[1155] Ring

If you believe you are a someone who “overthinks,” maybe you’ll find some solidarity with this digression.

If you dig through my writing history, several times I’ve described being, always, “on.” I don’t really understand the concept of “checking out” or “daydreaming,” per say. I can get distracted. I can get decently immersed in a movie or TV show. But there’s always a “hum.” Almost like a tinnitus of the mind. There’s an extremely vague, yet palpably felt and unyielding persistent “thing” I “could” or “should” be doing.

I understand that today as, more or less, an “irrational thought.” That is, against my will or intention, I’m getting bugged or poked by the mere existence of my sensory inputs and torrential storm of errant thoughts. Yes, it is true, I can do an exhaustively large list of things in any given moment. I am feeling the air, taste in my mouth, itch, or inclination to pee. I have considered the future of the day from what I might do outside all the way through to the decision to start and continue writing. If I had a vote, or the capacity and consequential decision, I’d shut off the automatic nature of existing altogether. I don’t want to itch, or be cold, or think I’m a stupid piece of shit because of a hasty or naive set of decisions.

While I can’t control any of that, I can scratch. I can write. I can put on music. I can frame the entirety of that nagging constant series of impossible to ignore or shut off things into my own set of words and responses. This is the burden of bothering to exist altogether. It’s trying to make sense out of the fundamentally arbitrary and irrational. This is why “god” is both the answer, and not an answer at all. It might be the language you adopt, but it’s also the irrational condition we’re all suffering at the mercy of regardless of our opinions.

If you use “god” as a banal linguistic place-filler for the unknown and mysterious, you’re not the problem. If you use “god” as a weapon, which can also be read as an “excuse,” you are explicitly the problem.

As far as we know, we may never have a satisfying and comprehensive understanding or scientific account for consciousness and existing altogether. This, to me, makes it all the more imperative to make explicit our burdens and responsibilities. Provided we actually care about being alive and living one way over another. I don’t want to be surrounded by people who can’t be bothered to take whatever level of responsibility they can. There’s extremes, always. But that’s part of the responsibility to discuss when you’ve gone too far.

There is infinite work. I return to this idea often. I met dozens of people through counseling who suffered from the idea that they, pretty much, always need to be working. Maybe it’s multiple jobs. Maybe it’s job, then kids, then spouse, then parents, then friends, then, maybe but probably not, they’ll get 5 minutes to themselves. It’s no wonder they then end up in a chronically antagonistic place where addiction can flourish.

When you arrest or donate your sense of self and agency to a pathological framework, the path out literally does not manifest in your awareness.

As a kid, I didn’t know what it meant to respond to my mom’s violence with a calm tone and specific word choices. They aren’t highly intellectual or difficult concepts, they simply didn’t exist for me. Until the day that I could physically restrain her, it didn’t even occur to me I had options until the precise moment I’m holding her wrist.

In moments like those, and this is coming from the social worker perspective, you most often see the corrupting nature of your realized power. It’s domestic violence. It’s the tense and threatening interactions with the accountability systems. It’s an invigorating sense of license to double-down. Just as soon as we get a little jolt or pride in exercising our new power, we crash. Why? Power, in and of itself, is ambivalent. The electricity that Zeus strikes you down with didn’t give him the idea to do so.

Very quickly we get confused and defensive. The nagging from our existential demons gets colored by arbitrary consequences and uses of power. We reflexively seek “why,” because it’s psychologically untenable or impossible to digest the level of absurdity. There is no why until you invent one.

No one likes to believe that in order to “stay sane” or “take responsibility” or “beat addiction,” you’re literally working. How often you work, or how that work takes shape, is both to be determined, and made obscure by everyone’s version of the work they’re professing, but often pretending, to be doing.

Whatever you might say about me, for example, you cannot deny me the 1,155 times, at least, I’ve worked to better understand, or failing that, stabilize “enough” my mind through writing. I’m building a verbal context, history, and example to help prove to me that my perception is a decent amount of the things I’m claiming about it. I release that perception into the wild to be scrutinized and judged. If I can’t notice a contradiction or unhelpful vagary, I invite feedback deliberately, because it’s coming regardless. Maybe I can filter it through more helpful or reliable means.

That’s, hopefully, what you’re after too. I hope you want to better frame yourself. I hope you want to feel empowered to take on more responsibility and problems others struggle with. I hope you wish to be a more open and honest person. I hope you’re willing to take the time to explain what’s worth your time, sacrifice, or attention. You may not and you may never, but that’s the hope considerably more than the expectation.

I might expect it from you if you come to me for counseling. If you came because a gun was to your head, probably not. If you came because everywhere else you tried wasn’t working, I’m listening, because I’m acknowledging the desire to try is there. I can see and understand that the “thing” missing is a lot like mine, and everyone else’s, when the frame is wobbly or corrupted. Instinctively, or as a result of your “I can stop you from hitting me” moment, you know there’s “more” or something “better” available, but might not realize what to practice in order to get there.

One of those things is “radical acceptance.” I don’t like the idea that it’s “radical” to accept the facts of your experience, but that’s what we have, and have to do. The “facts” don’t need to be intellectual or convoluted either. I can accept that most damming description of my life and existence possible; that I’m nothing, don’t matter, etc. I can accept that if only because it’s only as true as what I must unironically deny in…you know, continuing to exist. I may not know what that “something” is, but if I feel like nothing or that I don’t matter, I might as well kill myself. Simply refraining from killing myself means I know, at least, I “matter.”

Have you made it to his paragraph alive? That’s it, we have a floor. You may not have or agree with any of the language that describes that floor, but you’re standing on it with me nonetheless.

I’m a big believer in balance too. I think for as easy as it is to intuit or react with a negative valence to something, it simultaneously begs the question of the positive. This is why I will never mind “bad” or “inappropriate” or “too soon” jokes. They are the best evidence that life is both at once, not one way over the other. They are evidence of the inherent choice that feels impossible, but isn’t. You can spiral out of control in every moment available to you. You can also make a fart joke. Just because we don’t understand our power, doesn’t mean it isn’t there, or that we don’t have a responsibility to and for it.

I’ve resisted my power, and still do. I don’t trust myself not to “get high” on it. I “panicked” pretty hard just yesterday, and it took me less than a day to build the kind of foundation that made the panic feel “stupid” and “misplaced.” It’s one of my patterns. I think, irrationally, that I need to be “backed into a corner” in order to find the “motivation” or “reason” to “behave exhaustively” until a need is met. Then, I get to look at my creation, take undue and sick pride in my capacity, and ride that until I burn out.

Here’s the thing, though. I panicked as someone who has written 1,155 times about the nature of his thoughts and perception of the world. That’s why it resulted in a blog, a few phone calls, and a handful of practical steps in service to quelling an otherwise inevitable spiral out of control. I’m still thinking about every obligation I need to meet, but my heart isn’t racing, my stomach isn’t sinking, my jaw isn’t clenched, and my head isn’t pounding. I’m no less bombarded by my catastrophic thoughts about how I got here, how long or hard it will take to “fix,” or what it still says about me in my less than ideal responses. But this is as good as it gets.

I can accept that too.

I don’t need nor like to compare myself to others in the story of why or whether I can swallow something about life. It certainly helps to know there are an insane number of people suffering from the same issues, but whether or not I realize that in a personal way and build into my bone structure my own path through the condition is always up to me. It’s not enough to “simply know” you’re a cliche. You have to feel it. You have to develop your practice for incorporating and redirecting the consequences.

This is why I get fundamentally and instantly exhausted by people who don’t care to act. You can’t change if you won’t move or try or manifest something. Talking only gets you so far, maybe only to the point of describing an approximate door you can one day walk through. When you sound like a commercial, bad TV show, or series of colloquial truisms, I don’t trust you exist in the way you need to. I accept that you’re here, and good or bad for things, and might entirely reject my presumption that you “need” anything altogether. All that means for me is that we’re probably not going to be friends lol. I might also have to refrain from damaging my character by being condescending or manipulative.

I write this much so I can move in the world. I’m not “persuading” myself, nor you, of anything. I’m not “arguing” for my point of view, I’m spewing it. I’m articulating approximate doors for myself so I can feel as though I’m walking in a direction instead of falling into holes that open up forever beyond my choices. I don’t even have to have a coherent idea of what a “choice” even is to recognize this is one, and so is this, and so was the decision to put every weird word that popped into my head on “paper” instead of back up my ass and empowered to swirl around my concepts of “panic” or “anxiety.”

I get somewhere “stable” and “better” and “consistent’ and ”hopeful“ and turn the infinite intangible mess of existing and itching into the power of mercy for myself. You poor, lowly, suffering idiot thrust into this world through no fault of your own, here’s the ability to collapse the noise and the mess into a few pages. Here’s the cues to breathe, and stretch, and call, and eat. Here’s an invitation to the joke as your heart is being run through. Are you scared, or excited, or both and a dozen things more about what happens next?