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.
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