[1118] But, Like, What Do You *Do,* Exactly?

My first instinct is that this will sound like an errant complaining session. I hope that's not the case, but I don't know yet.

Very bluntly, I do not believe we give a shit. I don't think we care about each other. I don't think we look for ways to account for our worst tendencies and behavior. I don't think we have any instinct or take any time to denote what those worst instincts and tendencies may be. I think we carry on each day essentially apologizing for the way things currently are and we presume will always be. It's suffer, share meme, desperately look for an out in the form of an unfulfilling vacation or expensive toy that never fills the void.

Now, none of that description matters to me. I don't need "us" to give a shit in order for me to. If I think we live in an insane system that is greedy, tired, and deliberately blind, I created a way to live in contrast and work to scale that up. That's all well and good and easy to understand.

But, I am still a cog in the overall system. I need those people who control the money, or who work for the institutions, or who consider themselves as shit-givers with their own agenda on how to address or fix anything to understand where I'm coming from and compliment my effort.

I, literally, could talk or write for hours about the impact I've had on the people I've worked with. I could do the same in talking about Hussain and his clients. It doesn't fit in "neat" 5-minute videos. It doesn't have a fancy program name. In fact, the more I try to elevator-pitch it, the cheaper it will register and the less you'll understand it. Why? People are complex. The nature of fixing their issues is not something you should pretend is happening in a back-of-napkin-esc kind of calculation.

Also, the things people need and praise are fundamentally abstract. If you love that I "hold you accountable," how does that translate as a specific line on a grant application? Seriously, do you have any idea? Because I can claim all day that is the nature of the feedback I receive, but is that a "specific outcome" the money wants to see?

I saw a work-a-holic get better at structuring his day so he could spend more time with his kids.

I saw a client stop speeding on his drive home from work and go to a concert in Texas he never would have previously.

I've seen a dozen people start making lists to help them stop getting overwhelmed.

I've cleaned hoarder homes.

I've seen people lose weight and start hobbies as we focused on self-care.

I've seen people bridge conversations with family regarding chronic stressors.

We've helped many people not lose their children to the state.

I've helped give people the courage to taper down or off their Suboxone.

I've connected people with resources to get home supplies, baby stuff, and emergency funds to account for bills.

I've provided ways of breathing and topics for writing about that people report back helped them stop spiraling.

I've given people ways of engaging their children that allow for conversation and avoiding pointed judgment.

I've connected people to mindful practices that encouraged everything from drinking more water to refraining from yelling at their family.

I've helped people budget and get a direction out of credit card debt.

I've helped people set boundaries with their work environments.

I've helped people realize that difficulties they're having today coincided with traumatic moments or shifts from their past.

I've helped people make career shifts and build confidence in creating things they enjoy artistically.

I've helped people joke and laugh more deliberately.

I've talked people down and got services to people who were suicidal.

I've built and organized meetings/teams to address the needs of children suffering the lack of communication and organization.

I've supervised visits and driven 5+ hours for months just for one family in service to them being able to see their children consistently.

I've been counseling for functionally free to ensure the incentives and expectations can stay pure.

We've helped people get off probation earlier than they anticipated.

I've helped people understand and drop the guilt of things they did as children to survive growing up in the unhealthy environments they had.

I've graduated people through RWI and helped them get released from prison sooner.

I build confidence. I make it okay to talk about chronic and painful things in ways that start to feel accessible and like things you can be accountable to.

I've helped people navigate the DCS landscape and know their rights.

I've helped people stop qualifying what they say or think with, "I know that sounds dumb" or "I'm such an idiot," or "I'm sorry" about things they shouldn't be sorry for.

I cheerlead, remind, redirect, and celebrate - consistently.

I show people what it means to be approaching things in a deliberate, non-judgmental, and accountable way that is better than chronically complaining or getting complacent.

I know the difference in what it feels like and practically when you either are working on yourself, being honest about your constraints and strengths, or aren't. I clue you into your contradictory nature and point you in the direction of what it looks like to feel better and do more than you currently take for granted. THERE IS NO FUCKING BUMPER STICKER FOR THIS!

[1117] Down!

I'm something of an angry person. That statement alone doesn't mean much, but it's the one to kick off with. I have a standing steady state of anger that's waiting to be provoked. I've learned where it comes from, so it's infinitely easier to name and manage as an adult, but it's no less there. I think it was a School of Life video that helped round out my perspective of the underlying "hope," so to speak, that lies underneath it as well.

I'm someone who is very quick, and keen, to see the potential in something. I can see the catastrophe just as quickly as the celebration and implications of doing something well. It's "obvious" to me like watching someone's muscles grow from consistently lifting heavier weights and maintaining a proper diet over time. There's also an intuition born from experience either physically attempting something, or in speaking with thousands of people. Over enough time, I consider myself to, literally, "never have a good excuse."

Yoda said, "Do or do not, there is no try."

I think of the many lessons we're abjectly failing at culturally, this is one of the biggest. I don't think we see our potential, good or bad. I don't think we're living for something. I think we're reactive, addicted, and compulsively doubling-down on inadequate responsibility-obscuring coping methods.

I don't care how old you are, "professional" or "educated" you consider yourself, accomplished, monied, or socially ingratiating you may be. I care about what you do and your ability and willingness to account for its consequences. You either lock the flood victims out of your church and unironically beat your Christian chest to hear a righteous tone, or you feed, clothe, and house people.

I'm not a "dreamer," per se. I draw a straight line from the available funds, opportunities, working backs and tools until I reach a place the resonates as "healthier" or "stable" or "feeding even more potential" into my life. I hesitated for a very long time to even use the word "hope" because I never felt that's what I was doing. I was working. I wasn't "trying to work," I was literally working. I was stating my goals, putting up the money, putting in the time, and piecing together each part of a greater whole.

You can do that every day as an individual. You can account for something. You can build on questions you ask yourself about your fears, anxieties, or behavior. You can act as though everything you do and say is "just," or you can recognize how you're not living up to your potential and act definitively to contradict.

Much of what used to drive me was pure spite. I, compulsively, needed to refute your opinion of me. At least half of the drive to get good at my guitar was an off-handed comment from an acquaintance in high school that I'd never be as good as him. Teenage me can be forgiven for not recognizing his myriad drivers of behavior. Adult me would have a serious problem if I had to "one-up" everyone who lazily threw a faux challenge or comment my direction.

When I evaluate spite deliberately for its potential, it eventually runs dry. If I give myself permission to ignore people, particularly unreasonable and immature ones, it's silly to invite them into the disingenuous internal fight I'm looking to have to get something done. I must ask, can I feel good without riding this spite wave? That wasn't clear. Thankfully, the answer is yes, because I do in fact feel good doing a wide array of things.

What if you don't feel good? What if you're depressed? What if you're trapped and antagonized by an environment or family that undermines your capacity to pursue feeling better? What if that doesn't feel possible from the jump, let alone the wildest possibilities of it compounding? I think this is precisely where the majority of people find themselves, consciously or unconsciously. I think this is the entrance to an unhealthy spiral and compulsive reiteration of our exhaustion, confusion, or fear.

If you can tap into and anticipate a pattern, you can break it. That's the potential. You can tap into patterns through speaking about them, writing about them, reading about them, or literally just recording each instance you notice "the same thing" is happening. Every single feeling you have operates this way. There's an infinite list of occasions that might provoke the pattern, but at bottom, it is still a pattern. My anger pattern runs when my hope is betrayed. My anxiety pattern runs when I'm thinking about wasting time and money. I get sad the more I'm inclined to talk about the big bad abstract "world," and all its failings, instead of practicing asking myself what my responsibility to it might be that day. I practice contentment in watching shows, playing video games, playing music, and reading. I can get excited getting drunk and going to an energetic or funny show.

To the extent I feel any given thing is the interplay of my standing health, the environments I plug myself into, and the actions I take in any direction. I can't control whether I wake up with a headache, but I can stretch the muscle that likely antagonized it, take the Advil, and write about how the headache is making it hard to consider what I wished to obligate myself towards that day.

What I witness people do doesn't look or sound like that last paragraph. I witness people "blame God" for their headache. That is, it's often "just the way it is." Period. Or, it's so-and-so's fault because of what they said last night. Or, it's because of a dozen perfectly hallucinated reasons from the weather to 5G. "Why, me?" They ask. "How could my head deserve to suffer such a fate?" It is not that a headache is a human universal to be handled in stride. It is the latest thing to be used as a weapon, an excuse, to not handle it effectively.

We're dual creatures. We're infinitely mysterious, and nearly perfectly predictable. We're our best stories of care and accomplishment, and genocidal. If you choose to accept the project of piecing together your dual nature, you must be prepared to accept every level of superficial contradiction. It's superficial because if you actually contradicted, you couldn't exist. You're alive or dead, as far as we understand life and death. Your feelings and your words will be indefinite gross approximations of where you're "really coming from."

To act is something I consider sacred for this reason. Barring all else, you get a chance to leave an indelible mark on the world that others can utilize or be scarred by. You can't know for certain what your impact will be, but you can know as well as you know anything that planting an apple tree is going to be better than slipping razor blades into apples. If you don't know that, you're lying, and you're practicing a disingenuous self-serving game to stay smug and sarcastic in your complicit laziness. And you live in a time where you're one click away from a whole family of people who will make you feel good about that. Then you've an algorithm that recognizes what to feed you so you can seek that feeling unconsciously indefinitely.

As much as my betrayed hopes might piss me off, I act to contradict and defy the automatic places my feelings may land. If I catch myself saying "I'm too tired," I get up. If I know the process is going to be complicated and take "forever," I ask myself what I can do in the next 5 minutes. Sometimes that looks like doing an initial search or opening a spreadsheet. Sometimes it's 2 or 3 few-sentence emails. Sometimes it's digging one hole in the remaining daylight, staring down the barrel of 14 more and incoming inhospitable weather.

I'm not powerless. I, always, have a choice. Sometimes that choice feels as impossible as anything ever has. The next action resolves the contradictory feeling. That doesn't mean I feel "good" or "happy." It just means I set an example of my potential. If I was conscious and deliberate, the example speaks to my values and hopes more than my words ever could. The more I'm objective and articulate in those values, the more potential they have to survive in a world that is otherwise forgoing to express and defend what I think we need to survive and live well.

A real example that highlights this for me is around "pro-life" ideas. I don't hear pro-life arguments that concern themselves with what the science says about embryos. I don't hear pro-life arguments that care about DCS or adoption statistics. I've not heard about longitudinal studies pro-life people tout regarding care and consequences of unwanted pregnancies. Pro-life doesn't entertain your life as an individual woman once it believes you've loaded yourself up with their concept of a baby.

If I was "pro-life," here's all my choices. I choose to flatly ignore the science. I'm going to choose to call that ignoring "disagreeing." I'm going to choose to ignore statistics. I'm not going to adopt myself, but I'm going to choose to use someone's story of adoption in my argument. I'm going to choose to "blame god" for your whorish nature, but not for the neglect inflicted upon the child throughout its life. In fact, I'll choose to co-opt that suffering as even more evidence of God's plan. I'll choose to vote for politicians who bankrupt social services. I'll choose to decry the importance and sanctity of my deep and personal feelings about this issue, and treat you as though you don't have deep and personal feelings.

This is a caricature, as all mind-reading exercises are. But, I don't have to mind-read the actions these people take and consequences we're currently suffering. It's the exact same self-justifying process that empowers and emboldens them as disables you. It's riding the ambiguity of disquieting feelings into an abysmal abyss where anything can happen because we're all pretending choices aren't being made.

I promise you, in more ways than you are paying attention to, you're locking flood victims out of your church and calling yourself a Christian. You have a lot of complicated fancy ideas about your value and potential I challenge you to draw a straight line from your day-to-day actions to its realized manifestation. Closing your eyes, and crossing your fingers, and wishing real hard is getting us all killed. Whether you want to call someone like Putin pragmatic or psychopathic, anyone willing to exploit how we condition ourselves will, and literally is, killing everyone in their path.

People accusing Israel of "genocide" are decrying "That's God's baby!" like a pro-lifer about the jizz in your uterus. How do I know this? They aren't interested in the actual definition of genocide. They aren't interested in what Israel is or has been fighting against since its inception. They aren't going to let things be complicated and comprehensive enough to talk about religious extremism and psychological conditioning. They're at the mercy of their spite engines, compulsively reacting to a visceral sense of indefinite and inflammatorily defined injustice.

Big and small, hot or cold, an infinite list of issues can all be scrutinized similarly.

"What emotional pattern does touching on [this issue] kick off in me?"

If you don't understand or can't define that pattern, you're at the indecent mercy of propaganda and "arguments" that fuel your preferred emotion. If you don't care to understand that pattern, you'll compulsively double down on it until you're exhausted, interrupted, or forced to abstain. Broadly, we imprison indefinitely repeat offenders and punish harshly those without the means to control and account for their most violent potential, especially if you're poor. Shittily trained dogs bark at any and everything for no reason, except the barking feels like the right thing to do.

[1116] Cornholio

Today has started out with a decent potential for the presumed ADHD to "win." It's a perfect day to work outside, I've slept well, and the tasks calling out to me, from hole digging to starting a new job training and evaluating A.I., are feeling accessible and not too taxing. I've also, for the last few weeks, been having "the universe speak to me" with lines from songs and television shows speaking about friendships, relationships, and the things you should hold dear. Today, I reached out to my "best friend" who I haven't meaningfully spoken to in months after I landed on a few conclusions.

I'm exceptionally eager to cut bullshit people and unproductive soul-crushing lies and games out of my life. I haven't spoken to my mom in at least 10 years. I didn't wish my brother a happy birthday a few days ago. Living alone in bum-fuck cornville has proven to bring more relief and focus than any day I've spent with any amount or type of roommates. That fact alone means I should build in a check when the instinct is to cut one more person off.

I have another friend who said, almost word for word, "Even if you tried to rape me, I'd probably still be your friend and forgive you." Talk about setting the bar simultaneously and unreasonably high and low at the same time, but I understood and appreciated her sentiment.

My "best friend" and I are statistically 2 of the least agreeable people on the planet (we've taken the test) and aggressively manipulative. We're either both/and autistic or psychopaths. Not necessarily mean-spirited or evil ones, but ones with the capacity to wholly uncheck where those propensities might lead us. Until recent history, it never bled over into me feeling at the no-mercy end of his propensities. We've been friends since 5th grade, and we're in our 30s now. It creeps up on you.

That said, it means I've never necessarily set a particularly strong boundary to help refine and determine our dynamic. Most people would understand this in terms of "family." I've dispatched with most of my family, and the ones who remain I'm mostly civil towards in service to my dad. As a counselor, it's, of course, people's families who provoke and inflame their addictive poor-coping tendencies. As a former DCS assessor, it's your family that's touching you inappropriately, beating the fuck out of you, or defiantly donating you to the State when their lack of personal accountability gets particularly egregious. I have no respect or innate positive feeling for "family," as such.

So I set terms. I don't really carry ongoing emotional animous, but I've been fucked financially. I would give, and still do, all of my time and funds that I could to real family and friends. No one who I'm going to designate that way "owes me" for that. When that dynamic gets exploited, thrown in my face, or taken for granted to such an extent I get scared I might die in the dumbest way possible? I can lament so far something I had previously taken for granted, cut it off completely, or set terms for repair. I'm not going to present terms to my batshit mom. I'm not going out of my way to make my brother feel better about his unresolved anxieties and resentments. I'm not going to kiss any of my thieving aunts' or uncles' asses.

My "best friend?" He's been more adrift, than deliberately malicious, in my view. I'm not entirely sure he recognized anymore than I had how much the dynamic had shifted. It took me literally popping off emotionally not wishing to be dead potentially crashing at 135 miles an hour to kick off this latest saga. Some of the chickens regarding his dynamic with the kid seem to have come to roost, but I'm not privy to details, just the grapevine. Ultimately, if I have a handful of friends, each finger I might cut off deserves above-average or beyond base-instinct doctoring.

My job is to set and relay the terms. I talk to enough people who say something like, "Well, if they don't already know…!" about their fights as if that person is thinking about them, mind-reading them, or you told them anything remotely achievable and coherent. I reach out. 99 times out of a 100, I get silence and the chance to imagine how "weird" and "awkward" I made it for someone who thought they'd never hear from me again. I'm considerably less inclined at this stage in my life to hold a grudge, at least with any emotional weight precluding any action steps to bring about a preferred resolution. I'll still cut you off completely, but that doesn't remove my obligation to listen to the universe, do and say what I can, and weigh the balance of my dynamics.

This is the work. This is the living by example. I don't want to be isolated, resentful, and unreasonably angry. That said, what I want rarely, if ever, jives with how people treat me or what they want for themselves. Oh well. There's a reason we get paid to do the work no one else wants to do. I'm not going to continue choosing for myself unreasonable and unnecessary financial or emotional burdens by downplaying or making excuses for an unhealthy relationship. I'm not going to let the pull of "normalcy" or "familiarity" playact as forgiving and forgetting.

[1115] Count On It

I'm a big believer in cutting out noise. My house, and much of the improvised things I've build testify to that. My car doesn't need a bumper to drive. When I get it in my head that "this is the thing to do," I spend the money, get up and out, and make my future working reality a measure of incorporating the new piece of information. I don't "wish" and "hope" and wait and stir things that prove to be unhelpful or impractical. This highlights not just my approach to counseling, but my experience of the barriers in translating my approach to both clients and the ones who hold larger dollar amounts.

You only think you know what you're talking about. You only think there's a relatively narrow lane in which you can walk or operate. This fact proves controversial. Practically speaking, this means if you look or sound like something that the person you are speaking to is unfamiliar with or unrehearsed and learned about, there's a fleetingly small chance you're getting any information through. If they "need" an expensive professionally produced and scripted elevator-pitch video with cliches and smiles in order to give you money, if you submit anything less, you're unworthy by default. It's as much a class thing as it is a basic translation thing.

When I worked at DCS, supervisors who respected evidence and the sovereignty of families were easy to work with. They never suggested I needlessly harass and question or re-question to the point of destroying rapport. When I attempted to explain to aggressive and presumptive supervisors what evidence was, why I get more compliance not acting like a dick, and the basic morality of treating people with respect, it didn't translate. Every day I'd get some kernel of advice or direction that, had I complied, would step me over the cliff of maintaining self-respect or effectively doing my job.

Drug addiction, counseling, mental health - there's a whole pop-up industry of cliches, happy-sounding videos, testimony, and opportunistic "harm-reduction" platforms eager to bill your insurance. They all look and sound professional, but 2 pointed questions to any of their clients obliterates the veneer immediately. They aren't giving you specific work to do. They aren't interested in your individual story. They don't care what you accomplished, how, or whether you're developing habits that are self-perpetuating and translating across different struggles you will encounter in life.

The reason the statistics around addiction look so bad is because there aren't enough people who are accountable and consistent able to demonstrate and encourage what's needed to maintain sobriety. There's a fundamental people issue at bottom. People aren't accountable, it's not just those with a substance abuse issue. People don't understand the language of day-in-day-out that isn't emotionally overwhelming struggle and insecurity. We have literally trained ourselves by the millions to accept the worst possible attitudes and platitudes as it pertains to healthy behavior and thoughts.

I want to scream every time I'm asked what my "mission" is. I believe in being clear and specific in your goals. That's not what they're asking of me though. They're obligating me to degrade and make vague a pleasant-sounding propaganda-adjacent and familiar thing that they can comfortably pass off as agreeable and allowed to perform. Every individual is different, but they rhyme. if you tell someone, "My goal is to get to know someone intimately enough that I can point out their thought and conversational patterns that interfere with their ability to act on goals as "simple" as doing their chores or as complex as managing the testosterone rushes that got them imprisoned." That's not, "I want to support those struggling to succeed!" But that guy gets the money, because it translates, and it's familiar, and it doesn't "feel" like it's "too much" or "all over the place."

Evidence only matters to those who understand and respect evidence. If their concept of evidence is numbers they're not going to investigate, or statistics they're not going to contextualize, or surveys they're not going to concern themselves with who answered and why, then you have "nothing" by telling them individual accounts of growth or problems solved. Why, didn't you "help" 100 people like the large organization next door who sees 200 every month? I promise you, and they know this too, that large organization may physically see people pass through its doors, but it has no idea who they are, its "help" is infinitely broadly conceived, and there is zero accountability until someone dies, and then probably not even then. This has literally been the case at a methadone clinic I worked where 4 people died, and nothing changed.

A good portion of my life has been the struggle to translate. I know, daily, what it is to be dispositionally overwhelmed and perpetually misunderstood. No amount of work I do gets across unless you're on the receiving end. I can't explain enough. I can't sacrifice enough. The words mean very little to almost everyone I've remotely tried to get involved. They do not understand what it means to bond and encourage and establish boundaries and expectations. They just don't. They swim in waters that are incidental. Recovery and growth and counseling are about ongoing conscious decisions and reflecting and accounting for success or failure. Your familiar codependent relationships aren't that. Your fluid privileges and colloquialisms that explain away your doubts or guilty conscience aren't that. Your too-comfort betrays the entire life-long process and habits. Addicted or not.

I can't tell you how many people, almost boastful and proud of themselves have asked me, "Well, why don't you apply for grants?" As though I am not currently, haven't invested in alleged professionals, or didn't also have that as my first idea. I can't tell you how many people hold seminars spending hours telling you information or advice you'll find in the first 5 pages of any book on the topic they're pretending to be informed or insightful about. I can't express the frustration of trying not to scream, "I just want to fucking tell you the evidence and show you the work!" As though the project is magic and convoluted. But it is, by those who don't understand and don't care to learn how they're shitting in our collective cereal with their power or victim complex.

I want you to tell me each week how many times you noticed and recorded when you were getting unnecessarily shitty with your child or partner. I want you to tell me how many times you caught yourself getting exhausted or frustrated with your work environment. I want you to tell me how many times you qualify the things you say with "I know that's stupid" or "I'm so dumb." I want you to figure out what you've been avoiding, how it affects your thoughts or actions, and to notice there's a direct line between how you feel, and whether or not you actually do something. I want you to do that until you have as many words explaining your emotional and behavioral patterns as I do so that you don't need a counselor to point out when you're doing it again. I want you to understand, because you've practiced, that confidence is earned and a learned behavior. I want you to trust your system for evaluating new or difficult information.

Can I fit that on a bumper sticker? Fuck no. Can I "neatly" explain what it takes personally to be the kind of person who can engender that in someone else? Hell fucking no. Anything remotely good about me or that people recognize as "I want to be more like" or "I want to live a similar way" I've worked though literally thousands of pages of self-reflection and arrivals at next courses of action. I didn't rest on a cliche. I didn't deny until I got so comfortable denying I forgot that I was even doing so. I'm still doing the work. That's the fucking point. It never ends. I've arrived at a certain comfort with the discomfort that I did not have in the past when I was more obsessive and compulsive and poorly coping. I talk about what is currently working for me, or not, and why.

We need to explore together what your story looks like. I'm not in the business of just talking at you. I'm not just going to read through some random psychology material and pretend like you "get it." I'm not going to blissfully ignorantly play out my unresolved trauma and ignorance through you because, ya know, I got into the field cus my own life was crazy and now I wanna help people! Cool. Help them what? Overcome your blistering blind spots and inadequacy now licensed and running wild? No, really, cool.

I hear more than anything from people something like this:

"Well, my counselor/therapist is nice, but…" Nice. There's polite, well-meaning, maybe even decently informed people all over the place. But. What is that but? They don't handle the running rotation of poorly managed groups. They don't get to know you and your situation, your language, your habits. They don't have the lived experience, nor overcoming and learning from message, to translate something purposeful and meaningful into your language. They don't charge less than $100 an hour. They're "nice" people who are "smart enough" to read a book and get a degree, maybe, and then greedy over-eager exploit machines keep them just happy and comfortable enough to not think too deeply about their actual impact or complicity. Your counselor read about this breathing technique, do they use it? Never. They're "non-judgemental," so they just won't speak when their judgment might make them say something that conflicts with their patient's "comfort."

I should not hear, routinely, "You seem like you actually care. You actually give me things to do. You ask me about my life. " That is a fucking travesty and shame on our entire system, not something special about me.

If you have "values" that don't translate or you refuse to account for their practical fallout, they don't amount to shit. Think every dipshit "pro-life" consequence we're dealing with right now. Think every "loving" family that routinely exploits and emotionally abuses because, "That's how I was raised." Think every negligent cultivated attitude that keeps us hateful, afraid, exhausted, and proud of how little we know or attempt to fix. The hard part is admitting just how full of fucking shit you are and how not powerless you are. Coping with your growing awareness and obligations is the adult human thing to do. The rest is reactionary animal bullshit. Try explaining that within a culture where we already believe we've arrived and understand things as well as we need to. Didn't I mention my age, degree, and perfectly suited experience?

[1114] A Mild Infection

A theme about what constitutes "healthy" is bubbling. Health is at once abstract in the positive, but explicit when it goes negative. It's hard or impossible to say someone who can do 105 push-ups is "healthier" than someone who can do 100. Conversely, we can pretty much say anyone without cancer is unquestionably healthier. Again, the opportunity to get specific beckons.

I just got done accidentally watching TikTok Murder Gone Viral. The people killed came from "happy" families, or were literal influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers. They were as superficially "healthy" as modern society can get. They're artistic, funny, well-connected and outgoing. They had clear and present futures and were infinitely consumable. The influenced-to-kill influencers in the first episode had millions of followers and money coming in.

How did these families get implicated in murder? How did they enmesh their lives with the darkest corners life has to offer?

To my ears, there was a fundamental dishonesty. The show resonates as extraordinary examples of perfectly ordinary realities we use to keep pretending. The "fun" Insta-lives that betray our lived experience. Our insecurities regarding our "healthy family" get pushed into their ultimate conclusions. The show interviews "best friends" and grieving parents who all wish they could have "done more." At one level, it's altogether another opportunistic dive into murder porn. At another, it's a chance to examine the stories after-the-fact.

I don't pretend to have a great grasp on some objective sense of "healthy." I do know, personally, that it feels particularly unhealthy to treat my thoughts, words, and actions as analogues for cancer. If what I say and do starts to eat at me or multiply uncontrollably, something needs to change. I'm as stuck in the world of biases and familiar self-destructive patterns as anyone else. I'm not going to notice them without efforts like these. In fact, some of my very first attempts at writing were explicitly trying to resolve my perspective of abusive and controlling boyfriend dynamics carried out on the girl I liked. Whatever healthy was, it wasn't what they were doing, and her description of it didn't match her face and body language.

We know smokers who live to be over a hundred, and people who run ultra-marathons and die in their 60s. We know perfectly blood-pressured people who eat nothing but junk, and those who will shit themselves for days if they eat the wrong things. The contradiction over the word "health" is in every anecdote, and every detail from your life that betrays the worst-sounding examples.

I said I watched the show "accidentally" because it happened to be on the front page of The Pirate Bay, so I added it to my queue, and once I saw it was only 3 episodes, and I could watch it at 3x the speed, I thought "why not." By the numbers, my TV habit would suggest "unhealthy." It doesn't seem to make sense. How can you watch, according to Trakt, the equivalent of 13 or 14 days worth of shows out of every 30? Details like speeding things up, watching things that don't require looking at the screen while driving, not watching intros, credits, or commercials, doing so primarily at night, or doing so while playing a video game or waiting idly start to make the picture clearer. One trip and back to my dad's house is ~12 hours worth of content. Drive into and back from town, 4 a day.

I could imagine my TV habit going into "unhealthy" space if it became compulsive. It would be unhealthy if I had wild swings of emotion were I interrupted or unable to locate what I wanted to watch. Anything, TV just feels like a good analogue, can be the avatar for a set of unhealthy behaviors. The internet and scrolling is normalized to the point that we couldn't measure how many hours we're on our phone if we tried. There's programs for it, and we're not downloading them. They had to literally quell a budding mass hysteria about facebook going offline for less than an hour.

But back to murder. None of these people's tragic behavior or fates happened in a bubble. They whispered something to a friend. They posted their intention. They received praise and attention for their "off-handed" remark or for the example they were setting. Yet, the legions of fans and followers, loving friends and family, remained powerless to keep them alive. Something vital was missing, that I think starts with the story of honesty, and ends with the nature of accountability.

What does that mean?

You might argue that a social media influencer isn't obligated to "tell the truth." In fact, it's regarded as something of a media job. Coke commercials don't advertise how much they contribute to microplastics in the ocean. Leaving aside the assumptions and ethics of big business behavior (and fuck is that a lot to leave aside) the role of "influencer" feels almost too appropriate. They influence as they are influenced to produce the kind of content that fuels a certain form of engagement. It's not engagement that's concerned about how many hours it's engaging or the consequences of its content - at all. Occasionally, you can get Coke to act like it's recycling or cleaning up a waterway.

Is it "healthy" to be an "influencer?" I suspect most people would react to the question with at least a mild disdain because it's "obviously" something we all kind of want, right? Kind of like celebrity. We don't want fans ripping our clothes off or bothered while we're eating, but to strike joy at the very sight of us? To get paid for seemingly no reason beyond our winning personality and talent for talking? Stories of stars being driven mad be damned, you'd do it better. Add to that the story of your current mental health and conception of yourself, and anything that upped your prospects or battled a sense of loneliness and being lost is going to feel perfectly healthy.

I liked when people called my name from across the park because my parties in college reached a certain level of influence and popularity. I did not like being pulled into a random dude's video, after being kicked in the head by several crowd surfers, at Warped Tour after Less Than Jake invited me on stage and I made out with a stranger, making me concert-famous for a day and a half. Whatever "just enough influence" to gratify me is, is somewhere between those examples. I like when people in my field have heard of me, because I take pride in my work and they know I don't fuck around. I don't necessarily like if people feel they have to "warn people" about me in advance of us meeting.

Every abstraction asks the same thing of you in order for it to make sense. Can you ask specific questions about how you feel or behave? Can you then answer those questions honestly? Is your family "healthy?" Yes and no, it's not a good or specific question. Do you respond appropriately to the asks or demands of any given member? Now we're getting somewhere. If your mom's anxiety provokes yours indefinitely, your behavior relative to hers probably needs to change. If you find yourself making excuses and acting in fear when you think on one or more of your dynamics, ding ding ding, you've found a relationship to explore! Almost no one "gets away" from the pool of relationships and habits that groomed them. Why? Well, who's bothering to ask the questions, and when has the cultural influence ever trended towards real honesty more than performative "realness?"

I'm not suggesting you need to be "too blunt" or lay every grievance you've ever had out. I'm saying you can measure the relative "health" of your behavior, environment, and words in these kinds of conversations with yourself. If I didn't get my ass up and do things regularly in service to my other goals, feeling bad about myself and uncontrollably drawn in, I'd have a TV problem. If I surrounded myself with people who make me feel like shit or practiced apologetics for abusive dynamics I have a hard time recognizing, I'd need to work on getting myself as relatively isolated and refocused as I currently am. My goals for the business, my land, or my relationships are all subject to the same scrutiny and can become problems in complicated ways the less I bother to identify patterns and evaluate how I feel.

I don't think it's healthy to seek attention for its own sake. Functionally begging for codepency erases the path to being accountable for what you're putting out and whether you can navigate the attention it is attracting. It strikes me as emotionally immature. It's healthy for a baby to scream for "no reason," not you. I don't think it's healthy to treat a performance, which all social media is, as "normal," cramming the connotative baggage of "good" and "healthy" and "obviously so" into the weight of its consequences. It's healthy to share things that make you laugh, or think, or that you're proud of, but not when it's compulsive or you feel unduly obligated. Most of Prince's music sucks, and has gone unreleased. He's a dead drug addict. If you're moved to conflate his fame and influence with his health, you might have his same problem. The walking dead are still walking, getting those steps in!