[1102] Once And For All

I really need to talk and think "big picture" right now because this day in isolation is proving several orders of frustrating.

I'm about to hit about half as much as I typically make a year in debt. The largest portion of that is the investments I'm making in grant writers, fundraisers, and the infrastructure to keep my website, insurance, and credentials up to date/alive. Thinking about my needs in isolation, there's hardly a grant that could be granted that wouldn't cover my expenses for a year easy. Whether I invested $500, or $5,000 in landing a decent grant, in theory, I have little to worry about with enough exposure and submissions. It's the same story for an individual who might donate or securing funds from a corporation. I hit 30K, I'm not just out of debt, but the rest of the bills are paid all year.

Well, you ever hear about how hard it is to find good help? Even, it turns out, when you're paying $40/hr or, considerably more than $40/hr. For reasons I'm sure I'll contemplate the rest of my life, I can neither be too specific nor too communicative about what I need. If I use one word, they'll hear another. If I use 3 pages of words, they'll arc their head like a dog and ask for "more." I don't know what part of my insane younger self thought he wanted to be at the center of dozens of people's terrible interpretations of words, but some days it gets to such an overwhelming degree, you want to flush it all and just go fuck off at a factory or something.

Not a day goes by that I don't hear some horrifying mental health statistic. We're, broadly, getting dumber, less equipped, less accountable, and we somehow pair this with "positive jobs report" numbers while our psychological well-being is mercilessly dragged through raging gaslit fires. I have a company now poised to live or die on the back of our perception and goodwill as it pertains to what is, literally every day, described in numbers of tortured lonely souls, and I feel at constant battle to be allowed to address or work to make things the tiniest bit better for those in my orbit.

My state doesn't want anyone to get better. Insurance doesn't want anyone to get paid. "Competitors" want the same clients dependent and afraid and ignorant. Other do-gooders and "passionate" people passive-aggressively lay claim to the dignity and insight of their particular bubbles and ways of conforming to suspiciously blind norms. Everyone I talk to, even when they're not trying to, uses a tone that says something like, "You're new, or not enough, or not credentialed or organized or equipped in the way that suits me." I feel like I'm fighting for acceptance in a field that I've got years of demonstrated exceptional competence in. It creates a very cognitively dissonant place.

Am I a punchy little naive start-up looking for a big-brother sponsor and to have my hand held? Like, no. I'm a social work professional who's materially influenced and changed people's lives routinely for years who just wants the bare minimum "keeping the lights on" in return, even for the first few fucking years! This despite the personally-experienced level of need observed and engaged that should allow for more than subsistence living. Your extra year and a half in a Master's program or social work school specific degree isn't decades of experience and competence creating an obscene gulf between us in how we might relate or help each other.

It's a multi-layered "attack" on what I'm trying to do. There's the practical with taxes, start-up fees, online infrastructure and credentialing costs. There's the personal, with my business partner an almost perfect stress machine dealing with his severely injured wife, or battles with his school and the licensing board. There's whatever you want to make of my own head and things that make me want to pop. There's the language and communication barrier where everyone I speak to has to be online or mostly via text and email, and no matter what gets said, they find a way to capitalize on it in a way that has me spending more and getting less, or nothing at all. And then even the good-natured genuinely capable can't help but occupy overt and increased skepticism that tends to cripple the path towards a problem getting solved verses a path that doesn't wish to be bothered.

In any given moment where the weight and racing thoughts about all of that rush in, freeze me, or feel way more persuasive and compelling than waiting or looking for the next opportunity, it's about as bad as I can ever feel without being sick. Even looking at the next thing that might cause any level of stress feels unbearable. So, you can pull back and watch TV or fuck around on a guitar. Good luck in that moment not shitting on yourself for not powering through the discomfort. That's, of course, unfair and unrealistic and unnecessary. Tell that to how you feel anyway. Also, be by yourself pretty much all the time. Then, all of the disconcerting words and feedback exist as a kind of fogginess and extra steps removed from ever getting resolved.

I could pack what I do or what I've done into 4 sentences appropriate for an elevator. I'll have to write a fucking book or ten about the infinitely infuriating process, barriers, and human condition that makes remotely achieving anything feel like a fucking miracle. It's not one step forward and two steps back. The paradigm isn't backwards or forwards. The paradigm is now and whether now is aware of how to make now actualized into one moment over another. Every moment I'm trying not to sound disorganized, incomplete, exhausted, or like a cunt because I think you've just taken advantage of me or wasted my time, suggests I have no fucking idea how to make now better than it feels.

I'm gonna try again tomorrow. I'm gonna fuck around with my shows and instruments tonight. I'm gonna keep waiting and seeing if I can meet or talk to people that don't complicate things more than they need to be. Thankfully, if I know nothing else, it's that I'm at least as wrong and full of shit in my despotism as "they" are in their ignorant optimism or pride in how they engage me. Their persistent, almost motivated failure it seems, is all the more evidence that I shouldn't act like them against myself. Don't I trust they're blind cunts? Don't I trust they'll be sly and calculated in their denial about trying to fuck? Of course I do. I'm inviting them in to do so. Why react when you get proven right with anything but joy and confidence? I mean, that's obviously an incredibly dangerous path to self-deluded hell, but you know what I mean. Of course, you don't.

Do you have any idea how much I don't want to be right? I think an obscene amount about the idea of, "You can be right, or you can be happy." It's one of those lines that has never left me and nags like an old crow. I want to be wrong about so much shit that keeps proving true in the most consistent and painful ways. I wish I could trust the things I feel I need to exist in a healthy mental place, but I need to doubt, aggressively so, or I can't function. I will literally lose too much money or people to work with in any capacity if I trust. That's fucking crazy to me.

If I treat the environment I'm working within as though it actually cares about people, you know what happens? I get targeted and taken advantage of. I behave as though problems are there to be solved, therefore, in violation of the reality, I become their problem. I get lectured and condescended towards. I get "good luck" sentiments. I get gossipped about. This shit isn't conspiratorial either, word makes it back to me. How could you not? I stick out. I fight. I'm angry. I don't give a fuck how you feel if you're doing dumb wrong shit that conflicts with the smart good shit I'm attempting. I illicit that look and pause and exasperated airy sentimentality that really does not wish to be bothered, but doesn't want to be blamed as more complicit or indicative barrier than support.

I have exactly 5 relationships in my entire life that have maintained a fairly equitable investment/output kind of dynamic that weren't otherwise mostly superficial acquaintances. Whether we're talking literally financially, or emotional work and time to maintain. 9 out of 10 people in my life cost me money, will gleefully draw from my time to their own ends, ignore the work of maintaining their own sense of balance or mental health, or will levy endless commentary or judgment about me that I don't, or at least didn't feel or return about them as it was raining in. This most often manifest as silence as I'm expected to deal with whatever the fallout becomes of their negligence.

And I aspire to counsel people in situations where 9.5 of the people in their lives are pulling the same shit, and the shivering half of their own self that they can still recognize and respect feels as dark, overwhelmed, and made to feel as crazy as I described feeling above. Sounds like a fucking party.

One of my clients called and texted several times, waking me up too early, to freak out about information I'm not inclined to share with her PO, and am also bound my confidentiality regardless. After calming down, she brought up speaking to her friend who she has implored to start speaking with me, especially after I said I'd hold sessions for free. Don't you know? Her friend said she "definitely" would, but it might take a few weeks because she has doctor's appointments and yada yada yada. My client doesn't understand her friend isn't going to call me. My client is my client because she genuinely wants to get better. Her friend is 9 out of 10 people who pretend they don't have an hour to sort themselves out, at least a little bit, one day, between the moment you find out about it, and the weeks or years you'll spend pretending it doesn't exist.

I let myself suffer unduly for about a half hour before I started writing. That's practice. I identified things about me that reflexively catastrophize and conceptualized my fledgling feeling effort. I broadened the scope. I denoted the indifferent or impartial patterns people follow and depersonalized the particular cunts who drew focus. I feel a little better than when I began. Shouldn't we all get really good at our own version of this? And is it not existentially right to pursue a way to sustainably help people to keep practicing if 1 in 4 have a substance use disorder?