[1149] Everything's My Fault

I want to linger on a few cultural buzzwords and see if I can dig out a more coherent relationship to them.

The first one is “identity.”

It seems to me that major shifts in culture swirled around this word. More specifically, the more you could parse your identity into different categories of race, sex, or trauma, you gained a certain license. You could not only empower and weaponize your identity, but denigrate others without really looking like you were doing so in a superficial and prejudiced way. I genuinely think a large portion of the rise of fascism was in direct proportion to the idea of “straight white male” becoming a caricature divorced from a discussion about class struggle.

When I think about my identity, it’s this constantly undulating blob of influences. To lean into any one aspect is often to betray what’s now the majority of my otherwise being. The most pain and stress I’ve dealt with is when someone utilizes a bad thing about me, or even a good thing reimagined in a bad way, to pigeon-hole my entire being and draw ridiculous conclusions. Indeed, the worst I can make myself feel is when I belabor a mistake or act as though my first and worst impulse maps onto some larger story of fate or karmic justice.

“Identity” is the first word to explore because I’m watching “The Dark Side of Comedy,” and the idea that so many “troubled” comedians struggled to “live their truth” is echoed constantly. Often as a result of “trauma,” they would abuse substances, disappear into characters, withdraw and self-destruct, or otherwise suffer their insecurities no matter their level of success. These problems often exacerbated by our culture’s ignorance or ambivalence at the time.

This brings us to the word “trauma.” You’ll still read or hear about trauma dozens of times before you are invited to recall “resilience” is also a word. Trauma became the seed from which an identity could grow. “As a such and such…” and the explicitly poor relationship to the systems and powers that be, listen to me become an authority overnight. In the spirit of being “modern” and “progressive” the ground was ceded to what was presumed to be “evolved” and “woke” ideas before woke became a caricature.

When your identity gets rooted in trauma, it begs a question of how far you’re going to dig for the roots that inform your description of that trauma. Are you just at the mercy of terrible systems today? Or are you historically oppressed? Are you sure it’s just racism or is your oppressor also sexist, ableist, and any amount of “ists” and “isms” you can sneak in to really sell it? Almost by definition, trauma suggests victimization, regardless of the 2-second-later thought experiments where you could tally an infinite list of things that may destabilize you that are perfectly impersonal.

I think it’s easy to get lost. That’s the first thing. It’s easy to lose track of anything. We have, and this was true even before the internet, a nonstop vying for our attention. We have overgrown children in our families who never figured out how to get their needs met. We have all the obligations that come with owning stuff or wishing to be a part of things larger than ourselves. We have the diffuse ever-confusing personal quirks that are hard or impossible to articulate nagging on even our best days. And all we can do about it, most often, is ride it out.

Here we arrive at the last word to linger on, “agency.” Agency carries with it the implication of responsibility. If you exert agency, you made a choice, you’re more culpable, and the story can be better understood about the consequences. Kill someone while you’re texting and driving? Negligent manslaughter. Create a serial-killer-esc map with yarn and cash-bought supplies over months? Murderous psychopath who gets documentaries and series investigating your “reasons.”

Slowly I think we’re coming about and realizing again as a culture that we’re all suffering. It’s built into our religious doctrines, but modernity offers a major disconnect. It doesn’t really look or feel like the suffering of the past for most people. We’ve had quick and dirty fixes provided by technology that have worn down our humbling influences from disease, hunger, or the weather.

You have to go out of your way in the vast majority of spaces to not hit “basic survival” levels, pervasive injustices around inequality and greed aside. I say this as someone who routinely threw out hundreds of pounds of unwanted or unneeded food at a food pantry every week. We have enough houses for everyone, but people who own them, regulate the economies around them, or mythologize and pathologize the stories of those who need them ensure they stay empty.

There’s a major disconnect in what we conceive of as “basic survival” though. Just like our identities, our truest, basest selves, they’re amorphous undulating blobs under the influence of too much to process. Maybe you’re uniquely suited to thrive in a Naked and Afraid scenario. Most people today would reflexively talk about the modern amenities like phones, cars, and healthcare as “basic.” You can’t get a job, drive to said job, or get your often-needed medication, so obviously those things are foundational, right? It’s not complicated.

How do we get our needs met? We belabor the story of our traumatized, victimized, impossible-to-exert agency. And because that story is constantly shifting, muddy, or plausible from an infinite sea of gray areas, it lingers in our cultural conscious more that we’re mostly stuck on this ride, and the most we can do is lash out, self-destruct, or look for simple catastrophic narratives and fixes.

Much is made of “the addiction crisis.” Being a social worker from DCS to addiction counseling for hundreds of people, I’m of the opinion that there’s so much spillover of our current cultural victimization narrative, it’s highlighting very normal and human tendencies to adopt those methodologies for meeting meaning-sized and agency-implicating needs. If you’re a little less mentally quick, a little extra broke, a little more surrounded by emotionally abusive or exploitative people, your normalized suffered environment makes the concept of exerting any control that much harder if near impossible.

That is, we need to feel like we’re in charge. We need to believe we have control. No one is typing these words for me, and if I’m born with the “problem” of a contemplative brain that won’t shut off as it nags me about every wasted moment or mistake of my life, I can choose to organize it like this and feel better. Feel “good?” Feel my “best?” Absolutely not, but I can orient myself away from the compounding consequences of thinking I’m stuck and at the mercy of unforgiving and uncontrollable forces indefinitely.