bothered to show up again tomorrow.
I pride myself on incorporating the bad. It is bad. It’s bad to have to bend at the demands of ambivalent capitalism. It’s bad the contortions we get into to maintain the faux civility in service to the haphazard tribes. It’s bad that I can’t confidently say I trust and respect how the people I work with do their jobs despite their overtures to your comfort and assistance to “remove barriers to your success.” They don’t know me. They don’t care about me. They care about retention. Is that okay? Is that unfair? It just is what it is under the conditions we’ve been given. I don’t want to be whatever it is I happen to be under the conditions I’ve been given. I’m not just going to smell and remain content.
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