[1208] It's Just That Easy

There’s something so fundamentally human that I think I will go my entire life unable to grasp “completely” or “seriously” or “empathetically.”

I don’t understand how people stay convinced.

I consider myself a deeply critical person. I’m exercising my judgment about everything, constantly, and it’s why I have simplified heuristics to remain sane. My cars are often old, dented, or cost less than my guitar. I just need it to get me where I’m going and it’s the greatest car it ever has to be. I have no genuine opinion that stems from the type of car that I have.

By contrast, I routinely experience people who functionally identify with their car and consider it an extension of their personality, taste, wisdom, etc. What this does is removes any obligation to say or think about anything “objective” regarding the car. Who cares how it was made, if it’s safe, or if it’s famous for being preferred by some notable despot of history, it’s my car, man, and nothing you can say about it matters.

I’m stuck just seeing “a car,” and it’s a “nice” car or “good” car if it cars correctly. If I need it for a more specific purpose, again, all that’s implicated is my sense of meeting the need. I don’t want to make a long trip in the backseat of a sports car. I don’t want to load wood onto the hood of my Buick. I love my truck because it helps me get work done, not because, “Geeerrr, man, truck!” Or because I want to be seen some kind of way. Incidentally, almost always if someone’s a cunt riding my ass, they’re in a truck.

To me, when you’re convinced, you’re stupid. You’re consciously and deliberately motivated to stay a specific kind of stupid to maintain some relationship to the identity you’ve…let’s call it worked-ish out. You train to prefer dodging skepticism, questions, or critical thoughts about whatever you’re convinced of. This is the maintenance of toxic family or relationship dynamics. This is religion. This is the heights of vitriol in music preferences. This is the irrational basis for war and control.

I’m extremely unconvinced. I’m interested in immediately changing something I’m doing particularly egregiously wrong. I know you can only have so much evidence and there’s always confounds, but I’m starving for ways to do “it” or “things” or “life” in ways that don’t make the whole project feel pointless and stupid. I feel incredibly alone in that posture. I’ve met maybe a handful of people interested in operating the same way, and often it’s extremely domain specific.

Well before the cesspool of the internet, I’ve been the kind of person who has fielded an immense amount of feedback about who I, allegedly, am. Boy howdy, do people sound convinced. I learned very quickly how that seemed to be most often what someone was willing to share, often a less than flattering opinion about how I talk, think, or behave. For most people, I suspect when they encountered the same thing it was pretty disorienting. The people I meet in counseling have an endless treasure trove of the traumas of youth and generational passings-on. I wasn’t one to be convinced. I immediately had thoughts, notes, and questions.

My mom used to call my brother and I “Serbian princes.” She considered us, as single-digit aged children mind you, on some pedestal because my grandmother would cook for us, and otherwise treat us nicely, I guess? My mother grew up in a verbally and mentally abusive home. She saw fit to pass on the tradition. She, clearly, was convinced about herself whatever she was told. So convinced, she found the wisdom to beat, belittle, and terrorize children. Also, you’ll be excited to hear, my brother doesn’t consider it abuse! He’s convinced! Pay no attention to me who has literally removed children, as a DCS assessor, from their homes for 1/10th of what happened to us. Same state, different decades, makes all the difference apparently.

I don’t want to be the kind of person who’s stuck doing something categorically stupid indefinitely. I think violently and routinely beating children is pretty stupid. I think using power in aggressive and domineering ways on people in sensitive situations is stupid. I think conversations where neither side complete sentences and begin to get loud are stupid. I think bending over and asking to take someone’s rapey dick move a little deeper is stupid. I think pretending like you’re too busy, too moral, too smart are all categorically fucking stupid.

I got a classic “criticism” in IOP class the other day. “What could you possibly teach us about addiction if you ain’t going through the same thing?” Many people in recovery, because they’re people, not because they’re in recovery, make a show out of how convinced they are correct. He’s right, no? Addiction is something so categorically different, defined, and dominated by those struggling with it. Obviously. Every scientist studying it. Every debate. Every counselor worth a damn is, or was, chronically abusing a substance in spite of the self-destruction.

Or, this is such an unimaginably stupid question, that it sits squarely at the center of my opening confusion. I don’t know how to sound that stupid on my worst day. I have no analogous topic or sense of defensiveness about something in my life that is like, “Oh, yeah, I sound like that when we talk about…” For most people, it’s their faith that occupies that space. They believe what they believe, circularly, forever, because. I don’t have that. I’m certainly not convinced of any given sky-daddy, nor am I convinced I have any fucking clue what it means to be alive, dead, or inextricably intertwined with everything.

I think it’s stupid to adopt catch phrases. Free Palestine? From what? The terrorists they elected to routinely terrorize? From the influence of Iran? Or are you, most likely, pretending to be an expert on global affairs, religious extremism, or Israeli foreign policy, and accidentally doing an antisemitism? I don’t have to be an expert to listen to 10 hours over 5 days on my drives to and from work the opinions of people who’ve lived, studied, or hobnobbed with the players involved for longer than I’ve been alive. Do you know what my opinion is after all that? You should listen to them too, and share who you’ve been listening to. Then, if we both want to pretend we, as individuals, have a dog in that fight, maybe we talk a few days later.

But people are convinced! The narrative is popular, therefore true! All my favorite bands and friends are saying it, and what’s ever gone wrong with punk or youthful energy? If there was a habit I wish we would adopt globally, it would be starting most sentences with, “I could be wrong, but here’s what I think.” Not picking a side. Not judgmentally labeling someone. Not decrying some grand victimized frame and indictment of power as though you have none.

When you’re convinced, you’re forgoing responsibility or choice. The conclusion gets to do the work for you. More importantly, it gets to take the blame when things invariably go awry. When you demonstrate to me how convinced you are, I return to one of my simple heuristics. “Oh, this is stupid, time to move on.” You’re not actually convinced, you’re woefully incomplete. You don’t like how that feels, so you anchor on literally anything, but especially on things that are culturally normative. Your car. Your girl. Your politics. But always your indignant posture that you met someone who sees through it and how it works instinctively, begrudgingly.

What are we to make then if you’re over there stewing and waiting to decry, “Ha! Fool! You’re convinced beating children is wrong!” Am I so unserious a thinker that I made some gross oversight? Or, in your eager temptuous posture did you not just highlight the nature of what I’m talking about? Are you genuinely trying to debate a child’s experience of abuse, or obfuscating because that’s all you know?

More to the point, I’m not convinced beating children is wrong. That’s not my framing, nor my language. I would describe, in detail, the research, the litany of people’s experiences, and my own, and use a mountain of evidence to say something like, “I’m 99% sure abusing a child is unlikely to get the desired outcome of doing so.” The more specific the scenario, details about the players involved, the better. Unless your goal is to fuck with that child, you’re probably doing it wrong. Don’t you want to know that?

[1207] Extra Ordinary

The last 2 days it’s been incredibly hard to focus. I’m entirely sure if anything happened. I feel like I’ve lost a beat, or like something that was previously animating dropped away. The days prior I was having fun, or trying, in spite of some aggressive feelings I was having towards no one in particular. When the weekend ended and I started back to work, I found it, and frankly still find it, hard to lock in and give a shit.

Yesterday evening I emailed my boss indicating a desire to maybe pull back on some of my work responsibilities and focus. My job, while not proving to be the often immoral and ridiculous environments most show themselves to be very quickly, is pretty messy in some foundational ways. I work for a sober-living/IOP operation. I conduct groups and carry out casework tasks. I’m currently obligated to carry out new person orientation and have been creating material for life-skills and case management that didn’t seem exist…at a company that’s been around for at least 5 years.

At first, this job was supplementing the paltry salary I was getting working for the Y. I got there in the morning after my first Y shift, left before the beginning of my 2nd Y shift. It’s messiness barely touched me. I decided to get myself fired from the Y, then I could neatly become “full time.” The messiness grew. I took steps to try to make it less messy like asking for the materials I’d be teaching in advance so I could make copies. I insisted we get a white board that showed the daily schedule so everyone could be right or wrong in the same way. There’s many, very simple, fixes like that which the place still needs, that I think can be accomplished in relatively short order.

At the same time, it hit me how often I seem to experience the same pattern in my relationship to work. I show up, experienced, energetic, consistent, and with a good and genuine nature at the prospect of demonstrating the work or a fix. A slow-creep of things that undermine the effort come in, and if I notice and speak to it, I also have to ensure I don’t do so in a hyperbolic or sounding-too-aggrieved type of way. There’s all this excess labor that forms “shouldn’t have to be this way” kind of sentiments in my head and gut.

If I don’t want to be rushed to make copies right before class, and to their credit, they give me the lesson plans in advance for 2 weeks, but forget the 3rd, I’m pulled right back into the anxiety and frustration over something “dumb” and “simple” that I’ve tried to fix several times in asking for the whole curriculum so I can spend one afternoon getting prepared for months in advance. Surely, it’s just a series of .pdfs somewhere. The rush in the morning bleeds into my attitude or sense of preparedness for group. The notes and tasks due after group maybe take a hit. Now I’m angling to “reset” the next day, trust violated, and my grasp of the spirit to make things work better loosened ever so.

On balance, I don’t know if I get 3 out of 5 days a week that I’ve worked there (it’s only been 2 months) that I’ve been able to anticipate, technically, scheduled and easily anticipated things. It’s incredibly disorienting and feels compounded when we’re trying to model behavior we hope our clients will adopt in service to maintaining sobriety. Do as I say, not as I do?

In 2 months, I’ve been witness to improvements. I’ve contributed heavily to them. I’m feeling protective or maybe defensive of my perspective that, for reasons I’ll never understand, needed to be the one to show up and make the changes. I’m worried the changes won’t stick. Or that the people who I’m trying to shape up and do better are stuck in a place that’s going to continually undermine the attempts to create better beats and downstream effects. I, never, just “trust” that my effort will be recognized or rewarded, nor do I think as a rule most people are concerned with quickly and materially altering the consequences of their blind spots.

It seems out of nowhere, but it’s also relevant that I just got some outside work done around my property. It was a reminder that I like shaping up my property and working to build/organize things. It’s something that takes a lot of time and I usually only ever have the time when I don’t have the money or the weather. It’s been incredibly hot lately, I have a little more time, and I’d rather be doing mostly anything here than somewhere else.

It feels key to point out I’m not impatient. I know change takes time. I know I’m not prepared to ride that empty broad sentiment indefinitely. I know I still retain the power to say I don’t want to nor can work as much as I previously thought if the instability feeling persists. I’m not shooting for some vague notion of stability either. I’ve worked for enough companies at all layers of social work and interpersonal drama to know what works or doesn’t independent of the players involved. Paperwork can be a savior. A shared calendar can cut through a lot of noise.

I want to believe really bad, in something beyond my friends, indulgences, and self. I don’t have a magic sky daddy or in-crowd I practice apologetics for. I don't have bad solipsistic philosophy or the personality disorder to uncritically tout my brand and content. I want to show the principles I’ve applied to my life in order to achieve what I have so far in a context explicitly suited to doing so. It feels like such an opportunity for a Shakespearean play-level tragedy to embody the fucking up when you’re proof positive, individually, the fuck ups need not be.

I don’t know if my focus fucking off is me trying to protect myself from what might be yet another catastrophic failure. I don’t know if I’m looking for license to distance myself in a more deliberate and polite way so that I might maintain a reference that won’t throw me under the bus. I don’t know if the heat is just making the ambient space we’re all operating within wonky in a way that can’t be accurately accounted for. I do know that I’ve been pretty locked in and inspired and motivated, and then it aggressively drifted away. It’s not gone. It’s not hopeless. It’s not even got a decently long list of issues that can’t be fixed. No one has shut down attempts to try or deny they are problems altogether like they did at the Y.

My coworkers are overwhelmingly fun and funny people as well. It’s as close to DCS coworkers as I’ve found, and even more raw in places. We’re dealing with about 80 people, on rotation, in early recovery and regularly getting shit on for things both in and out of our control. We got jokes. The elements that were impeding structure and growth were removed from the work landscape, the ones recently hired (basically 85% of the staff is less than 4 months) read as capable and reliable.

I want my focus back. There might be more begging for my attention, but this is my best first guess.

[1206] Bet

I’m not going to pretend like I don’t have days where I simply feel aggressive or like I want to fight. They are few and far between, but they happen. I don’t know if it’s a guy thing, or a me thing. What’s important for our purpose of writing today is that it’s not some innate and persistent hunger. I’m not trying to fight. I’m not desperately waiting for permission to be an asshole. I’m loathe to accept the invitation.

If you’ve been to a concert in the last few years, you’ve no doubt read the words that go something like “no refunds under any circumstances.” Weather rains out the show? It also washes the organizers’ hands of responsibility. You get sick? Ha! Go fuck yourself on that one in particular. They move the date and time? At this point, you’re not even talking about having made a real purchase with any genuine intention nor can you take any real responsibility unless you think literally all money spending is akin to gambling.

When I reach out because a date has moved, relatively last minute, months later, and to a date I know I can’t make, you are obligated to refund that money. You are obligated to refund that money because it’s not a fucking complicated thought experiment or rumination on morality. You’re obligated to return that money because you offered a service, production, show, whatever descriptor you wish to apply, and then do not intend to deliver on it. You’re not performing in my backyard on my timeline. You’re obligating me to plan on meeting the conditions of your venue. When you don’t meet your own conditions, you’ve violated the contract.

When you respond to my outreach with “No refunds, I’m sorry. Policy. Yada yada bullshit.” You’re inviting a kind of retribution and drama that is unbelievably unnecessary but for how it speaks to how and whether we’re able to exist with each other altogether. I’m decently disagreeable and have a vengeful spirit. I didn’t earn them, I think I was born that way. When you want to pretend like I’m crazy or entitled in wanting my earned money back for a thing you can no longer provide, I want to destroy you. I want to sabotage your toilet. Steal your shit. Throw a baseball through the window…you get the picture.

What I fail to understand is your lack of imagination. Are we living in a world so devoid of consequences? I think the answer is yes, but I maintain, I don’t care how ridiculous and backwards we get, I will remain of consequence. I will maintain a standard of reason and fairness. If you can’t get on the same page of polite exchange, I’m going to give you precisely what you don’t want and take considerably more from you than what constitutes a loss from me. You must understand, I’m defending civil society at this point. I didn’t hunt you like some crazed ideologue. I was invited by you to enjoy a show, and then you shit in my face.

Hyperbolic language is fun sometimes. But the point I think is sane and salient. I spend my time often encouraging people to not prioritize vengeance or repeat the stories of the injustices they’ve experienced on a loop. They don’t often grasp the nature of what they’re suffering in staying stuck on certain narratives. I know precisely the nature of my struggle and why “small” things need big defenses or reactions. I don't let the slow-creep of what’s essentially social suicide go ignored.

In the meantime, I’ve disputed the charge with my credit card company, filed a Better Business Bureau complaint, negatively rated their facebook and Google pages, emailed, messaged on facebook and Instagram, and am fully prepared to aggressively knock on a window and demand a manager every day like my name is Karen. We cannot keep putting up with this bullshit people. You cannot keep feeling the license to conduct yourself in a way that justifies this behavior. The irony of how often I’ll need to scream that at myself when my retributive self turns cartoonish is not lost on me. No less, I refuse to be a martyr for ambivalent selfish exploitation. I bet I value fucking up your way of operating more than you do my money.

[1205] When I'm Gone

I have a unique ability to trust in who I am. I presume it’s unique. As a counselor, and often when I reflect on conversations with friends or coworkers, I don’t get the impression others are as convinced of themselves. That is, they’re often “fascinated” or “frustrated” about their own behavior or in hearing about how I conduct myself. The most dramatic contrast is with clients. A deep ambivalence and skepticism is the default when I insist on performing habits of taking responsibility or looking for solutions. It’s a though I’m operating with answers and am pursuing the matter-of-fact or step-by-step means of trying to achieve the given thing, but am encountering people who either haven’t asked or can’t be bothered to believe there’s a question altogether.

At bottom, my mind wants to obsess over something. Call it autism-y. Call it compulsive. Call it ADHD. I want my attention sunk deep down into TV or a videogame, a woodworking project, a rabbit hole debugging something, yard work, practicing an instrument. Any one of those things could be a relatively indefinite obsession. I reach natural stopping points. My fingers give out. I run out of money. I get tired. But I crave a degree of engagement and stimulation at my core.

I’m not addicted to it. I’m not at the mercy of it. It’s just how I’m built. Knowing this, I also know I can, in fact, achieve pretty much anything I genuinely wish to do. That’s, at least, the most common way to phrase the idea that provided I’m realistic, even at the outer bounds of what one might consider realistic, I know I have the intelligence, drive, creativity, persuasive capacity, and time. I know what I’m prepared to sacrifice. I know at least half of the ways I’ll likely fail and what would be needed to carry on anyway.

You might well consider this all an errant faith claim. Fair enough. Faith without works is dead. Hence we arrive at the floor of my “belief” in myself system. I work. I put the time in. I make the drives. I have the conversations. I write the blogs. I try, really hard, to make peace from moment to moment, and I try to keep track of what is or isn’t working. I state my values constantly and then work to put them into the world. I pick hard things to do, and then show myself I can do them. You do this often enough, you’re allowed to claim you know something about how to conduct life.

What I’ve gathered as I’ve gotten older is that in spite of my work, I’m embedded in a significantly impactful series of contexts that don’t really care how quickly I can fingerpick or competently assemble a shoe rack. I don’t live in a county, state, or country that appears to agree on pretty basic principles for someone like me. Whatever heights I, or anyone bothering to do work, might reach, they will inevitably be cut short because the air is poison. This has humbled me. This has stifled me. I’m reticent to obsess and immerse because “it” always tastes poisonous. I can’t maintain innocent “passion,” I’m disingenuously distracting myself from “things” that need more attention. That’s no way to live, and that feels like precisely the point of ensuring we must. Why nail a Sum 41 song when insurrectionists are getting pardoned?

Life’s not fair! The dismissive and condescending will decry. And they are correct, in the weakest way. The counselor in me would question the framing of my last question. What does enjoying music or drilling a solo have to do with federal corruption? They only happen to both exist as facets of my perception that appear to influence how or whether I direct my attention. Fair or unfair, I feel I owe “the mess” more brainspace than I do the story of what I can do with perfecting an already written song. My relationship to both things is its own story. Maybe I get called on stage one day at a reunion show and get the chance to show off! Maybe fascism continues to win in greater and greater ways. One feels considerably more likely, and not just because I’m not appreciating art enough.

I used to think I had “good reasons” for a lot of my behavior, and come to find out even more of it was out of spite than I was already claiming. “I” used to be an unyielding reactionary force. Reacting to people’s judgements. Reacting to the helplessness and fear instilled in me growing up. Reacting to off-comments about how I talked or looked. What did I want? Who could even say back then, but I can speculate. I wanted to hang out at my grandma’s. I wanted to play videogames. I wanted to fit in.

I think a lot of the chaos I see in the world, in clients, in colleagues, is the same kind of misstep I used to make riding my reactionary energy. Bari Weiss recently told Coleman Hughes that The Free Press started as a reactionary response to her experience at The New York Times. Now she’s tasked with evolving it to be a center of people’s news or media diet. She never considered herself an entrepreneur or business owner, she’s just corralling the fallout of attracting attention over what she was reacting to. The “good reasons” might have been one or a few, but the ongoing story of the collective reactionary effort will be painted as though there was a method and guiding principle all along.

I’m still spiting circumstances more than living for things. I’m living to go to shows and hang out with my friends and dad. I’m living for the last few hours I spent inventing a multi-situational phone holder, playing with my tools and drowning in sawdust. I’m living in service to the, still pretty vague, story of what happens when I’m back out of debt, too comfortable with my job and regained my free time. I’m situated in a future hopeful the broadest institutional and spiritual failures don’t crash my plane on the way to Vegas for When We Were Young. Perhaps my industry goes bankrupt because “charity” and “grants” are needed to construct the Thunderdome approach to healthcare.

I just heard it, but forgot who said it, when they said the best thing they ever heard about how to know if you were rich. You’re rich if, had you even more money, you’d still be doing exactly what you’re doing. I’d still be building, just bigger and more efficiently. I’d still be going to shows, but in more exotic locations and with better seats. I’d be trying to hang out with more people, but likely from the crop who have the money to have the time. I’d probably spend more time catching up on the history of games I haven’t played knowing I don’t have to be anywhere else. I might get a personal trainer and cook or nutritionist.

This presumes a world you can basically trust. Overwhelmingly, I’d be doing what I’m doing, just taking errands out of the equation and building a team I can’t achieve organically. If I could create the adult version of my college party house atmosphere, I think that’d be swell. But, that wasn’t about what “I” could do as it was all of the players involved. If we’ve come full circle, it appears every potential player I meet is stuck asking questions they don’t feel obligated to answer.

I think I don’t want to wait until things get dramatically broken that we simply must react. I don’t want to wait until the next divorce or depressive episode to be relevant to a “friend’s” lived experience. I don’t want to be more bald and grey before it dawns on us that time’s almost up and the answers are already there, but they aren’t being acted on. I don’t want to think I’ll “luck out” and get brief stints of my “ideals” provided I treat most time as something to suffer the wait through and incidental to some vague fairytale about tomorrow.

I got really good at guitar and I love to play, but not in a way that started a band. I enjoy creating things and having the tools, but rarely invest the money and time to make things particularly pretty or consistently. I can get lost in plenty of stories, but I’ve already given myself to dozens of narratives in the past, and whatever I was missing that compulsively drove the play, I think I found. I’m not waiting for permission. I’m not confused. I’m not helpless or ashamed. I’m not even as alone as I’ve normally been. But I am still pretty singular in my perspective about how all of “it” works. I’ll continue to dream about the damage we could inflict as a group of like-minded individuals.

[1204] Just Chillin

Getting back into my role as an addiction counselor and case manager has me thinking more frequently about the themes I belabor in class.

One of them is “work.” I firmly believe that if you don’t feel like you’re working, you’re probably not doing your recovery correctly. That doesn’t mean you need to be manically occupying every moment so you don’t give yourself a chance to feel. (be it a craving or simple pleasures). It does mean when we’re exploring new boundaries, who is or isn’t supportive and why, or what it feels like to practice something new be it writing, conscious breathing, or exercise, if it was “easy” and you’re “killing time” or professing a cliche like “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do,” you’re lying to yourself.

Trust me, this position is often considered contentious or unreasonable. Surely, all that needs to happen is you being physically present, mostly, within the constructs of a recovery environment and in the presence of counselors, therapists, and peer supports, and when enough time goes by, poof! sober. Sober in such a robust and persistent way it’ll grant a new license to be pretentious and judgmental about those who haven’t done it like you.

When I moved to cousin-fuckistan, I routinely underestimated the amount of work it would take to reach a minimum level of comfort. Some people like the outdoors and can handle all sorts of weather. I need that AC. When you go to build something, the right tool makes a world of difference. An extra hand makes several worlds of difference. It started to sink in the resolve, planning, money, time, and disposition I would need to have in order to get the next thing. I started eating before I started, packing water, bringing “extra” tools, listening to my body when I started to get tired so I didn’t crush or cut myself out of fatigue and frustration.

I think it was a lot easier for humanity to find solidarity around things when we were all forced to work to survive. The argument from a conservative is that the negative consequences of welfare trickle down into how we conceive of ourselves as responsible conscious agents. They’re not totally wrong. They severely underestimate the degree to which the game is rigged and exploitation reigns. The liberal argument also rings true to me. But I’ve been around for, let’s say 20 “adult” years, and I’ve found 5 or 6 people willing to bet and work in bids to transcend the game, and the vast majority accepting or more or less making peace with their level of first-world poverty. Financial, "spiritual," interpersonal poverty or otherwise.

We’re working, somewhat, in service to basics. It has us believing that the effort we’ve put in thus far should suffice to get what we deserve. It has us shifting our concept of what we deserve to precisely what we’re getting. Our adaptability is a double-edged and dangerous tool like that.

What kind of work would it take to get to some form of globalized consensus? I mean the kind of world that bakes into the cake of “global understanding” that there will always be a forever-percentage of the most trolly/insane/just-asking-questions types that we can remain persistently confident might never again seize power regardless of their “platform?” How uncomfortable would we have to get trying, trusting, and investing in ways of being? And is it even possible to be intentional about it? I’m not so sure.

When I think about my “politics,” it feels weird to characterize it as some kind of “independent” position. It’s almost never I explain myself to someone, nor listen to where they are coming from, and there isn’t some kind of objective story to be told. I don’t meet people intimately familiar nor interested in learning the stats and science behind abortion before they offer their “strong” opinion about the sanctity of human life. I don’t meet people particularly concerned with “logic” or “existential assumptions” as they tout the dictates of their sky daddies and mysticisms. I think you get to maintain a certain wonder and deference to the myriad means of describing “power” that shapes or controls you without taking the extra step over the cliff and drawing conclusions about fate, ironic metaphysical constructs, or context-independent morality.

I think, for example, if you’re a death cult like Hamas, I want an extremely strong border with you and want to do just about everything within my power to eradicate someone who is willing to carry out the violence insisted upon. That can mean bombs, indoctrination, or painfully slow attempts at integration with the Western world. It probably means all 3 and more. It feels objectively true that debating tactics and timelines all need to be predicated on a fairly straight-forward idea about groups who kill concert goers. You’re also allowed to mourn the innocent civilians they embed with and regularly brag about utilizing in their sympathy campaigns. You can also ask yourself if they’re shielding themselves with someone who’s “soft” sympathies with their position is what got them voted into power in the first place.

But that paragraph alone takes a level of responsibility it’s hard or impossible to do if your identity rests in not grappling with it. I suspect there’s such a stigma around addicts because they’re simply a visceral example of our own posture as it relates to token issues. Who isn’t extremely dogmatic and intractable about any number of unhealthy relationships? Bill Maher recently said we need to move the narrative about personal responsibility and continue to take allegations seriously and hold men accountable through the efforts of metoo, but the women need to leave. The women need to be expected to, in one of his examples, take their private jets back to their loving rich families and stop talking about how toxic Shia LeBeouf is like they’re chained to the radiator.

Whatever it is we think we’re getting from tying our hands to various narratives isn’t as true as we think it is. That’s the work of articulating and reiterating where the lines are, why they exist, and what deciding what hills are worth dying on. I’m as confident as one can be that the next thing I profess to want will take time, effort, doing it wrong a bunch, and meaningfully engaging with the reasons why. The self-righteous are never wrong. The convinced are never patient. The noble and proud warrior can’t pronounce humility. These are defensive positions created by an ego that doesn’t wish to be threatened. It’s saying something objectively concerning about you if you consider new or more information a threat or something to fear.

The human animal is none of the things I talk about. It’s not what our biggest dreamers, creatives, thought-leaders, or scientists discover. The human animal is just waiting for the context, the excuse, to react in familiar and gratifying ways. The human animal wants to fit never asking where. The human animal wants to wink and nudge its way through a seemingly endless game of exploitation and distraction. The human animal won’t do the work. So where does that leave the humans? To my mind, at the mercy of the savagery and inevitable death that drives unbound nature. The appeal of the familiar religious fantasies will clench and suffocate as they do. The sins will pile up, and we’ll call the next, boring, compelled reaction a “revolution” and continue to pretend we’re ever going to take the requisite responsibility.

A client of mine wrote down that she was feeling lost and hopeless. She then said something about her ex and his behavior and, “if it gets to the point…” I stopped her. What? If it gets to the point, what? You’ll then have your excuse? You’re already at the point where you’re feeling what you wrote. There is no “point.” We’ve had several conversations on the best way to address her concerns which she’s provided thanks and expressed relief for in the past. Her job is to ask what her responsibility is to the feelings right now. Not after she constructs a false if-then scenario about him. Her responsibility is to bring the broader context into the catastrophized thought. Her responsibility is to respond to the feeling with things she can do to incorporate it, and barring that, steer away from the worst consequences of it.

I have interactions like that a dozen times a day. Someone might talk brilliantly, intimately, of the right and intellectual way to go about something, but it’s rarely acted upon or not felt. It’s not felt in their bones. It doesn’t serve as a quiet confidence built on example after example. So often it’s the ones contributing the most who feel like they’re not saying anything or “it’s probably of topic” or “I’m talking too much” as though there’s some neat and perfect answer I’m fishing for regarding their feelings and sense of being in the world. I remind them, it’s not just “addicts” that struggle to articulate and own what we’re talking about. It’s everyone. It’s the animals we all are that we’re up against.

The values need practiced and defended at all times. It’s work. There is no amount of shit you will eat that will absolve you of the choice to do so nor transform the flavor.