I’m here, now 13 months into my “hybrid” role, of wasting time and gas hanging out in an otherwise empty office with the office managers. Our building is next door to a historically and comically destitute meth hotel. I’ve got fancy steakhouse leftovers waiting for me in the mini fridge. A regional supervisor is on site, prompting my attendance. She’s not my supervisor, but she’d talk. I’m hoping to not make it an entirely wasted trip by obtaining my still-missing cords for the game systems I’ve been trying to assemble for at least a month.
I usually try to spot-check my birthdays. I’ve been fascinated with time for a long time. I thought I’d be fairly rich and living easy at 30. I’m not exactly roughing it at 35, and it’s hard to argue that attending 79, so far, shows all over the country (65 last year), is anything but “rich.” My job is mostly remote. I talk to people about “coping skills” and organizing their lives around sustaining sober practices. It’s a little on the nose, no? I’ve been desperate for sober thinking from my cohort my entire life. That these people have literal physical addictions to potentially quicker life-ending means isn’t as far removed from what I’ve been complaining about since I started.
Whether you latch onto your comfortable narrative, the path laid out for you in advance, or weaponize feelings, it’s part of an addictive self-protective instinct. If nothing else holds true, it feels right. The consequences are reduced to a form of archeology and academics that bypass the heart. We’re circularly “logical” in order to survive, just as we are, in any given moment. It’s not growth. It’s not incorporating or contextualizing. It’s sustaining whatever words or behaviors that exist in any given moment. That’s “survival.” You’re here, full stop. You don’t have to know what “here” means. You don’t have to have anyone accept you. You don’t have to believe anyone exists, let alone with a complicated context of exactly the same feelings generated from the same mechanisms that have justified the existence of every remotely conscious “here” creature.
This can’t be “fixed,” the longer I think about it. It can only be danced with. There is no “example” for those to follow, only partner “heres” you can match with the infinite void of chaos and destruction. The world is disorded? You defy it with a simple list. The universe is ambivalent and purposeless? You defy it with a single goal, choice, or sustained effort to show yourself what else is here at the same time. I can’t persuade any of my clients, my management pretending to be “leadership,” you, myself, or the family dog. I can just be here, as whatever I am, and create new words here and there. It doesn’t subvert agency. It doesn’t opine on “free will.” It just is or isn’t.
I find myself closer the more I detach. When I write about the intensity of my feelings, I get so close to them they persistently move me to actually work and change my circumstances over short and long periods of time. That’s my case for being as or more feeling-laden than anyone else. I feel it so deeply I have the energy to work, drive, show up, speak, fight, and the “hope” invested in putting myself out there to try and connect in abject defiance of contrasting or conflicting assertions about what’s really here. I know what’s here, and it’s at least everything contained within me.
I make statements about my sense of “freedom” or the importance of how I’m utilizing my time. My overall trend is still to ever-increasing levels of both. That’s incredibly hard to see when I’m literally here at the office, for no reason. There’s a new world in the books I brought. There’s new music on the songs I haven’t heard shuffling through my playlists. But I’m embodying someone else’s concept of where I “should” physically be. It’s at perfect odds or conflict with my approximate ideal. There’s no less potential in this moment to subvert their here and protect the positive trend. This blog is doing it. Do they pay me to reflect? They are now.
I have considerably more and less than I thought I would at this age. I never envisioned my “adult version party house” as filled with anything less than people mostly enjoying themselves. Instead, there’s two cats in my combo-shed. I have the capacity to build more. I have a decent amount of “job security” either built into my history or by virtue of my credentials. I have a living history of positive experiences I draw on to pair with the absurdities of my fascist here, my ignorant here, my ambivalent here, and my alone here. I can’t pretend something isn’t missing, but I won’t deny my capacity and responsibility to keep speaking to it, looking for it, or throwing myself into new heres where I suspect it might exist.
I’m the counselor because of circumstance, and I do the work. I maintain the boundary when “things” have “gone too far.” I show up and dare the rain to cancel the concert. I book the flight. I buy the tools. I save the bookmarks. I take a chance every moment I lean into the idea that it could be more of what I want than less. The more I speak to and define what I want, the easier it is to prove it. I wanted the last hour or so to be writing and made it so. Very soon I’ll want my here filled with food and a TV show. Then I’ll do notes, maybe, or crack open the graphic novel. I have everything, but in sharing it so infrequently, it can feel like there’s very little. That’s a tragedy with important components I need to consistently remind myself I can’t control.
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