[1008] Big Gulp

I feel like a tea time chat. It happened again, as it often does. I’m “technically” on the clock and at work. I’ve had one group today, and my next is at 5. This “in between time,” is often an anxiety-inducing affair. What, exactly, am I doing? Today, as the first rumbles of stomach-dropping started, I had the thought that I was “experiencing the reality of my full potential.” It immediately calmed my gut. Wait, what? I felt all of my possible choices and like I could perfectly well engage in any of them. It was excitement at the prospect of experiencing the reality of any number of consequences, and knowing it wouldn’t matter.

Say, for example, I up and quit my job. I know exactly what I’d be doing with my time. I know how full I would feel diving into the layers of what it takes to get this counseling operation running. I can go eat, or watch TV, or pretend I have enough tasks to eat up my time with spreadsheets and outreach. All of it, ultimately, doesn’t matter, at least it won’t impede me moving forward in the ways I would argue I prefer. I can’t move any faster or slower than I’ve been. Each time I’ve been presented with an opportunity to make a meaningful step forward, I’ve taken it. I have no reason to worry outside of the general random tragedy of life and how it may impact me at all times.

I can’t get that insight or phrasing unless I experience the anxiety first. An incorrect goal would be to say something like “I never want to feel like this again.” I think we haphazardly set ourselves up for failure with ill-conceived sentiments like that. If only, it was imagined, I wasn’t depressed or anxious. If only all of these variables weren’t. When you do that, you can’t weaponize your feeling into a viscerally felt and actionable stability. My so-named “anxiety” is the consequence of my training myself not to just be excruciatingly angry all the time. That mild “tickle” about competing courses of action is power. I’m aware first, then it can be a blog or cold call, or follow-up.

I really do want to quit. It’s for all the reasons I state often. It’s not mine, it’s not on my timeline, it’s not the kind of challenge that will beget growth or a sense of pride and dignity. It doesn’t pay enough for my ambition. It’s building more immoral behavior into its base of operations regularly. If I quit today I’ll owe my hostage-taking company two grand. I haven’t actually received any money from submitted claims yet. The practical reality of a paycheck continues to overtake many disgruntled lists. But I could quit, and that power is anxiety-inducing. When I get moments where I entertain how to navigate the consequences of doing so, I’m anxious about the credible confidence I have in my capacity to pull it off.

I feel like that sentiment harks all the way back to when and why I first started writing. In turning over how people engaged in shitty relationships, I inevitably shined upon how I could manipulate and under what circumstances it would feel more or less appropriate to do so. My awareness and ability to do so lends itself to being aberrantly good at things like DCS assessment and counseling. I know what makes me tick, so I know what makes you tick, even if you never quite land on language you would espouse as confidently. I also continue to learn that the moment I lay too far off a manipulation, you tend to use that room to hang both myself and you.

We could look at my business partnership. I don’t have to talk Hussain into working himself to death. He had that complex before I ever met him. I do have to be a cheerleader. I have a certain confidence that in his world might feel more like a desperate need. No matter how good a job he does or how hard he works, he has a gaping hole that needs to be filled with his effort and definitely not his father’s money. I trust his capacity to work even harder than me. I have to persistently counsel that he take time for himself and feel good about each tangible step we move in the positive direction. He knows we’ll get there because he’ll cut it out of your chest if necessary (or, his own, he’s a nice guy.) I know we’ll get there because we both weaponize our different types of pathological working behavior into tangible results.

Is it malicious or bad to recognize how he works? No. Were I to task him with “doing everything” because I know he would drive himself insane in order to do so would be. Is it manipulative to lean into my strengths when it comes to logistics or paperwork or contract formation? The moment I use that power to cheat him out of money or engage in some kind of hostile takeover it would be. We have our lanes, and they are both necessary for a successful operation. It doesn’t help either of us for me to be naïve about what I am or am not good at, nor downplay what power I do or don’t have. That’s why the design and distribution of power needs to be an exchange, not a grab, or a lust, or a desperate stumbling into.

I have the power to keep the peace, redirect the conversation, and hijack your brain. It’s literally my job. I prove to myself how much I can throw you into a place of self-reflection regularly. I can walk you down the road of questions you haven’t asked yourself in a specific order to draw a specific conclusion. I’m asking myself the same things, and humanity has been asking them since the beginning of the capacity to do so. If and when you experience the same kind of anxiety, accurately described or not, what happens? You use? You deny? You cut? You get distracted? You otherwise engage in some automatic addictive behavior to suppress?

I remember some moments of my life for their outsized capacity to speak so loudly. I remember when I literally, bodily, couldn’t be persuaded to be as “down” or “depressed” as I had been in high school. In the middle of The Will to Power, I just stopped reading, like Forrest stopped running, and stopped conceiving of myself in the way that was driving my desire to wind up reading things like The Will to Power. I remember consciously deciding that problems did not need to include yelling. I remember when that started feeling like a choice. I remember when it stopped feeling like “someone” or “something” “out there” was going to “fix” literally anything and my trust eroded. A sense of agency and intention are trained skills, not divinely bestowed nor an entitlement of any vague semblance of consciousness.

Almost every day I hear a story from someone describing “what happened to them.” It’s incredibly rare that the story identifies more than one place where the person might have intervened beyond at the end, and rarer that the intervention is necessarily healthy. We’re always picking up the pieces. We’re describing after-the-fact our later impression of what happened, instead of waking up to the moment and choosing a path. “My mom yelled at me for an hour!” What? Why not in second 5 did you not say “I won’t be yelled at,” and leave? Why did you “fix” that situation by cutting yourself, inducing a calm, so you could sit back down to be yelled at for another hour? This, and more, are the literal realities people share about their experience of time and decision making. What’s your personal analogue?

I’m not blind to the fact that I don’t just “want” to find more people to hang out with, it’s a necessary mitigation of my awareness. I don’t want to be corrupted by my power or singular window. I see it happen in bits and spurts whether it’s in some indulgent spending or conversational liberties towards the pliable. I need exchange. I need shaping as much as I can shape. I know people “adjust” themselves around me, just like I tailor my engagement professionally. But that’s what I hoped to avoid in donning the “friend” moniker to people and letting them run wild. That’s my persistent appeals to hang out with my otherwise preoccupied crowd that doesn’t so much conduct themselves like the college people. That’s my striving to create big and powerful entities that can operate by principles that no individual can tend to be trusted with indefinitely.

It's voting season. I can’t trust everyone I know to do so. I can’t trust my neighbors, the people I counsel, or those currently at any level of power, to not be literal fascists. My “power” in the context of any given crazed and irrational individual is immediately humbled and reduced if not for a shared exchange of an awareness of the problem and institutionalized accountable ongoing mitigation of the consequences. Whether that “institution” is the company I try to create or the relationships we build, it’s not a mere discardable artifact of an otherwise meaningful and purpose-driven existence. It’s a necessary component that needs nourishment and defended. It’s an awareness of what matters and why so we’re not driven by marketing, trauma, and blind fearful ignorance.

Each stomach drop is conceiving of “the whole world,” mine, yours, and the one we can occupy tomorrow, depending on my next keystroke, phone call, or deliberate pause. It’s not a power you should ever get too comfortable using, and it’s not a power I want kept to myself. I also can’t pretend that everyone is entitled to it or can use it responsibly. Most lottery winners blow through the funds in a few years. We’ve hit the historical lottery, country of origin lottery, monetary lottery, and often genetic lottery, and we’re teetering on indefinite self-destruction. What’s missing from our awareness? What’s your move when you feel that anxiety-inducing sense of power and obligation?