[1154] Scream Queen

My disposition is shifting into a familiar gear.

For as much as I espouse the value and virtue of having the freedom with my time to do with as I please, it comes with caveats. First, I don’t know anyone with time like I do, so I’m almost always alone. When I have time, it doesn’t mean I have money, or the required tools, or skills, or focus, or motivation, or weather to do the things I otherwise like to do with said time. Most of my hobbies are not ends unto themselves. I’ll fiddle about on one of the instruments, but I have to be in some pretty low places to find the focus to actually write a song and fight with DAWs I don’t understand.

I get dozens of ADHD targeted ads trying to…apologize? for what maliciously might be described as “laziness” or “wasted potential.” You see, I’m actually just without enough structure. I’ve navigated the structures of school and 15 different work environments. I’ve never had issues showing up, doing what was asked, and moving on. Whether I was working 20 hours a day like when I started my coffee shop, or just needing to meet my 1 client for an hour once a week, if the structure is there, I stick to it.

Well, I’ve had no, or not-enough structure for too long, and it’s throwing me into, not precisely a panic, but it’s raising a lot of alarms. I’ve complained about debt for years now, and until the last few months, I’d never paid a dime of interest. Interest is now 9.7% of the money I have spent all year. I cannot psychologically stomach this. As a result, this morning I debt consolidated. How much debt am I in? Right about equal to the amount of money I would have gotten had my uncles not stolen money from me when my grandma died. I’m twice the amount I was expected to make (when it was half as much) from selling a house I spent 10 months renovating. I’m about as much as I would have hoped to make from any sane and reasonable grant for offering counseling and casework services at 20% of what the State overpays shitty monopolies.

Most people are familiar with the horrible, horrible process of applying to jobs in the modern world. You think you’re done just because you have your resume uploaded to half a dozen “the jobs are here!” websites? HA! Spend literally hours on the worst designed systems known to man filling out the same information on buggy spamming websites for prestigious roles like bagging groceries or delivery driving. You know, jobs that absolutely need 7 pages of redundant information.

I’ve gotten really lucky in my life so far. I was able to do drug studies for a couple years and amass enough money to buy my land. As I was trying to transition out here in a smart or patient way, I got fucked. The consequences of that fucking are still playing out. But, what it’s meant in general is that I have not had to spend the vast majority of my adult life swallowing loads of complacent shit about how I’m infinitely bound to whatever my shitty job might have been at the time. $5,000 a year pays my property taxes, electricity, and internet.

When I work shitty jobs, I do the math. It usually costs me somewhere between 25% and 33% of my take-home pay just to drive to the mother fuckers. So, even when I’m technically making enough to cover “basics” (if you’re raised poor enough and know insurance isn’t always part of that equation) I’m still often losing money just because cars break down, gas fluctuates, and the handful of times I’ve tried to meal prep I ended up throwing out half the food I got sick of

I’ve spent my adult life, save the last 3 years, pretty much living as though “fun” isn’t a thing. I’ve gone in debt to get my house in order. I’ve bought “toys” like a new computer because I absolutely needed it for my job and hadn’t upgraded for 15 years. I drive cars that have been crashed into or guzzle damn near as much oil as they do gas. Half my clothing is free giveaways from places like bars or clothes that have somehow maintained some kind of shape since high school. I know how to apply and get SNAP. I know how to cope with being functionally indoors or at home for weeks and months at a time.

I’m the kind of person who should NEVER be in any kind of debt, difficult situation, or piddling “I’ll take any job!” kind of place. I have my degree. I have special skills when it comes to interpersonal professional engagement. I have a supervisory level addiction counseling credential. In the past, I’ve gotten my real estate broker’s license. I’ve engaged hundreds of people at a time at varying levels of ongoing crisis. I’ve learned how to do fun things like woodwork in my free time. I’m a doer. I create. I struggle with every second in which I can describe myself as a “lazy piece of shit” because I didn’t occupy it with something to stimulate my brain or demonstrate my worth. It truly is a pathological base disposition to belabor my strengths as I lament excruciating details impeding my small conceptions of progress.

The self-hatred spilleth over. Now, I want every shitty job. I want to exhaust myself until I’ve paid off the money. I want to ignore my hobbies, TV, or the idea that I deserve a single second of my time doing something like this, instead of moving some box from one side of the room to the other in a warehouse or bagging your groceries at the white trash Dollar Store up the road.

If I could have “simply” maintained an uncritical and complacent disposition, I could have just kept my job enabling addicts to not really improve. What’s wrong with me? I pretty much had my remote position, wasted gas to the office 2 days a week 1.5 hours away aside. This is the critical piece of what is wrong with me. I fucking believe in myself! I try, desperately, to practice the behaviors and beliefs I arrive at after writing. If I think I’m being an exploited and exploitative cunt who is contributing to the veneer of insincere “help” that plagues disingenuous social work, THAT ACTUALLY BUGS THE FUCK OUT OF ME! I can’t ignore the ick. I can’t play along and adopt the catch-phrases.

I have left so many otherwise straight-forward or “comfortable” positions for this reason. Until recently, I haven’t had a job, paying next to nothing or otherwise, that couldn’t pay off my debt in 3 to 6 months. Why wasn’t the debt paid? I needed to go to extreme levels of distraction and coping because I was spending 12 to 15 hours a day poorly playing along. If I couldn’t pack the handful of hours or weekends with other shit to do and think about? I might lose my shit around clients. My mouth will get me fired and more alienated than it already does.

The wild swings between doing “nothing” with all of my free time, to this craving to occupy every second with something on the clock making me any kind of money I know is wrong or inappropriate. But also, I need to hype myself up. I need to get comfortable with the deadening that happens. I need to mourn the loss of the things I’d rather be doing while I’m standing for 8 to 12 hours a day or being directed by someone who gives me immediate pause and cause for concern.

I can’t ever seem to find some happy middle ground with my collection of skills and experience. It’s either 40+ hours a week, in office or equivalent, taking home 70% of my pay and eating 70% of my day, or it’s peanuts in the form of plasma donation and odd-jobs offered to me out of pity, no less appreciated and very needed, from friends and family. Part-time? No no, that’s a trick to get you in the door so they can impose mandatory overtime. Well, that’s the case no matter what role you get.

I also can’t seem to stomach the idea of constantly starting from the bottom. Every field has its “pre-license or certification” “x-hours you need to blah” “a year from now you might be qualified to tie my shoes!” kind of stupid fucking process. It’s fees. It’s tests. It’s arbitrary because the role they hired you for actually needs something they’re gonna take 9 months to even hint at bothering to show you how to do.

I should deliberately avoid trauma-dumping my experience across roles right now.

I had to back myself into a corner that raised my internal threat level. Included in my debt consolidation plan, I’m also thinking about returning to school for my Master’s in counseling. Why? Because I don’t want to pay some greedy asshole for the privilege of using their license number to run my nonprofit. I don’t want to have to keep reminding the people fawning over how I do counseling that I’m not licensed, technically, just “credentialed” and trusted to conduct crisis intervention. It’s about the money and plausible deniability for liability if someone loses their shit, not that any of the companies I worked for genuinely give a fuck. I’m extremely timely and organized with my paperwork, they like that.

I’ve worked 4 jobs at once before. I very nearly passed out, but I did it. I was also 24 and not 36. I also know that when an idea gets stuck like “I’m fucking sick of this, fix it,” I won’t be able to let it go. Before I started writing this, I applied to 15 more jobs, all over the map, but applied nonetheless. I’m getting up at 8, it’s 2:15 right now, no matter how late I stay up, to hit the job placement spot in town. I’m reaching out to people who might let me host a fundraising event for free in their spot. I’ve got the list of things sitting around my house and property that can make their way to facebook marketplace. I can start breaking down the large pile of scrap I collected over years because I thought that’d be a good and consistent form of money-making for too long.

There’s a world where I go into something of a fugue state and fix my problem in a few weeks or couple months, but I genuinely shudder and worry about what the true cost of that would be.

I want balance. I really do. I want a healthy medium between how much TV I can watch, or the 20 years of video games I need to catch up on, or the 80 hours of music production tutorials I need to filter through, or the dozens of pieces of wood I’ll fuck up and my otherwise capacity to deftly psychoanalyze, encourage, and model behavior. I wouldn’t advocate anyone do what I’m gearing up to do. But, more to the point, I’m not at the mercy of the compulsion to try, I just deeply appreciate the utility and my capacity.

The goal is clear, get out of debt. My arms and legs work. I can operate for months on 4 hours of sleep. No one is going to “save me” from myself like when I reached out to my “friend” that helped drive me to this fucked place altogether. I was thinking so naively that it’s worth turning every stone once a certain psychological threshold has been breached. I gathered his distance-putting pretense and superficiality immediately. You know what happened when I called another friend later that day? He sent $200 in anticipation of a work I’m going to do to install workbenches around his garage. He sent it after I told him 8 times not to. My former friend? He doesn’t even think he’s done anything wrong. This isn’t the mind-reading I caution clients against, this is me reading tone and his phrasing, “I can see why you would have that position.” Yeah, I bet.

This is the most chaos-like I’ve written in a long time. I’ve got like 4 separate things I could bitch indefinitely about. I’m fishing for a sustainable approach to what’s a flatly irresponsible and unrelenting place I’m inviting into my behavior. I’m so beyond whatever levels of anger or frustration I’ve bled onto pages in the past. Or maybe the numbing is doing its job. Or maybe, and this is a symptom of this state of mind, the fact that I’ve eaten 3 pieces of toast and some Cheez-its all day is maybe starting to sink in.

If I get 1 or 3 jobs in the next couple days and my new budgeting spreadsheet put together, it’s entirely possible I’ll write a 3 paragraph matter-of-fact digression about how I’ve solved my problem, and in 3 to 6 months at yada yada pace (with no overtime or a return to dreaded meal prep) this will all register like some frenetic fever dream accident blog reflective of a bygone era. Do I dare hope?