Another day, another series of moments filled with indignation for my working circumstances. I certainly try to pretty-it-up about the amount of time I feel is wasted and how terribly I think about my waste-of-money drives and hours spent meandering about the office until I can discover the path to inputting notes. It’s annoying because it’s not even a hard problem. I’m not indecisive. I’m not confused. I know I deeply hate not getting paid what I’m worth. I know “worth” is a wholly subjective and relative concept that, in our sick capitalist society, says what I’m doing is worth significantly more than I’m making for considerably less time. It’s the glaring open wound at the heart of my experience.
If I had a “real choice,” I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be employed. In an effort to not get on a personal hamster wheel of repeating the obvious to nowhere game, I walked over to the independent counseling business located next door. No one was there. I went back a bit later, still no one was there. An analogy presents itself. Do you keep trying, forever, until you can squeak out a sense of “positive” direction and - very maybe - get another question answered? Or do you listen to what “the universe” is telling you about your effort, and forge a different path? The latter sounds absurd on its face. The former a kind of self-immolation. Say you freeze instead of fight to the death or flee. What’s that manner of frozen contentment with so many gaping wounds?
Reconceptualize the wounds! Examine them so closely they lose all coherent meaning! Find the eternal thread that ties your perception of them to unrealistic and haughty expectations, cut it, and walk about life so present and free and connected! Monk that shit up, baby!
My ex emailed me last night explaining she’s been told she has Borderline Personality Disorder. She attached a video of Jordan Peterson giving a concise explanation that matched my experience of her precisely. She’s apparently doing considerably better, thriving in her land-management and cash flow, and vows to not treat people like she treated me going forward. Great. She gets her breakdown, time to process, growth, and me still in her corner, not precisely any more or less jaded about the prospect of connecting with people and how, but certainly not convinced I have much a capacity to attract anyone without varying degrees of severe personality or emotional troubles that don’t pair well with, you know, me getting to grow and thrive or rely on anyone to the degree they have on me.
Does that sound selfish? Or just how I process and engage in a constructive conversation regarding my “self-care?” Shouldn’t I be concerned with my seemingly inescapable patterns and the walls I’m against that inspire movement in different directions?
What if I acknowledge this moment and acted as I saw “morally” fit? Let a micro-breakdown, shirking of responsibility, and lapse in judgment/awareness dictate the rest of my day? What if I just left? I make it potentially harder to get hired somewhere else. I’m still in debt. I wouldn’t “fix” anything beyond enabling my sense of “freedom,” naively held, in the moment. I’m stuck. I could almost-certainly find another job, but I’d be like a client of mine who quit in a huff because she couldn’t get her emotions under control. Am I like my clients? Well, yes, that’s why I know how not to behave like them. But I can’t “think” my way out of how I feel. I have to construct the road to the continued self-punishment for not seeing another way on how to conduct myself.
Arguably one of the shittiest realizations I ever came to was the idea that I ever need help. People aren’t that helpful. They aren’t consistent. They aren’t particularly ethical or aware of their own damage that informs how or why they fuck with you. To need help is a precarious place on many more levels than whatever the issue at hand may be. And as I discover more things I don’t know or ways in which I’d like to explore, I find more that I need help with. The nature of my problems externally far outweighs my experience of myself internally. In a sense, it’d be nice if I “only” had to figure out I had a personality disorder.
Again, I feel like that makes me sound unduly cunty. The mistakes I make with regard to my experience of the world aren’t so fundamental. I’ve long passed the discussion of my relative psychopathy and incorporated it. I’ve talked my “depression” or “anxiety” to death or a level of ambivalent mockery, they barely register as anything but head nods to the laziness of language. I don’t struggle to employ boundaries. My “judgements” are fruitful for jokes, but not what I’m betting money on, until, you know, I get a girlfriend or find someone as equally pathological in their drive to work as I’ve been.
In this precise moment, I can’t even persuade myself that my notes will get input in the next 3 hours. It’s 4 hours until my next group. The notes will take, maybe 35 minutes. I could have done them yesterday. I have until 11 AM, technically, tomorrow to get them done. But every miserable step in service to my “responsibility” to this job is dragging the knife over another skin cell. It takes that long to kill you, cell by cell, until you die of “old age.” And I don’t know what else I’d be doing. Wouldn’t it be great if the ex who just reached out to me had a project she needed me for and connected me with that helped build the land-management business? What if I invited her out there to live her dream and all I asked was to split the utilities? Wait, I tried that? We only recently discovered the creature comforts of more sunlight, long showers, and a nutritious diet were integral to her mental health, so we were doomed from the start!? Shucks.
I experience this persistent sick feeling. It’s anticipatory. It’s a dare. It’s frustration. It’s anger. It’s dread. It's me looking at myself like I’m the stupidest person in the world for not doing “whatever” it is I “should” be doing next, I’m just typing and waiting and trying to stomach the heave of the ocean of bullshit. Am I “free enough” or not? Do I have agency, or not? Am I “creative” in how I address my issues? Am I smart enough? Am I wise enough? Am I willing and able to suffer as many people as it takes to eke out morsels of helpful information or meaningful steps?
All I can be for certain is that I’m not demonstrating whatever I may conceive of any of those questions when I’m here. When I’m in a building, for no reason, presented with a task that means nothing to me but the access to money, already spent, at a more consistent interval than I’ve discovered since washing-out of doing drug studies.
Fuck me am I feeling miserable right now. I fucking suck, this fucking sucks. I just want to be done playing the stupid fucking games.
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