This is gonna be one of those struggle-bus ones to figure out if there’s really anything to say in a nominally more coherent or comprehensive way. I know you skip ‘em all anyway, but this one you can scroll past extra fast.
I have a recurring nightmare. That’s a way to immediately overstate something. Every week, I’m going to be asked (told), in a formal and professional way, that I need to meet an obligation that I have, not just a zero, but a negative inclination to do. It’s not hard. I want to revolt. I want to destroy. I want to mock and question. It doesn’t take very long. I don’t have to sweat, lift, or try to do anything but retain respect for myself and how I’m exercising my time. Maybe it’s sit through my boss reiterating idiot-proof information in 6 different ways for 30 minutes when it could have taken 30 seconds. Maybe it’s emailing a probation officer information that’s, for some reason, 7 clicks deep on software that takes juuuuust a scream-worthy nanosecond too long to load. Maybe it’s input 95% copied information as I wonder how we get to 97% to save me those last few sweet keystrokes and toggles between spreadsheets.
I have a hard time robbing other people of their choices. I’ll try to explain more. I think I have a decent understanding of when I feel as though I’m making a choice, verses playing a part. Every professional role has been a part. Every rent payment has been a part. Most tanks of gas, a part. The “entertaining” place-filler before you move on to your “real” friend or love interest is a part all the way. I’m assigned an array of roles via the expectations, wise and unwise, of the people and systems around me. I’m an instantiated daisy-chain of ever-evolving and undulating consequences. I “bare” and “cope” and “roll” with that existential sea.
While all that’s happening, somehow, miraculously, I do this. I choose to look at it, name it, organize it, and set it all in neat little rows of digital contraction. I choose this sentence, then these words, and to delete the ones that came before. While I automatically breathe, I deliberately type. I follow the “feeling” into a place that’s “better” or “contentment-seeking” or “flow-y” so when I go back and read this, it can carry me into, hopefully, a place where the nature and power of my capacity for choice-making can flourish. I can bring it out into the larger rippling sea of consequences, and watch my choices manifest after harnessing or navigating all that I can’t control.
I have two cats. One arrived one day, the other I chose to buy. I play a game with them and myself where I pretend they have more autonomy than they do. I leave the trash can open and act like my cat won’t get into it. I’ve had to reorganize my home several times to allow for the routes they wish to jump and climb to not interfere with my sleep or things I don’t want jumped on. I’ve been forcing them to cuddle and eat snacks right up against each other. I don’t forget they’re cats. They remind me with each blocking of my screen, insistence on my attention, and fresh shit improperly covered. We are remarkably different in our awareness and capacity, but technically both conscious entities. They don’t know how I’ve conditioned them.
I know how the world wishes to condition me. That is, in any given interpersonal scenario or environment, I know the rules, the expectations, and how to get to nearly any end I desire. I used to think this made me a psychopath. There was never any “fun” or “novelty” or “reason” to play along too strictly. I can’t help but to be stuck on “why?”. Worse than an inability to stop asking, I choose to explore what the answers might be. Why get married and have kids? Why live in a “normal” house? Why get a degree? Why respond to anything, let alone nearly everything in practice, with anything less than the truth of what you think or feel? What’s there to be afraid of? Why respect the backlash, or imbue the silence and resentment with some special dignity or consequence?
In doing so, I leave myself with almost no capacity to “believe” anything. I’m not convinced there’s anything I could say, write, or do that I could consider “complete” or “the absolute truth.” I know there’s unknown unknown variables. I know I don’t have perfect access to every flare up in my mind. I know that there’s never a reason to be too self-righteous, confident, or unable to change your position if new information comes in that’s compelling, coherent, and reliable in a way that you aren’t.
I’m pretty reliable. I rarely, if ever, miss work. I respond to phone calls almost immediately provided my phone hasn’t enabled “do not disturb” without my knowledge prompting my best friend to think I might be dead because, what else makes sense for someone who has never not responded within 8 hours in 18 years? If I control the pieces for any given plan, I start it, carry it out, and more or less accomplish the mission every time. The out-of-control sea insists on offering weather snafus and muscle aches or threats to the budget, but the littlest opportunities and efforts made on those efficient days speak to my ongoing experience for years at a time.
I’m sensitive to the effect of working in a holistically appreciable way in service to goals that achieve numerous ends simultaneously. I understand the conditioning patterns well enough to know how I wish to break them or how to redirect them. But, I do not know how to create enough consistent hyper-efficient days. Moreover, I’m struggling to believe I have the capacity to do so in my current state and environments. What does that do to a person who can’t “believe” in anything that deeply to begin with?
It leaves me procrastinating on meaningless tasks. It leaves me spending money so I can impose a series of competing narratives on top of the, more depressing more suffocating, prevailing one. It leaves me looking for solidarity in the parts of myself that would “love” to “hope” at 99% for “anything” but the current stasis, but are buried under so much hijacked and abused attention. I can’t patiently explore music or literature when I’m so busy-worked by the oblivious. I can choose to “sneak in” little nuggets of knowledge, barely retained or worth their salt as a party trick as my mind is otherwise captured by my “professional adult” obligations.
I just feel lost. Like I was set adrift into a world I was told so many times made a certain kind of sense, and with each blink, I stomach a new betrayal. The “sense,” so hyped, so insisted upon, is just a series of familiar narratives meant to placate or hide. You hide who you are behind the words, the clothes, the money, and as technology blossoms, the shares, likes, and followers. Once that really sinks in, who’s going to choose the path of the madman that searches for the focus and time for the “most noble” of pursuits? Why is the song I might sing in isolation more valuable than a top ten hit? One is by you, for you. The other was carried by an ambivalent, distracted, and uncontrollable sea with perhaps as boring and predictable a grasp on the hit-making pattern as I have on the “people” one.
I tell people you can’t break patterns you can’t recognize. And even once you recognize them, you may not have a genuine desire to do so. You may have no awareness about how little you wish to change because it’s buried under so many words that aren’t really yours. It’s masked by habits manifesting in differently-addictive ways. We need some degree of predictability. We need to rely on our good instincts or that we’ll be paid on time. But I wonder how many layers get packed in every taken-for-granted sentiment and familiar setting. I wonder what I’m missing about the patterns I’m stuck in, and the ones I rely on to keep pumping out a continued choice to invest time and attention towards things that betray how and where I find myself. Both my cats are sitting in front of me just licking, and licking, and licking. There is nothing they would rather be doing.
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