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.
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