Whether I mean to or not, I find myself reflexively in a "solutions focused" mindset. Those familiar with counseling or psychology will recognize this as a therapeutic approach to intervening on a problem that, more than likely, won't take more than 10 sessions to fix. It's not what you try to apply to someone who is swimming in childhood trauma and can barely form the sentences of how they're experiencing pain. It's not carrying a presumption of ongoing maintenance, say, in recognizing that you can be 30 years into sobriety and still experience a trigger. It's an attempt to be practical, fairly quick, and more deliberately accountable to whatever the situation is.
As a listener, people are frequently taking up the hint that they can get into the weeds of their various problems with me. I'll learn from new coworkers everything from the extent of their various health concerns, to psychological issues, to history of patterns that preclude their ability to do anything but whatever they currently are. Once you get someone talking, probably a little too fast, you'll hear them reflexively say things like, "I just can't" and "Yes, but..." as they explain why they haven't advanced along some metric like school or professionally. People, intimately and confidently, know why they can't do something.
So, I'm also finding myself responding to the immediate and obvious holes in what they're saying. This morning I was given a story about why a person was unable to complete college because of dropping a public speaking course. Within about 2 minutes I learned that it's not so much about public speaking, it's concerns with getting picked on as a child that tie to, reasonable, concerns over self-confidence. She's not too stupid or mentally broken. She's too afraid to tackle the degree of work it's going to take to look in the mirror and see the positive things and practice the little bits in a manner that trumps what's mostly superficially wrong with her. If you think you're a fat/ugly/misspeaking reject it's easy to make fun of, you don't see the value in rehearsing your speech assignment so you don't stutter because the embarrassment would just kill you. Of course, it won't, you just haven't wrestled with how much you kinda wanna kill yourself...and that should, reasonably, concern you, but also is as explicit an arrow as you're ever gonna get as to what you really need to work on. You have a shitty therapist if they just want to write you a script and see you next week and haven't told you that.
Back to that meme. As the person dolling out the advice, but also showing up to actually organize or manage something that's been neglected, I'm almost never feeling like the student unless I'm, also leading, that charge to learn something new. I've been using my time between shifts to read and take notes on day-trading. I don't have a teacher. I'm almost certain I won't find anyone excited about the prospect of teaching me without a fee. So, even if I'll be infinitely ignorant of most things until the day I die, practically never is someone attempting to help or guide me with something save whatever you want to make of specifics related to a new work environment recently.
It doesn't follow that my nascent interest in day-trading means no one wants to teach me. I have many interests and am constantly listening or watching. TV? If I literally watch 625 shows, you're watching the 626th I haven't yet. Music? Sometimes can get a little back and forth, but ultimately even if we're close in genre preferences, if I read an article about the artist, it's a bridge too far in your level of interest. Work culture? If I frame potential and plans, you pat me on the back and stare into the distance because your experience was formed for gossip and kvetching. Podcasts? You're not very political or don't really care about history. You can't remember the last book you read that wasn't about vampires or magic. I don't know if we're just so consumption-based that no one feels like they have anything to say, or if there's genuinely no interest or capacity to have more than a superficial relationship to literally everything.
In a solipsistic sense then, I feel like I'm frequently the center of the story. To be clear, I know this isn't remotely true, and it's a confluence sensibility that comes from humanity's otherwise proclivities to eschew responsibility and be lazy. Another way of saying this is that no one is showing up in my life and encouraging me to keep trying or doing my best. No one is angling to round out and inform my perspective. No one is taking and rearranging my words to show me how much I'm talking out of my ass. No one is, reasonably, patiently, and insistently, trying to keep me and what I do on a particular path that, from an outsider's perspective, would serve me better than the conversation I'm having instead. I don't feel particularly confident at that point, just deeply alone and suspicious.
My interactions are most often either with someone being silent or short because they're mostly checked-out by habit. Occasionally, I'll get a reactive response, yet almost never actually towards me as the gossip makes its way round. Other leader-esc or manager-adjacent types will offer a kind of nodding along pretend-agreement where, on some level I make a certain kind of sense, but the underlying belief from the other person isn't there, so I'm being more or less entertained but not taken seriously. This is where I garner condescending chains of, "Good luck!" because obviously I'm just a dreamer who doesn't think hard enough about the how and why or practical realities.
We arrive back at why I remain solution-focused. I can't remember the last thing I've offered advice or a process to that was genuinely intractable. I'm not heedlessly proclaiming to "destroy capitalism" or broadly "fix people." I'm saying things like, "If the gym is closed, can we move the tables and allow them to run in the cafeteria?" I'm saying, "If we have too many people not uniformly carrying out this criteria, can we send them somewhere else?" Or maybe it's as crazy as, "Let's do the math and spend more money on this useful, consistent, and efficient thing instead of that."
I know fuck-all about day trading. I'm far enough into this book that certain scenarios or sentences are of the kind that I could read it 10 times and have no idea what it's getting at. I start with, "What's that word mean?" Then I google it, and move on down the line until I can conceptualize the broader message. Then I write out the next question I have about who, where, or what seems relevant in assessing what I just learned about. There's funds I can play with that are literally practice and play money. There's funds that require less money and low fees so that even if I lost it all, I'd barely feel it. There's explicit things you can guard against that, because it's very human not to, get belabored. I've never been a gambler, so I don't by disposition and definition worry I'll magically start desiring financial ruin the more I begin to grasp. I already acknowledge, accept, and contain the nature of my greed.
What I can't tell from the people eager to splay their stories to me is whether or not they're as interested in acknowledging, accepting, and containing the forces that present as though they are, at least crppling, or eating them alive. It also becomes so normal and matter-of-fact, like the compulsive-eating diabetic who plans to have their foot removed. It's not fate until you're comfortable and convinced it is.
What's crazy to me as well is that I feel a certain craving for wisdom, insight, or novel ways to approach things. I'm constantly looking for the next actual secret that I haven't begun taking for granted as a learned habit. Whenever someone remarks how well I've stated something, I point to this. I've been thinking about it for days/weeks, wrote about it, re-read it, and by the time I go to say it, it comes out short-enough and digestible. I shop those little bites around my life and into different scenarios that would otherwise test my best conceptions of myself. I wouldn't have them had I not done all of this work before some shit hit a fan.
I suppose I work to not get exhausted by how often I hear, "I can't." When you're primed to hear it, you notice it fucking constantly. I don't exist in many worlds where anything feels remotely possible. It does, of course, to me, because fuck you I do what I want kind of thing. I'm thankful I have Brandy who might feel "I can't" but shows up literally every time. I'm thankful Hussain is still able to demonstrate how much shit you can get done under impossibly fucked circumstances with his wife, work, and broader culture. My dad stays reassuring when I dip into that, "How fucking stupid am I?" space of car-crashing or debt. I try to constantly remind these people that that shit isn't normal, and the world fucking needs it.
I see where it comes from in watching these kids now day in and out. The amount of, "I know! BUT!" and "Well SHE did..." after you ask them about what they did. The move to perform tears is another constant. I don't coddle, preferring to either ignore or investigate. Yesterday, I literally had a kid go, "You know, I'm not even hurt," and ran back to playground after I asked him, specifically, where on his head he got hit with a ball. After pointing to his eye, then chin, then forehead, he gave up, smiled, and ran away. We have parents that you can see in the minute between arrival and taking them away feed the worst impulses. Too many adults keep those habits, looking for the license to lie, perform, and blame when a second of personal honesty would get them back in the game.
You're not the victim. You're not actually hurt. I'm not on my way to the poor house. My pink eye and cold were not killing me. I'm not getting paid enough, but I'm also getting paid to do, in my own words, almost nothing, and certainly nothing particularly hard. You certainly can, always, be doing "more" in service to whatever it is that just popped into your head. Do you actually give a fuck? Does it mean anything real to you? Are your reasons actually your reasons, or were they given to you, like lines to perform, so you can once again conform, excuse, and pretend? You're not even asking the questions, so of course everything feels impossible.
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