Maybe it sounds kind of ridiculous or a weird ask, but I want to work somewhere that I never hear the term “big words.”
In prison, you’re not finding the most educated individuals. I don’t feel a particular way over the obligation to adjust conversation or teaching styles to match the audience. In the event a “big word” gets used around inmates, they’re probably not going to acknowledge that they don’t know what it means and move right along. More often, I hear “big words” from colleagues, who seem perfectly unwilling or unable to open a dictionary or use Google.
It's the kind of pet peeve that speaks to my larger existential angst. Why, the fuck, would you not want to know or learn!? Especially when you are in a role that requires a lot of writing, why would you not be interested in constantly building your arsenal in how you convey yourself? When you start to answer the question, the picture is exceptionally bleak. The bar is incredibly low. The “standard” of most work environments is to “do the job” as loosely as you can define or get away with doing it. People have this chip on their shoulder about sounding “too smart” or “book smart.” Somewhere, I know they begrudge the effort it would take to look the word up, let alone take steps to reinforce their memory.
I see the “it’s not worth it” attitude everywhere. Why pay attention and proactively engage a problem? Why try when no one expects you to? Why believe, think, read, watch, whatever if there isn’t an ice cream reward or you’re not getting paid enough? I’m learning to appreciate more each day how being the little engine that could with its own locomotive power is practically divine. I don’t have significant and crippling questions as to “why” I do anything, even if I don’t have the most articulated answer. I know how terrible it feels to look or sound like the people around me.
Do they feel as miserable as they sound? Did I miss where I would be able to load my mind up with so much hopeless dread and laziness and just carry on like things were great?
I’m not even in that deep of a writing mood. But it just keeps hitting me, over and over and over again, that if I’m not occupying my mind in an active way, I’m falling apart. I started feeling unwell after lunch. I’ve ran through study questions for this test I need to take soon. I’ve inched along my spreadsheet and created a group for guitar class. I’m very thankful that the other people in the “office” we share leave early. I get two hours to do literally anything. Yesterday, I cleaned up and rearranged furniture. It was glorious. The day before, I napped for an hour.
I’m less tempted to blow up this easy money than I am generally. The temptation is there, and it is real, but I’m not plotting my escape for the short term. I’m in too much debt. Of course, the truck needs help. Of course, there’s a catch in getting reimbursed for these test fees. Of course, there’s hiccups in the amount and timing of my tax refund. Of course, when I start to feel remotely comfortable, hopeful, like I’ve sped something up or finally put in enough time, the universe conspires, and I’m left writing, waiting, and singing the same tune.
I’ve got 4 events scheduled for this month. I should have a new, new bowling ball over the weekend. The weather has been more than tolerable. I feel great about the new shirts I bought and my over-spraying cologne and lotion regimen. My Pokemon cards are probably worth a lot of money. I know I’m going to blink and it’s going to be June or July, and with any luck no disasters will strike, and I’ll have a few thousand banked and feeling comfortable about. Who’s to say that we haven’t worked out how to get in with disability or gotten into a new house for renovating by then?
I don’t think complaining is a demonstration of a lack of appreciation or accountability. I’m realizing when I might engage in a “bitch fest” there’s a temptation to apologize for it and create one of my little lists of the things going right or to be thankful for. Surely, this is a decent exercise to get into regardless, but it feels a little off to employ it like that. Like when someone says, “It could always be worse!” Sure, but fuck you, this is still bad for bad reasons or could theoretically be addressed if we weren’t hapless pieces of shit. Just because I can use several work hours to play on one of the guitars doesn’t mean that I feel great about some “efficient” personal brownie points laboring under what is otherwise kind of a joke or insult.
I haven’t just continued to meander for a while, so let’s begin there. I thought I might be done writing, and then looked around at the next 2 hours of my life I need to spend either doing this, reading more of my Wait But Why article, or pretending to have the dopamine levels that would memorize some flash cards.
I’ve thought for a minute that I need a shroom or acid trip. I have shrooms, but I’m worried that the same thing will happen the last time I took them, and I’ll get bored an hour in and be waiting for the trip to end. Something feels like it needs dislodged in my head. I feel like I can easily depict my circumstances in incredibly positive terms with an extremely great outlook. I can then think about that story as it maps against practically anyone who has ever existed, and I’m comfortably in the top 1% of existence.
So, why, ever, feel low or down about that? It’s obviously not just about material wealth. I don’t have a deep and intimate bench of people I associate with or friends. I know that a lot of my disappointment comes from the idea relayed at the top. One way or another, most environments aren’t really for me, sentiments regarding my privilege notwithstanding. I’m not polite. I’m not ever content to “just do my job.” I’m not even the kind of person who gives a shit if you tell the boss you think I smell. But I’m forced to care and over-correct because I’ve got a foot in both worlds. I have a reputation to protect regarding things I have little to no emotional investment in for people I can’t begin to respect.
That gets exhausting. It’s also exhausting to want really anything out of people. There’s this tension between wanting to have a standard and an expectation, and then needing the wisdom of remaining detached or at a distance. 50% of whether someone does well in recovery is tied to their attachment with a therapist or counselor. People aren’t doing drugs just because addiction is a disease they triggered or caught. People are doing drugs because there’s so few safe and healthy environments from which to get the right kind of signals to survive and live well. If there’s only so many people with the disposition or willingness to get into the field at all, let alone be any good at it, and those numbers are subject to the same statistics relative to the population at large, it’s not a secret why we don’t appear to be making a dent in the ongoing consequences of substance abuse.
Like, I work in a prison. I still can’t wrap my head around why. It’s prison. It’s people who’ve done not-so-great to abjectly ridiculous and horrible things just kinda meandering and saying hi. One client got a crazy look in his eye and relayed how he connected with descriptions of psychopaths in a book he was reading yesterday. I’ve connected with those descriptions too yet managed to stay out of prison. There’s a level where of course I’m a person who’s working in a prison. I’m the guy who shows up at strangers’ homes and maybe takes their kids. Prison? Prison, who?
So much of my life reduces to my ability to justify or pursue the dollar amount. I think I take lengthy reprieves in between roles so that kind of statement doesn’t become the prevailing narrative I allow myself to adopt. I certainly continued to pursue money between July and January, I just did it in more affordable and creative ways. It’s all trade-offs all the time, right? You can only ever have 2 out of 3 with time, money, or tools. The closest I’ve come to attacking this idea is when I get to working with salvaged material, or spending other people’s money. You know what still costs money? Nails and screws and the tools to shape-up the wood for more than incredibly rough projects.
I hate that so much. I hate it sooooo much. Even if I make Costco wages, it’s still more than minimum wage and I don’t have to smell like food. It’s enough money for me to do some things with, and to a greater degree than if I had a rent or mortgage payment. What I’ve learned, is that even if I functionally had double the amount of money a “normal” person would have, I’d still be at least as hindered as I am now. Where should my hope for “the masses” go with that perspective? When I can’t do something, it’s a paycheck or 3 away. So, for you it’s 2 or 6? Plus, you’re carrying more liability, have more social ties, and are probably less of a dramatic cunt prone to acting out.
That’s a pretty binary and matter-of-fact reduction, but I think there’s an easily graspable practical truth contained in it. It’s hard even with the leeway and license I’ve given myself. I’d be “nowhere” with children. I’d have swallowed more than a mountain of hopes and dreams if I had to keep a kid alive. Did I mention, I still have not managed to capture some overt health concern or major catastrophe that’s just embedded in my existence? Seriously, where do people find it in them to carry on even as well as they do, let alone what I would foist upon them.
Now, tell me how that thought isn’t condescending and the kind of hopeless I can’t stand from other people. Can you do it, or not? Can you try regardless, or not? Are you literally just the basic series of movements and words to keep yourself alive as the sack your genes are carried around in, or are you human, punking those bitch-ass genes no matter how many millennia they think they’ve passed through?
I suppose I’m rather adept at responding to feeling bad. I’m still writing, after all. I still eat food I like. I still watch my shows. I still speak to things right up to and before the line that gets me fired. I don’t even know if I “don’t” want to “feel bad.” I want to stay salty and aware of the things that threaten me or my best conception of my identity. And even if it’s not the best, a decent, or “more better” version of someone than I care to bother with generally. Like, I’d fuck with me in life. I’m chill. I’m funny. I do shit. I genuinely invest myself in things people proclaim to need and am self-aware enough to know both where that impulse comes from and how to not let it get the best of me.
That surely adds another layer to my plight. That eagerness to please. I really do want to do good and well. I want the living breathing examples set and raging forward. I want the momentum and thing to point to. I want to viciously attack excuses and bring my wildest imagination into the present. I want that so much I think I sometimes make myself sick over it when I approach how to think about it incorrectly. People tell me they get sick at the thought of what people do to their children. I get sick thinking about how I’ve watched the people tasked with responding to what people do to their children.
Maybe I’m just greedy. It feels like “my” existence. I’m extremely selfish in wanting an environment that is “generally safe” by treating it with the deference and respect it deserves. You know how to not get stabbed in prison? Make friends. What if all your friends are shit and help create the conditions that you might get stabbed? Look, do you want the paycheck or not? Corrections officers antagonize. One counselor is particularly incredibly rude and yelling at people on the day she goes to the dorm. If a fight breaks out, you know who has the pepper spray and radios and is rushing to help? The same people who get the job deliberately to fuck with inmates. You know who you’re sitting down to lunch with every day? The “counselor” who meant to fill out the C/O application.
I don’t think it’s naïve to keep the idea close that each day can come with a new opportunity or surprise. I didn’t know when I started in January that I’d have the opportunity to feel bad about a new work friend transferring. Perhaps, if I came to this environment for nothing else, when I leave, I’ll have someone I can reach out to who will actually play a sport with me. Would you trade 30 days of your life for about $4500 and potential longer-term friend? I got a few friends from DCS, and that took 2 years.
Maybe I don’t have the phrasing, but I think it’s dumb to not expect things from people. I think people expect literally my entire life, at some perverse level, under capitalism and subservient role-playing in professionally ambivalent domains. You expect me to smell good, look a certain way, and follow an endlessly shifting set of rules implemented imprecisely if not arbitrarily. I need to get up, continually assess and orient, stay out of prison, stay sober, up on my notes, keep the taxes paid and on the right side of the yellow line. It’s not out-and-out unreasonable to have expectations, and I’m okay with constantly navigating the grey areas of what constitutes harm.
I don’t think those who should be expecting more from themselves bother to, and that is what translates into the low expectations “generally.” You find the happy little line you think matches the effort you’re capable of or the world deserves, full stop. After that, whatever will be will be. You can’t be bothered to take the risk. You aren’t obligated to look up the goddamn word in the dictionary because you’ve made a clear and conscious choice to not associate with people who use such contemptible big words. Why does my anger and anxiety always tie back to the examples I’m watching get set? I don’t have unreasonable expectations for drug-addled and ignorant convicts. I HAVE FUCKING EXPECTATIONS FOR THE ASSHOLES IN CHARGE OF COMMUNICATING TO THEM.
Is that okay for me to do? Is that my fundamental misstep I should make peace with never happening in the way I’d like? Should I be working to “give up” thinking you should be prepared for class, personalize treatment plans, answer direct questions with direct answers, follow-up in a timely way, explain poor antagonistic policy and reasoning, implement a training plan, or just generally shut the fuck up about things you’re unwilling or unable to enforce? That’s a lot at once and maybe not answerable as a whole, but what would I be asserting, what example would I be accepting, if I just rolled with that?
A line from a lecture series I’m half-rewatching sticks out. Piaget was a great scientist because he asked if there was a pattern in the data that was previously thrown out regarding childhood development. I see patterns in the excuses people make for not doing “more” or their “best.” The same shit that can’t be bothered to keep an appointment with me is the same shit that pushes my “training” indefinitely. The shitty lashing out responses I get to my questions or proactive approach is the same insecurity that functionally begs me to be “patient” and “forgiving” for persistent disrespect. What we’re willing to reflexively and colloquially throw away as someone’s bad day or quirk I suspect is much darker. I think it’s an in-built unacknowledged and unaddressed (often) self-destructive capacity. I think my existence triggers people to pay attention to it.
When I do something well, it shines a light on what they don’t. I don’t even have to speak to it. If I pop up and rush to the dorms to meet my new people, you, who hasn’t been to the dorm in a week, “hates me.” You think about how stressful your life is at home and how unfair it is what has been asked of you this week. You don’t grant me the license and humanity to think the exact same things as you, and then I go to the dorm.
When I behave my values, it shines a light on how you maybe don’t stand as upright in service to yours as you think. I speak my mind, in increasingly respectful and tactful ways as I get older. You’re the “honest” one in your group or family? Cool. I bet you’ll whisper to the boss before you bring your grievance to whom it’s with. (Holy fuck did I call this one.)
I don’t even have to particularly excel at what I’m doing, and it garners the same attitude and responses. The bar is incredibly low, remember. Basic competence, answering the phone, taking the half hour to input notes, take attendance, respond to the email, will make you look like you’re something new, worthwhile, and different. And, you are.
In lieu of doing those things, you can talk a lot. You can make a lot of promises. You can elevate every level of drama in your life to occupy every waking moment of your thought process because you don’t have a cogent value or goal to cut through the noise and orient your obligations. You can make an in/formal enemy of people like me. You can get passive aggressive and snippy where I might otherwise be attempting to exist as politely as the circumstances will allow.
I’m caught in this cycle of bullshit and drama. This must speak to why I’ve felt an increase in tension and been mildly clench-y the last few days. I’ve lost before I’ve begun because my existence is the problem. The way I engage with the world evokes predictable responses. I’m not addicted to the abuse, but in my life still costing money, I’m thrust into these unhealthy cycles and interactions seemingly indefinitely. My default environment is as sick as if everyone in my life was using drugs, and I wished, irrepressibly genuinely, to stay sober. My biology wants to be bonded and feel safe and accept people “where they are” so I might otherwise focus on the things trying to kill me; but I feel like the people I am around are constantly trying to kill me. And in ever-ubiquitous irony, they feel like I’m trying to kill them too.
They’re right.
If they’re balls of shitty excuses, laziness, and deliberately employed helplessness, I want that dead. If they’re ambivalent to the consequences of their behavior, kill that mother fucker too. If they’re in denial of how deeply they resent that I’ve managed to scrape together a semblance of the life and behaviors I think lend themselves to the best kind of existence, send that shit to hell, bring it back to piss on it, then send it on down again.
A prisoner, let’s call him Mr. Helper, relayed a story about how much he’s “called to help.” Another inmate was stumbling around, likely intoxicated. This inmate said he went up to him and asked if there was something he could do. Mr. Helper, citing his deference to God and his good nature then relayed he wasn’t sure if this other inmate would lash out, but if he did, he’d respond by incapacitating him. He won’t let himself be attacked or violated, you know, as a man merely defending himself. The story was a long meander avoiding an explicit discussion about both gentlemen’s relative gang affiliations and sticking noses in where they don’t belong. Jesus isn’t telling you to invite potentially physical altercations into your life.
Which God are you relying on to justify your desire kill and call it self-defense? What gang dances you around like a puppet? Plenty of people have hit me who I have not hit back, and I’m not as big as Mr. Helper. I don’t need to hide from how good it has felt to be invigorated by rage. I own what I’m capable of. When you don’t, I’m a threat. I don’t need to interject myself into your life and look for a reason for swinging. I appear fated to be trapped in your respective mental prisons as you wait for a sign on how to take me down. I see this shit EVERYWHERE. I’m told your God is everywhere. Good fucking luck, God.
I’m coming for you.
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