[1026] Type 2 Brain

I was awake at 5:30 AM today. I went to bed earlier than I might usually, and given I only sleep for 4 or 5 hours, I’ve been fairly awake for just over 2 hours. I have a few things I want and need to do today. I found myself immediately distracted trying to make coffee without my usual cup, get my contacts in, navigate the cats, and set up my work computer. A few days ago, drunk, I proclaimed that I would turn up my effort in fixing our problems in getting the counseling business in working order. That meant to me spending money creating an online presence, organizing spreadsheets, and making an obscene amount of phone calls with hopefully in-person meetings setup. I really want to do “just all that” right now. The mild, familiar, foreboding panic struck.

I still have my day job. I still have my day job taking away time that my business requires. I’m already incredibly distractable. I know I’ve been mentally checking out of my day job with each week and each email telling us they’re expanding into new markets while continuing to neglect ours. I’m already anticipating a call, email, or just some negative thought and attitude constantly pulling me away from figuring out a detail that lets me get a website looking and operating as I wish.

I feel so wrong. I don’t know how to do both. I don’t know how to earnestly use the same potential focus and energy to churn through day-job tasks so I can beast mode my endeavor. I’m living this incredibly uncomfortable contradiction that suggests my effort in both directions will be a waste of time and money. At least with the day-job, I know how little I need to do to keep spending money on toys, trips, shows, and food. I’ve bled indefinitely in service to my entrepreneurial ideals to lose money, get taken advantage of, work myself to the point of passing out, and temper my disposition. I know how much it took of me to get, not “nowhere,” but I’m not running a coffee shop I’ve had open for ten years, nor am I hopping over to the next house to flip, nor do I have anyone out here on the land working on a shared project or me helping with one of theirs.

The entire story of my effort is one of constant begrudging effort to not get overwhelmingly dejected that no one is coming, nothing will work, and never is it going to make sense, go smooth, or result in some anticipated level of status and stability after having done wise, helpful, useful, and forward-thinking things. I could save myself the disappointment, money, time, and discomfort in my gut by just doing the functional nothing of my day-job, making the regular amount, and adopting a “come what may” posture about the business.

But everything antagonizes. Every person who tells me what a good job I’m doing, or how I’m not like any counselor they’ve had before, or that they’ve never trusted someone enough to call outside regular work hours, or how they appreciate that I know how to push, or that they’re thankful I wish to protect the integrity and focus of the groups, or that my advice and patience are things I should get paid a lot for, or how someone doesn’t know how I’m able to “do what I do,” or literally anything nice and encouraging ever – I want to break down. It’s not right that I’m, apparently, this capable of eliciting this kind of feedback, whether it’s accountable or true-enough I’ll leave to you, and I’m just a cog. I’m just stuck. I’m just flailing to “fit” into an entire system and culture designed around the exact opposite of what I’m fighting to maintain.

Having more time is great. Filling that time with more concerts and comedians is even better. Getting to spend time with my dad and friends is as good as anything I imagined about my obscenely wealthy future where I had retired at 30 and pretty much maintained being in the business of partying. My mind is occupied by things screaming at me that enough of the foundation isn’t right. I’ve yet to enable the exponential potential of the positive sentiments offered. Something about those sentiments has to be true. Either they’re total bullshit and I’ve weaponized them against myself in service to building something out of a series of false narratives. They’re only a little true, so it’s a mildly less damning version of the last scenario. They’re true-enough to qualify as functional, which means I’m either a fucking moron, or uncreative, or horribly poorly connected to make anything that functions, again, in sheer irony, that I’m already working and getting paid at precisely what I’m trying to do for myself. Or they’re particularly and individually true in the earnest way in which I believe they’re conveyed, which triggers my, “Well, wouldn’t it make sense for me to get paid and organized around these habits verses the shit I’m stuck in?” sensibility.

I don’t want to shut off the tap of a paycheck I can anticipate, particularly when I don’t have my next 20 tickets bought yet, and $7000 of debt, and just rediscovered an Amazon deal tracker that saw me buying $130 headphones for $15 and $145 watch for $20. Money is always on its way out. Always. I don’t know how to reconcile my divided gut. As soon as I get done writing, I’ll get the email off to probation, I might get some discharges done, and I might get some drug screen results and notes completed. It’ll probably be around 10:30. My first group isn’t until 3. That’s almost 5 hours to watch some videos on how to design a website, get it paid for and setup, do my groups, and be on my merry way. It’s not hard. It’s not a time crunch. But it’s still wrong and it’s still off, and there’s any number of calls or emails I’ll get that break even that vague semblance of order.

And I’m just a little bit cold, and my cat took off outside before eating breakfast, and I’m going to be thinking about the UPS truck who is bound to pretend to drop off my package again in spite of me finally getting numbers on my house. I’ll forget I need to eat and shit and I’ll need to release a spider back into the wild. The details that describe the undermined effort and intention will get delineated, and the next time someone asks how things are going, I’ll barely refrain from saying, “What’s really needed is gone, if it was ever there to begin with” like some forlorn poet.

A major contributor to my general frustration is that I’m unable to discern the reason “anything has to be like this.” Is it just some rule that you can’t treat people fairly under capitalism? Is “fair” even a reasonable concept to entertain? I’ll always wonder why nothing “we” talked about wishing to achieve or be to each other never was bothered with. Why can’t we just shut up? Why does the lie need to be so loud and at the heart of the ironic churn? Why does the betrayal have to manifest in so many catchphrases and corporate-speak or empty truisms about love and family? Why, if it’s already so hard, do we make it harder with layers of bullshit and laziness and fear over phantoms?

I’m 34. I habitually find relationships where communication and honesty aren’t really the girl’s thing until crisis hits, and then perhaps we should never speak again? My friends are on collision courses with varying forms of heart-attacks or strokes and then baffled when I would suggest they won’t be able to stop me when I go into heart-attack/stroke modes of effort and stress to get what I want. I love my house, but I would never use it to entertain, as if anyone’s ever coming. I have so much shit. I have so many projects and things to play with. I don’t have anything outside of myself to orient towards besides the professions of “woulds” and “coulds” that I’m apparently in no way capable of doing on my own nor enabling and inspiring others to help me with in an ongoing and persistently positively financially consequential way.

I have the fantasy I’m always measuring myself against. I’ve started and continued to run a coffee shop. It has a presence in the mall and a delivery service. I’ve learned all these things about house flipping and am always shopping around or working on the next one. Each day I’ll wake up and take another bite out of a project on the land, read a chapter or two, get a lesson from some insanely talented musician, work out, call up one of a dozen people and get a delicious meal. All of the details in all of the blogs about the rent, weather, mental and physical health of anyone involved, time, money, or ability to focus when “surprise” panic sets in allow for it to be a considerably more compelling delusion than it should be. But it also serves to make the reasonable argument for a measured (registers as plodding) approach to anything new or “big” I wish to approach. So, again, I’m wrong and feeling wrong, even if I’m not, as it becomes impossible to tell which aspects of the story I have any real control over. I can chill and slow down. The more I feverishly move to learn and overachieve? I introduce more chaos and panic and I’m left alone and cold.

Just because I don’t know what to do doesn’t mean I’m desperate to be told what to do or follow orders. I don’t need your sky daddies, your superficial rules, or your frightened personal ethos that keeps you emotionally “stable.” I want more things to make sense. I think it is a “just” cause and thing to believe in when not marred in subjective experiences alone. The more I can get things to make sense, the more I’m able to move through whatever is in front of me. I’ve spoken about the panic dozens of times; it’s taken a slightly different form and I’ve found more details. It makes a little more sense. I’m feeling myself drawn towards what was handicapping drudgery as I run out of things to say. It doesn’t get better, because neither you nor I are any better or worse than our awareness and culpability to any given moment. We’re certainly not fucking that.