I don’t know what I feel. I thought about saying, “I feel weak,” but that doesn’t seem true enough. I feel bored. I feel sad. I feel like I’m sick of fucking trying, and then that feels like the price of admission to ever, proverbially or otherwise, transcend my current condition. You know, I got someone to send me their license number. You know, they don’t have an NPI number, and that can take weeks to get assigned. You know, this delay was partly because the agency I contacted sent me the wrong checklist about what we’d need to get the impaneling process going.
When I first started with Groups, my boss was very gung-ho about “meeting people where they are” and defending not discharging people for simply missing too many days, generating threatening chaos, or other acts of noncompliance. You see, she had a story of “some” or “any help” that transcended the practical reality of what might be a dozen people’s experience of a member who isn’t suited for this level of harm-reduction care.
Groups is exploding. More and more money and greedy futures are on the line. In 4 months, it’s gone from practically never-discharge-anyone to, “Are these discharges done yet?” She might not be making any more money, but she’s not bound to anything higher than her master’s narrative. When the overall ethos shifted from whatever the analogous, “Don’t be evil” motto any brand that wants to believe the best of itself adopts, you step in line. She was formerly DCS for 12 years. She can swallow a lot of bullshit in the name of The Man or order or keeping her bills paid and kids fed.
Today, the last few hours felt like way more of a struggle than they should have. Again, I have the easiest job one can imagine. I talk about familiar obvious things I’ve said or done a million times, and turn what people share into encouraging sentiments about how much good they’re doing for themselves and the people around them. Any moment in my 4-day week that I choose to focus for even an hour puts me ahead of any outreach effort I may need to make or prep work for the rest of the week. I feel like I’ve been stockpiling reflections for the last few days, and I happened to put extra-curricular personal work things on my plate.
I’ve been working the job long enough now to track trends in certain members. I have about 120 clients. You’re certainly not going to please everyone, or to put it lightly, have a “style” they will all enjoy. A problem that kicks off my existential angst muscle is when I am invited to search for how and what I’m attempting to translate or share is divorced from…meaningful survival and bothering to exist at all.
I attempt to hold people accountable. But more than that, I attempt to teach them how to hold themselves accountable. This is anathema to the automatic fluid adherence to cultural norms or compulsive self-soothing addictive behaviors. It’s also the only “cure” to being a violent wanton ape flinging shit and crashing into every layer of life you never manage to understand. It’s not something you can “disagree” with anymore than I utilize my strong opinion to never drink water and maintain a concurrent desire to live at all.
But we find ourselves, culturally, writ large, acting as though we don’t believe we need to be accountable. Then, like insane narcissists, we double down on the belief, eschew the irony, and seek accountability, told in so many ways but Lord of the Flies will do, from those who don’t deserve it. We’ll take our hatred and resentment out on the innocent, the other, and those who remind us how truly weak and pathetic we are. We absolve ourselves of any individual obligation to our shitty feelings, powerlessness, and hopeless sense that we don’t matter, the people we’re close to don’t love us, and the things we care about are inane and unfulfilling.
So let’s disappear into the woods and grab a gun. Let’s adopt fiery conspiracies. Let’s get evangelical and dominate the conversation so our self-delusion can be shrouded in group protection; psychological, physical, legal, sexual and all the way down to verbal. This is why I consider a liar the most dangerous thing. All animals are honestly animaling. A human is the only one who can weaponize that honest nature into something that kills literally everything.
There’s a level in which I’m forced to “make peace” with the idea that people who run from my groups are not in a place for accountability. Except, that feels like an impossible concession. I don’t excuse you. I decided consciously to stop laying myself over the sword of decisions you were more or less capable of making than me, but still capable nonetheless. I push myself and ask for more. I look defeat and delay and head and heart-wrenching problems in their face. I reflect and look for what I can control. I investigate how complicated and messy and incomplete the story is in every seemingly hopeless moment. I show up on time, practically every day. I do the work in spite of the worst examples I may set.
You just…you have to. I’m not suicidal, but I don’t know how I wouldn’t have killed myself if I left who I was going to be up to whims of my circumstances or opinions of others. I don’t know how I would break depressive cycles, because no one was going to help me or listen long enough to work me out of it. I don’t know how I would have developed an approach to anxiety. I don’t know why I would bother to take risks in business and moving to this fucking field and building a fort. I don’t fucking know anything without practicing accountability. When I get too in my own head, I can count how many books I haven’t read to send me in another direction. When I want to pretend like I live anything less than a privileged regal existence, I can count the cashflow and number of people still dreaming of clean water and mosquito nets.
You don’t get to tell me any story that absolves you or who you’re tasked with working with of who they are and what they did or did not do when presented with the same fucking choice we’re given in every moment of every day. You pay attention and make a decision, or else. You pay attention to self-servicing and self-destructive things and you’ll make decisions to keep that going. You don’t pay attention at all, you’re at the mercy of how everyone else wishes to self-destruct, or you ride the security of those who don’t know any better as to why they should let you die off.
I ask people to pay attention to things they tell me they wish to improve on. I don’t say, “Here’s your assignment,” I say, “What do you notice about yourself you wish you did better?” Do you know what they tell me? They want to be more patient. They want to be less angry. They want to be talking less shit in their heads about the people around them. They want to be able to say “no” and set boundaries. They want to recognize when they’re taking their frustrations out on their children. They want to stop spiraling in negative and depressive thoughts. And you know what? When they pay attention, record what they’re noticing, and redirect themselves THEY FEEL FUCKING BETTER! They come to group excited to share. They attend to what others are saying. They begin to meet a reasonable expectation to just start attending to what’s going on in their own heads. They treat themselves and others better. They believe because they can “see the point” of what’s been recorded at the end of their pencil.
What’s the alternative? That’s a dead serious question. What other option do you have? Especially when you’re an addict, and by not paying attention, you almost immediately find yourself in some form of life-destroying space. Do you think you’re any less addicted to your narrative? Do you have any idea how much I wish I could ride the high of the ideas I had about where I’d be in life by now? My pride comes from the ongoing effort. I’m writing this after work, after a fun, if flirting-with-disaster weekend, and after taking another step in service to getting my business running. What is my alternative? Stop spending, sit isolated for months playing my piano, reading, watching TV, and writing what would almost-certainly get described as a “screed” excoriating society for all I’ve deliberately and delinquently checked-out of?
They say actors wish they were musicians, and incidentally, so many musicians end up acting. Whether it’s a perceived nobility or respect or simple grass-is-greener thinking, those who reach heights that give them the freedom to flow into new creative outlets seem to do so almost habitually. Whether or not what they create is “good” or culturally relevant is beyond the point. We access layers that we allow ourselves, and I think this works both directions. You ride fame and money into connections that get you on stages. You ride excuses and self-immolating narratives to the sublimation of everyone and everything. The creative energy will provide an infinitely irrational meta-narrative from which to proclaim your rule.
I saw Sam Jay at The Comedy Attic, and found she had a compelling point in her reiterating, “We’re all trash.” Her identity spans from junior man to woman to black to fat and all of which with their own groups she finds exasperating in their capacity to bitch and pretend like they aren’t shit. Sam’s takeaway is that she’s not going to focus on the big picture things and just keep trying to figure things out for herself. As long as what you’re doing isn’t trying to control or impose what you believe on someone else, fair game. Free and free alike. I think it’s an admirable position, and I don’t want to belittle Sam in conceiving of it as “merely naïve.” As I’ve thought about it the last few days, I can’t escape the impracticality and underestimating of what the religious or insecure or weak or invisible person’s compulsion is. Regaining a semblance of control at explicitly your expense is the name of the game.
When you don’t live for anything that you’ve learned or fought for, you live in contrast to your antagonist. When you’re not wise enough to forgive or incorporate your demons, you see them everywhere. When you’re not big or stable enough to tread into high waters, you’ll do anything to capture more air than you could breathe in a lifetime because you have no sense of proportion and an innate fear that any risk is the one that will end your ironically miserable one. Christians won’t leave you alone. Trump won’t stop. Haven’t you heard of the “gay agenda?” Don’t you know the only way to stop men from raping is to bag your women? There’s no such thing as a held-harmless free to do as you please idea. It’s going to infringe, impose, or desire more than you’re willing to pay.
That returns to my broad and often-argued point. You’re always paying something. You’re always fighting. You’re always building something up that is bound for eventual destruction. Whether it’s consistently mowing your lawn, keeping your self-esteem so you can show up and smile, or building the next argument for comprehensively dealing with the absurdity of existing at all, it’s all the same game, same obligation, same demonstration of your awareness, and in service to the same end. You get to have, hopefully, more moments than not that persuade you it’s worth staying alive at all. Does the nice lawn feel good? Do you enjoy the company of people who’ve tended to find themselves and don’t wish to give you shit and judge you? Don’t you love feeling “normal” or “responsible” in your title or ability to maintain your family and obligations? Why would you let someone deceive themselves that they’re worth the same as you who’s willing to do the work? Why would you give your life, as though you’re play acting some Jesus-caricature, for those who literally can’t be bothered to recognize what it is to live as you do? You raise kids to a point where you fucking must expect them to be an adult.
There’s no god raising us. There’s no authority, older than sin or otherwise, that is going to bestow upon you the infinite wisdom in a holy book, system of laws, or anarchistic decree. You wise the fuck up, hold other people accountable, or we all die. We die in big and small ways ANYWAY, and yet you’d have us do it faster and in more painful ways than we can conceive until it manifests as different crises of addiction, war, personality cults, and “post-truth” analyses.
We can’t all just get along. I can’t take you seriously when you don’t. I don’t respect myself when I sit and spin and get super smug about what I’m capable of or who I think I am. I respect when I’ve spoken to how I’ve managed to break the narrative spell again. I respect when I can patiently engage the next step through the desert that provides me just a drop at a time’s worth of water in service to the next tortured step. If we are so collectively not in a place to even acknowledge fascism, the severity of our mental health problems, the depravity of how we conceive of our neighbors, or the inevitable death of not experiencing some form of collective wake-up call about what it takes to survive and sustain, now the inherent wisdom of Sam Jay’s point becomes king. Find a way for you and yours to survive until it all burns down. Even if they’re coming for you, practice your ducking and weaving.
I’m not there yet, but I don’t think she’s wrong, and I don’t have money to seriously entertain a kind of “escape” like that too seriously without it manifesting as another one of tomorrow’s antagonisms.
I’ve tried, passively and with force, to make sure what I was thinking or where I wished to go wasn’t just in my head. You could read on your own time, or not. You can watch what I literally build to test and manifest. I, still, get drunk and text heartfelt “wish you were here!” things to people who won’t own how little they actually want to do with me. I take what I can control, the impressions you’ve given me, and respond as I want my best self to respond. Open, forgiving, trying, and not allowing “hope” to look like some platitude I’m unwilling to speak and work for. I don’t hope you’ll hang out; I invite you. You show up or don’t. I don’t hope you’ll read; I write. I don’t hope we’ll get back together or live like the old days; I pay the price of honest vulnerable expression and the many ways it manifests. I don’t do it perfectly or never delete, but I do it so often I’ve become all-but intolerant of those acting incapable of the same while professing to desire what I do.
I want as many words as it takes to feel better. I want as many opportunities as I can recognize. I want as many friends who will actually respond and encourage and grow and change with me. I want to damn that which belongs in hell and defend whatever’s left of why I bother to stay alive. I’m not imposing and justifying, just looking to acknowledge and celebrate. My expectations are about preserving me, not controlling you. I think when I “force” people to think of their lives the same way, they realize how little of themselves actually exists or there’s nothing they can recognize as worth preserving. All the more my fault and burden, I guess.
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