[1257] Working Girls

I want to tell you a little bit about my job. To me, it’s not a very complicated job, but it has as many moving parts as exist within the people involved. I think it’s odd to call it “social work,” given the people who need to do all the work are the ones I’m tasked with inviting to do so.

“Social work,” is very broad terminology wise. I used to be an assessor for DCS. I’ve done visit supervision for a few companies. I’ve done “case work” in every role, including prison. I’m a CADAC II counselor in an environment that’s so overwhelmed I get routinely called “therapist,” and have been explicitly told by many therapists I’ve worked with who have audited my classes I’m “basically a therapist.” I take this to mean both therapists and I use the same models and strategies, yet are equally helpless to do any real work for you.

I’ve been out of social work for a few months and just got a new job. It’s like riding a bike. It’s a source of perpetual fascination to me that “the problem,” while manifesting in individual ways, is exactly the same whether you’re in prison, in-patient, IOP, or the infinitely grey sea between IOP and OP, or in just maintaining sobriety. It doesn’t matter the drug. It doesn’t matter if you have “too many” rules or “too much” freedom. I’m never without what needs to be done in my approach to the infinite list of what’s presented to me.

At bottom, what most people are suffering in any given moment is a lie.

The suffering is real. Don’t deliberately, or otherwise, mishear me, as is so routine throughout my day. The suffering is anxiety and depression, a series of traumas in the not-so-distant past, medical conditions due to use, aging, or violence. All those things hurt, truly.

The lie looks something like an excuse. The lie operates like a tool that removes the obligation of slowing down or examining your role. The lie looks like the reflection in a funhouse mirror. Technically, if you’re standing in front of it, that is, in fact, you reflected back. The story of refraction, perception, and complicated subjective experience is something of an infinitely long digression approximately 1 in 10 people are interested in exploring long enough to get it.

If you zoom out and take a broad picture of “addiction,” you start the see the pathologies in your clients manifested in your colleagues. Whatever you wish to make of their protective factors, it becomes blindingly obvious that there’s an irresolvable blurriness between “good” and “bad” habits. You can absolutely find yourself compulsively working, eating, “helping” by diving into the infinite flow of drama, peacocking, or blaming your behavior on your ADHD.

If you’re good at boundaries, this leaves you practically hoping to meaningfully contribute to an environment so that it’s less self-destructive, but you might be the most significant observer of what’s already an extremely thin line. Moreover, those, in good faith, that you work with, might not even realize or be that keen to learn about how they’re threatening the whole endeavor.

I think stupid political actors operate the same way. I, who listens to hundreds of hours of political commentary and pays some attention to global affairs, occupies a different semantic universe than someone who can’t tell you who the acting attorney general is. Any subject takes the time, attention, and basic interest in order to be learned. When you learn it deeply enough, you can start to see deeper implications and patterns. If you “don’t care,” you get to ride the lie that your acts, or lack thereof, are of no consequence or significantly less consequence than they actually are.

Frustratingly, unfortunately, ridiculously, because the god you claim to believe in is hysterical, you matter. I can’t fucking stand it. Because in my world, my brain, it means I have to work hard, pay attention, tell the truth, and figure out even basically what the fuck I’m doing with myself any given day. I don’t really get a choice unless I want to suffer like someone addicted to a bad, incorrect, and woefully incomplete story.

I have to traverse the universe of differences between myself who has intimately mapped the degrees to which he matters for decades, and a population who has practiced implicitly and explicitly the idea that they do not matter. And they’ve likely practiced even more aggressively than me to establish their instincts and habits. I think the world of silent complicit “moderates,” suffers the same condition.

I don’t bring my job home with me often. I can respond to a crisis or hit a snag with paperwork, but the souls I’m wrestling with don’t haunt me. I’m very clear about what I want, what it takes, and what I’ll contribute to help. I don’t want anything for you you don’t want for yourself. I will never pretend otherwise when I’m there, and what you’re doing in sober living, it’s work, all the time. We’re not hanging out. We’re not best friends. I’m not your boss or keeper. I’m your opportunity to slow down and your reminder that the work can be done in spite of how you feel.

I’ll help fill out forms. I’ll provide rides. I’ll re-frame the most damming things you’ve shocked yourself by admitting for the first time. I’ll let you cry. I’ll stand in perfect detached non-judgment as we walk down whatever path we must or can. I can’t make you want to live. I can’t make you honest. I can’t make you “believe” in the consequences of your actions and how they make you, or us, suffer. I can’t tie words to emotional meaning if you are unable or unwilling. It’s not my job to save you, trap you, or merely occupy your time with jargon and obligations in a bid to avoid dealing with what I need to work on.

So it goes in the “normal” or “non-addicted” landscape. Do you think we get fascism if most people aren’t just lying, but doing so in such a catastrophic and compulsive way that we’re functionally suicidal? I don’t care what flavor or era of fascism you look at, at bottom, it’s lies. Lies about purity and purpose. Lies about “them.” Lies about capacity and consequences. We know, intellectually, the fire raging that we set. Emotionally, we’re dead. There’s no real and meaningful response to the chaos we’ve sowed. So we take another hit, point the finger, and undermine what little those with the awareness and capacity might yet be able to save.

What I’m describing often manifests in complacency and complicity in the people I work with who might be better at it than average. They use the statistics as license to phone it in or drag quick things out over weeks or months because it keeps the paycheck coming. They tell a story of what they would build or do differently, but they want the same things our clients do. They want the easy win. The functional disability check. They want to bill the state regardless of whether they actually believe they’ve done all they can for someone. Why? They have more official, more standard and socially acceptable lies to maintain.

I’d bet and win every time that you’re so tired and never have enough time. I know that you don’t think I’d ever believe the drama from your so and so! These gas prices, these groceries, and these no good dirty politicians basically fucked your spouse and killed your dog! You're just thinking of the children! You’re the hero. You’re entitled to exacting your revenge with every fired shot across a comment section bow. You know, the realpolitik of purity tests, ironic dismissal, and increasingly AI-generated astro-turfing.

I used to suffer the lie that I could save the world. I was poised to do it by speaking intelligently, getting attention, and leading a charge. Little did I know. I can save my world, not yours. I can write this blog, not your entry. I can eat my food, watch my shows, play my games and instruments, rock out with my friends, blast my music, drive my car, build my house on my land, and choose the shape my suffering takes. And I can know that I want it that way compared to the alternatives. And I can save and protect and advocate for the ways to get there because I know they exist independent of me, but also die with me, if you’re not practicing the same things.

I find this incredibly empowering, humbling, and energizing. I find this pretty easy to understand because I’ve reached a point in life where the work I do I take for granted. I’ve done more than “try.” I’ve embodied the consequences like a muscle stuck throbbing after an intense workout. It wasn’t an accident. No one granted a wish. I didn’t magically come upon a secret. I worked, and continue to work, one line at a time, one day at a time, one choice to meet my needs, demonstrate my world of values and desires, in any given moment.

I wasn’t able to shut up when I didn’t understand that silence was a choice. I’m never able to empathize with those who seemingly choose to stay silent about the fire daring to engulf us. I couldn’t hear until I recognized the choice to listen. I couldn’t be honest until I recognized the choice to be responsible for maintaining the integrity of words and a shared reality. And now I can’t go back even if I wanted to. For me to want to, I’d have to behave as insistently self-destructively as I observe addicted and non-addicted alike.

So, what’s my job? Is it anything like yours? Are you truly living in service to a world that you actually want to live in? I’m invigorated by Scott Pelley and Stephen Colbert getting fired. They aren’t dead. They’re more alive than their their audiences can recognize. They’re burning hotter than the fascist forces clear-cutting the forest of once trusted institutions. If you’re paying the requisite attention you’ll connect their work to what yours must consist of. You’ll feel it like they feel it. You’ll practice as you preach.

Or, you won’t. I get paid either way.