[1027] Nice Things

“You can’t give up.”

I was just on the phone with my supervisor. She was calling to “make sure I had the support” after I called my officer manager’s supervisor. I provided her supervisor the context behind the months of struggle I’ve been listening to about the lack of leadership, direction, or protection from threatening and escalating-in-creepiness behaviors from clients. My office manager has tried, many times in the past, to email, ask for help, and detail her concerns. She’s most often met with outright silence.

My supervisor nonchalantly suggested that, like her, I know you can’t give up and stop advocating. If you have a genuine plan and boundaries and capacity to help and protect yourself, and that advocacy is in service to that, sure. If your leadership is shit, of course you can give up. I’ve stopped bringing things to “leadership” on many occasions because they’re not leadership. They’re figureheads playing sadomasochistic roles. They don’t want to use any real individuated wisdom or bring consequences. They want the tortured dance that protects the glossy edifices of “professionalism” and “care.”

Give up. Give up more often than not. Most things most of the time aren’t going to get you where you wish to go. You think you need the paycheck, so you’ll squeeze your head until you bleed from your pores. You can quit before or after you’ve followed directions to stick gauze in your ears and nose and hold buckets for the rivers from your eyes.

75-90% of the reason I stay in any role for as long as I do is related to my coworkers. My longest job had large periods where I considered my managers and coworkers like family. My actual supervisors at DCS and I got along very well. My supervisor now leaves me alone, and my office managers, save for one, are able to laugh and joke and not turn on each other while also handling our difficult clients. They’re overwhelmed by default, and the busiest one is on the verge of quitting. Why? An incredibly creepy client, who has already hit on her, rifled through our trash and appeared to play with used tampons for 25 minutes while in the employee bathroom.

Previously, clients have threatened violence. They get extremely cussy and rude. The office managers are responsible for dealing with 300+ members, most days there’s maybe 2 of them, and with pharmacy changes, random incoherent communication, and seemingly zero support to address the more dramatic ones, it’s a recipe for popping. If she leaves, the precarious place I occupy psychologically about my responsibilities or desire to maintain groups with integrity becomes pretty severely threatened. I still need to make about eight grand though.

It's an unconscious thing to keep yourself trapped in these abuse cycles and advocate that others abuse themselves as well. That’s something I don’t think my supervisor is aware that she did. She’s not actually concerned about my office manager, just like she’s not actually trying to support me. She’s trying to contain the Bedford office. Every industry, in the name of capital, control, and professionalism, does the same thing. Train derails? Oh the toxins won’t possibly be that bad, you know, all history and evidence aside haha! Market crashes? It’s a race to the scripts about normal business cycles and personal accountability. It’s at once arguably one of, if not the most powerful patterns and so simultaneously tired. He beats you? Laundry list of reasons/excuses you’re trapped and dependent follow.

Until you delineate a breaking point, you don’t have one until your body or mind fails you. Any discussion about boundaries or self-care could, if nowhere else, start just before the physical limit of exerting yourself against or in service to that which breaks you into pieces.

If there’s some broader “point” of existing, be it service to each other or something “greater” that you call “God” or abstract “goodness,” it’s to not kill yourself as you go about it. It might speak to why the Jesus story is so compelling; it embodies the Noble Battered Wife narrative.  A point of true genius to couch the balance or comeuppance after death, right? Helps keep the flock from feeling like they need to own or do anything this precise moment that their skin is peeling away. No no, I’m sure that’s just wool!

It makes sense why you either can’t recognize the narrative, feel the depth of its consequences, or draw any real and sustained effort or motivation from its recitation to react contrarily. It’s built into our psychological fabric of meaning. We aren’t just battered wives; we’re designed and predestined to thrive the more we contort ourselves to the thrashing. Keep the secret. Suffer. Pass on the generational trauma like you might a pocket knife that will run down the length of your teenage daughter’s arm. Don’t police how, whether, and why you do…anything, let alone begin to trust what you can see, hear, and feel in interacting with the information.

I kinda feel like I cracked a code in my broader confusion about the state of our existence. In the general “opposite day” that people occupy in how they use words, “sacrifice” at the individual word, if not syllable, gets to run a micro-ironic instant life-death-relive cycle, like so many tributes to undead saviors. You’re not lying, you’re celebrating and emulating peak nobility in death. Everything’s a target. Mass shootings are pretty on the nose, but we’ll kill the planet, education, regulation of any kind, or even the memory of a just, civil, and safe space until we can only sustain interpretative mockeries. We’ll co-opt literally everything into feeding the self-destructive architecture. Think about what happened to “woke” or #metoo or Black Lives Matter or anything that started pretty clearly in opposition only to be snatched out from under the already embattled and stultified ethic.

This is why we can’t have nice things.