I consider myself a pretty practical person. I think this is different from being a "realist." I'm familiar with the seemingly infinite ways in which we must operate under illusions to function. This inclines me to either make peace with options I'm not crazy about, or rail indefinitely against something I'll never know enough about how it functions.
I get into trouble, a lot, over language. What's practical to me is pure fantasy to most others. Whether I can demonstrate that practicality in thousands of examples across my entire life or not doesn't matter. All that matters is that I'm pitted against someone who most often describes their life in ways resembling the following;
"I feel like I can't." "I don't see how that's possible." "It's real to me and you should respect my opinion." "It seems like you (x), therefore I can/should/won't (y)." "Everything, everyone, and it's always."
You can create an entire life, and entire world, on the back of these phrases. I'm sensitive to them as a general listener turned counselor. I pick up on them as driving the "plot" of hundreds of cliche television episodes. I see people employ them with such fluidity they might never grasp the water they are swimming in. I think every single fascist movement from the beginning of time resides within those excuse-making confines. They're rooted in our survival machinery. They're singular sentence representations of decades of books and studies that describe how we orient and anchor to the world.
How much patience should we have for these? If we want to treat them as practical constraints that happen…innocently, then how long and under what conditions do you tolerate them? How do you measure a growing or successful relationship to how and when they are employed?
You might stop saying them entirely, but their emotional core still dictates your behavior. You might recognize when you've employed one, but it might not prompt any kind of accountable action or change. I suspect, if you've made it this far, you're not even on the same page as me in considering them the heights of how we destroy ourselves and everything we claim to enjoy. Your capacity to notice won't get implicated when you couldn't be bothered in the first place.
This is why I don't task people with things they don't ask for and can only report on what I observe. I've had jobs with 185 clients. I'd go absolutely insane if I couldn't practically engage in some form of counseling or feedback and didn't try to personally emotionally account for whether or not any individual did something I advised. What you can provide as "therapy" is questionable at that level. You can cultivate a therapeutic environment. A therapeutic environment can presume you're trying to improve your relationship to yourself and others.
It should go without saying, but the internet, most social dynamics, your job, your hobby, and basically anything you do that is "distracting" or "taking the edge off," is not a therapeutic environment. Checking out and mindlessly scrolling isn't therapy. Numbing and suppressing certainly isn't. Getting embroiled in family drama or gossip, doubling down on hours worked, or making hundreds of superficial "friends" is not providing you therapy. We talk about these things as though this is what's happening. We mark partners with their capacity to mitigate our anxiety or depression. We celebrate and mask the depth of our codependency.
A therapeutic environment requires honesty. You have to be able to be called out and accept that what you said was, at best, incomplete, and often allowing yourself an excuse to stay where you are instead of improve. This is why writing became one of my tools for self-regulating. When I want to say something in a "too much" way, I can clock what that feels like. I can recognize, bodily, when I'm tempted to lie or hide something. I can feel when something is missing the mark or needs more words. Writing can be therapeutic for me provided I keep following the rules and maintain a genuine desire to improve my mood, behavior, or relationship to something.
It's just words otherwise. So it goes with how you engage with anything vying for your attention. I can laugh at the guy pretending to fart on people on the elevator, particularly after uniquely stressful days. If I rushed to my phone to follow his antics for hours a day every day in a way that felt beyond my ability to control, I have a problem. I talk a lot about my seemingly endless capacity to stream TV and ever-growing number of shows I'm adding to my channel. It's not compulsive. The second there is anything more compelling that catches my attention, that's what I move on to. I don't need to be immersed in a fantasy. I, practically, have little else I ever "need" to do on any given day, so it fills space.
There's a lot that I want to do, though. And the harder I lean into wants, the more practical negotiations I have to make. The more hours I have to spend at a job I know is never going to be a career. The more time and money I have to put into maintaining vehicles. The more I need to invest in tools and capitalize on moods and weather. I want to apply my practical approach to things much bigger than any hobby or work environment. I want to see them at scale. IU's football coach said there's no secret to their success on 60 Minutes, it's just fundamentals, and he wins. I believe him.
When I break things down, I tend to get what I want. I can transform my mood moment to moment as I look directly into the face of why I am or am not doing something. Often, I don't fundamentally believe in what the consequences of a course of action will be. I don't believe because I've tried, a lot, in the past. I don't believe because even if I do what I can or should, I'm most often met with what you believe that negates or sidesteps what I can otherwise show. This gets exhausting. This is where I can start "feeling" like things are "pointless." They are, if I choose to continue approaching them, with you, in the exact same way I know doesn't work. If I don't own slipping away from what practically needs to happen to get there.
I've thought for a long time about what it would take to change how my state of Indiana operates. I've never found someone who has created the tools I would need. I want to create them. It would take more money and time than I have, but I think it can be created and I think it would function as I needed. It would start as just accounting. Who is voted into what and where? What reasons/excuses have they offered for why they operated or voted the way they did? I think there's no comprehensive and lightning-quick way that I can get that perspective about any given official from any given office. All I hear from are the loudest proudest fascists, and get to be surprised once every decade when a Republican doesn't do something I'm ashamed or embarrassed about.
My practical sense manifests in how I live. I live in a shed. My cars cost less than my guitar. I work when I "have to," not because I'm desperately trying to cling to health insurance or pay off debt before I'm willing to see the next show and buy the T-shirt. I functionally conceive of adulthood as your capacity to navigate the increasing weight of practical limitations. I got criticized once for having "garbage monitors" as though they don't allow me to display what I want them to display. What makes them garbage? Because they were free or $20? Because they aren't curved? That, probably child, just feels like they're garbage and like it's a worthwhile thing to say. It would be impractical to engage someone like that, if I care about how I relate to what I choose to share online.
It's funny and just hitting me now that my approach applies to the things I've bought as "extra" or "indulgences." I didn't get "fancy" tools or an "expensive" guitar until I reached a place of building and playing that needed them. I didn't buy an "Owner's Club" 4-day concert wristband until the year I had my bills paid a year in advance already. It wasn't until I applied and failed, for months/years on some measures, that I decided to invest in people who could allegedly help me apply for and secure grants or get impaneled with insurances. It's like, practically never, about my inability to do or try what's next.
I have not figured out how to navigate my environments more effectively. I legitimately don't know what the next step is to get where I want to go, most of the time. Again, the things I try work narrowly and specifically in the moment to get me each tortured step. The response dictates whether it's the latest step over a cliff. This speaks to why I'm skeptical of utilizing too much or the wrong kind of financial support for something. Who cares how much I appreciate it or actually utilize it? I'm convinced "the world" will waste both our resources as quickly as it's keen to mine alone.
I think most days I dream about feeling like I'm meaningfully trying. I come up against the things I create feeling like Titanic deck chair realigning. I feel like a curiosity most people just kind of stare at or laugh off, not because that's what I "deserve" or "invite," but because I'm so rooted and practical it's a provocation. It defies how you operate by default. It calls out. It begs the question. It's expecting of you exactly what I'm expecting of myself. I don't like it either, but the alternative is worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment