[992] FFS

I need to attend to my bubbling experience. It happened during a video call with my supervisor. We were discussing some process on engaging members and getting forms signed. It was innocuous, boring, and I’m not on any lists or generally doing anything wrong. I’m not feeling particularly unwell or dealing with concurrent issues. In fact, I just came off a very successful and fun weekend. But, something hit. Something snapped, and I just wanted to scream.

My phone’s been acting up and my alarms didn’t go off this morning. I told my supervisor as much and offered that I’d come in Thursday instead. She said that would be fine, and that was it. The absurdity is that there isn’t, nor has been, any reason for me to be in that office since I began. It’s the “littlest” thing that speaks volumes about my big picture circumstances.

You might get the impression that I struggle living with “corruption” or “tyranny” or “immoral” or “incoherent” things. I’ve certainly the intellectual posture that sympathizes with environmentalists and vegans and people who want peace or to invest in vastly different things than where money goes. The amount of contradictions and often frankly horrible things one must swallow to be part of the general population is pretty long. I still eat a fuck ton of meat. I’d rather pay more to keep my air conditioning on indefinitely. I’m constantly in a morally gray negotiation with regard to just how hard I’m willing to burden myself with your bullshit as a client.

What nags me is not that “things are fucked” on some broad inescapable way. It’s that I have a perfect escape for perfectly good reasons, that a plurality of people can see and understand, and I could do it “now,” and I can’t. I’m being mocked. I’m being attacked. It’s a threat to my sense of common fucking sense and well-being to know that I can do the job I’m doing, remotely, as well as if not better than going into the office, but I need to “make up for” not being there, FOR NO FUCKING REASON, because that’s the unreasonable expectation I signed up for, under duress.

You never get done solving problems. I listened to an interesting talk discussing smart vs chance vs stupid. You’re smart if you can systematically apply a set of behaviors that improves your ability to accomplish things across domains. You work on reasoning skills, you can apply them to the logistics of moving boxes around a room or yourself through the world, or how you organize teams around people’s strengths. Through chance, you can shuffle and reshuffle variables, and half the time you’ll get something passable, half the time you’ll fail, but the direction is dictated by the physics more than the intention. Stupid, you can destroy and impede indefinitely the ability to get anywhere. Stupid works against itself, and the death of worthwhile possibility reigns. If I have a prayer of tackling bigger problems, I need the stupid parts of my life to be incidental or non-existent, not something I’m compelled to practice regularly.

I feel fucking stupid, and I’m not fucking stupid. I use the stupid feeling to feel helpless because when I speak, I get the answers that acknowledge the reasons to behave differently. I don’t get the argument that is filled with a lot of “maybes” or “when we get back to…” not the “when you’re there you’ll accomplish (x).” So what do you do when you’re stupid and helpless in screaming contradiction to your sense of being and agency?

I don’t know. I write, which usually gets me through the next few hours, but I don’t feel any better. The area of concern is not going to get fixed. And whether or not I can actually fix it or not, I feel like I can, and believing otherwise starts to influence me in other negative ways. I have a dozen little things around the house that feel handicapped too. Moreover, I get to compare what I’m not doing about my surmountable problems with the ones I’m constantly hearing from my 120 clients or friends with significantly more on their plates than me.

In the middle of the last paragraph I had a group. The provider said something like “we train people how they can treat us” in chiming in about how one member’s child abuses her for money and tears up her apartment if he doesn’t get what he wants. People treat us how they treat themselves. If we could properly “train” each other, we wouldn’t have to have institutional pressures forcing us to whip ourselves like they’re dying to when we get out of hand.

This would normally be the end of my day. I’ve gotten functionally backed into a corner to “cover” what they never built the infrastructure to handle correctly in the first place. My head started hurting at the beginning of the last group. Whether I want to or not, I’m processing all the crap people tell me. I’m thinking. I’m working and searching for solutions and practices and phrasing they’ll understand. Anyone in “service” knows the feeling. I’m tired of serving. Where’s the job where I just fill in numbers on a spreadsheet? Where’s the research position? It’s entirely possible I’ve got such a low opinion of jobs because I’ve always had to have too much time in front of people.