[1146] Check Please

I’m mostly sick of writing about accountability. It feels like the thing that just bubbles up incessantly. Whether I’m listening to stories from people I know, a podcast, or just carrying on through a normal day, the consequences of whether or not the practice of accountability takes place play out.

There’s many ways to get accountability wrong indefinitely. I think it’s easiest to see in relationships.

When you’re unduly possessive or controlling, you’re not being accountable to your insecurity. When you’re trying to spend or lie your way out of your bad behavior, again, clear as they can get indications that you are in the wrong. Overt praise and what’s colloquially been hijacked as “love bombing” is a good way to obscure the landscape of your broken mind by what’s flatly emotional manipulation of your target.

You can also get your sense of accountability wrong by adopting a hero story. That is, you can pretend your entire life that you’re waging some kind of personal war against unjust forces in a way that only you can understand. It requires no sacrifice, no team, and no paper trail. It’s the story you tell yourself to quell any rebellious feelings towards your boss and unjust work environment. The kids and the mortgage, after all.

You get accountability wrong with apathy. You’re just not going to play? That’s an unhealthy reframe that pretends you don’t have a choice. You’re just gonna live as though you have a personal island, and use your ability to talk about “reality” to acknowledge and designate all that you observe to be fucked up, but it’s not about you in any meaningful way. The unironic amount of attention paid as you pretend to lounge or hunker down I guess we can just ignore.

There’s a component to accountability that requires a scientific ethic or sensibility. If all we needed to do was amass information by literally counting everything or making infinite lists of facts and their counters, we could exist in an arbitrarily held-harmless space, just awash and overwhelmed by too much to operate with. In science, the more you’re demonstrably wrong, the better your chances for arriving at better truths. The more you can describe how you might be catastrophically wrong, the better your chances of shifting a paradigm of assumptions and actions entirely.

This is illustrated just in how we’ve come to understand toxic chemicals in what we’ve built things with. This is constantly shaping our understanding of what constitutes “healthy.” This is under-girding panic about screens and hours faux-socializing. This speaks to the power behind a metaphysical belief system where all roads can terminate at “divine judgement” regardless of how suspiciously it aligns with any given era or adherent’s opinion already.

But, it’s also not a mystery to us or anyone watching when something meaningful isn’t being accounted for. You live in a formerly safe place where the police are getting hamstrung by a new philosophy about crime? Shit snaps into focus. You used to eat every day and a new Republican bill takes food out of your mouth because you’re a poor kid who doesn’t deserve it? You don’t have to understand convoluted debased moralizing like you will hunger. I think when it comes to a “passable” sense of a life worth living, what needs to be accounted for is built in and built in deep.

It gets more complicated when you dive in to social circles, preferences, monetary policy, or navigating an endless series of dangers. Should the rich entitled 60-something woman I was chatting with yesterday learn to actively listen and refrain from being condescending towards her older husband? I think so, but that’s with a snapshot of their dynamic and a whole personally opinionated framework of observed and engaged conversational dynamics. Can it account for theirs in particular? Or, can it account enough*?

Right at this point, we need to look at motivations and goals. I don’t need her to change anything about her dynamic with him. We paid to use their garage and he likes to supply cheap beer and chat on the porch. If the second we leave they go inside and he beats her with his cane, still, does not change a thing about what we needed and used them for.

But what if my goal is to get a handle on a “healthy” or “healthi-er” relationship dynamic than the one I’m in or about one I hope to get in the future? Well, now my concern about her rudeness informs how I interrogate my preferences or approach if I encounter the same thing. Certainly, people love and care for partners, parents, kids, family and friends who are incredibly rude to them constantly. The accountability is still personal though. I can’t account for their dynamic, just how it makes me think and feel about mine.

So, it’s “enough” to get me thinking. Whether or not I suppress those thoughts, write about those thoughts, or make excuses for those thoughts is the work.

If you don’t know how or what to be accountable to, panic sets in. Luckily, the logic of capitalism, norms or radicals, and conservative practice immediately step in to tell you what you need. You need to free Palestine! You need to find Jesus! You need 2.5 kids and a nice car! You need to work 3 jobs and grind and hustle! You need increasingly specific degrees and specializations and to reinvent yourself every couple years to keep up! You need to be in debt, but told through a story of pretty pictures and memes!

If you return to the question of your goal and examination of what everything on offer makes you think, you can cut through.

For me, my goal is to feel free enough to do what I want, when I want. Kids don’t comport with that. Jesus certainly doesn’t. Debt has a way of making options feel exceedingly restricted and clouding even thoughts about what feels possible. My goal could, and has, led to some choice paralysis and obscene amount of time spent alone, but I’m not confused about why it’s my goal or why it needs to be foundational in pursuing or building towards other goals. I also don’t want unreasonable hard to articulate or impossible to achieve things.

In order for me to be “free enough,” I need a basically functioning country. I need principles that aren’t being whispered into the ears of eager and motivated ideologues mostly steering the ship. I need to encounter people who feel like they have some purchase on their domains and lives. I need to exchange and relate in ways that can inform and empower either side. Where, how, and when I can be more accountable comes into greater focus. Aspirations begin to look like daily achievable activities on the way to getting somewhere meaningful purposefully.

I think it’s normal to have your sense of accountability to be “implicit.” It’s whatever “feels right.” It’s what was handed down or dictated. It’s part hero story, part excuse-ridden child, and part exhausted checked-out ironic solopsist.

It’s a wonder how often we feel lost without intuiting that we never understood or articulated the goal in the first place.

What kind of friend or family member do you wish to be? What kind of citizen? How would you need to act in order to develop a sense of what to reasonably expect in return? What would you need to learn or lean into to fix what you already describe as wrong? Where can you place your discomfort or confusion so that it serves more than suffers?

[1127] Moving Right Along

I felt myself getting a little heated in today's CASA group discussions about "trauma." For every 10 times you'll hear that word, "resilience" will come up maybe once. I think most of us are aware of how arm-chairy and buzzworthy trauma and therapy have become. It's one of the latest cultural trends that facilitate a fluidity to presumed-more-informed conversation, without the practice of developing finer lines of understanding and distinction.

On the basis of your invocation of "trauma" you can rush to provide "help" and "services" and begin blaming an incredible amount of "mental health issues" or "unresolved childhoods." It's literally the cliche of a freshman's behavior after enrolling in their first college psychology course on blast. They've already invoked unsubstantiated pseudo-science and pop-culture explicitly not psychology as tools to provide frameworks for understanding your families. When someone infers substance abuse from a story just because the accusation was levied or any kind of drug was referenced at any level, their conclusions or assumptions go unchecked. It's predictably baking a recipe for an unnecessary mess on top of whatever the family is going through.

You can feel the tension every time you speak in "checking" ways. This happens to me routinely. One of the presenters spoke to the biased and incomplete ways that foster parents or aggravated family members might speak to the nature of the case or anyone's character. I pointed out that case managers can leave out details and massage stories to fit their ends as well. That got ignored and we moved right along. It's a real concern, and you need to know how to protect your relationship with someone who might be specifically directed to undermine your effort to advocate with the evidence.

But it doesn't feel "pleasant" or "decent" when you "want to believe the best" about your colleagues. Is it less true? Absolutely not. I was literally forced into that position from predatory supervisors and watched dipshit coworkers skip along those disingenuous lines without hesitation. Anecdotes fawning over better-inclined and capable FCMs do nothing to erase that.

So I started thinking about "discomfort" broadly. Another concept that's been wholesale abused. We needed to be way too on guard for what or whether we said might be a "micro aggression" or would cause someone to feel "unsafe" or "uncomfortable." Again, our pop psychology and propensity to overstate the noisiest out-ragers, made it so critical thinking and doubt became sinful in and of themselves. Facts don't matter in that space. "Being heard" is afforded only if you're claiming victimhood, but then, only victimhood of a certain type. The own-goal that is reactionary politics when you forgo any genuine attempt at taking someone's, almost certainly mostly irrational but nonetheless real, concern seriously is the ongoing consequence we get to suffer.

I think the more you practice observing conversational patterns, word choices, and trends, you can start to see previously "abstract" things considerably more acutely. One thing I notice is a propensity for "moving right along." I don't care what the topic is, there's a "normal" pace and pater that is preferred. Violate that, and it's time to move on. Point out the failings of the people you're supposed to trust most or even ingratiate yourself to? Let's move right along into the next module, as we all know there's nothing much more to say about that.

Another pattern I notice is the "taken aback pause." It's not precisely a reaction to being "offended," but it's a stark enough detail or way of relaying information that who you're speaking with was not prepared to engage that intensely. If they're quick, it'll be a brink-of-condescending acknowledgement before moving-right-along, or if they're not quick, it'll be a placating obfuscating of what you said to "even things out."Again, these are imprecise norms of conversational behavior around the particulars of one culture at one point in time, but they're real and of consequence whether or not you can see them.

When we use the word "bias," we let ourselves off the hook on the myriad ways it manifests. We let "bias" obscure in the opposite way that we let "trauma" obscure. Trauma is abused to over-explain what should be considered a necessary series of responses or consequences. Bias is abused to overlook how deeply it colors your propensity to engage that over-explaining behavior. You are biased, first and foremost, to your subjective experience of reality. In my experience, almost no one is that clued into their own flow of experience. Even the ones that are, or are showing the most growth and evidence, struggle, and will struggle indefinitely. This includes myself.

That's the point, though. You need the struggle to keep your wits about you. You need appropriate stressors against the things that will help you grow and incorporate. By definition, norms put that insistence to the side so we can all find a baseline mutual understanding to move right along down. The more cliched you sound, if you don't have a reflex to pause and pull back, the more you're training yourself to believe and act on "just whatever it is you say." You're a circular and totalitarian monster by default.

Add to that, you may not have any real ability or willingness to recognize how many cliches you truly are under the spell of. This is what the unironic attempts around discussions of "privilege" do a generally miserable job of explaining. We all have privileges up and down hierarchies and competencies and dozens of other metrics we fluidly transition through all day. None are necessarily going to jar you awake or indicate there's anything worth examining on their own. Your cohort speaks your language. Your education taught you the "right" things. Your hobbies and interests conform to a person of your state and stature. "It's just how things are done."

This provokes people's insecurity as a standing state of a lack of readiness. When you poke people, you'll find they don't have "real" reasons for their behavior, beliefs, or words. It's all been handed to them. They're a series of unconscious forces they're more or less molding to because that's how our brains work. Your brain doesn't care what it forms a pattern around, just that it can do so. There's survival reasons for this, as well as a story of basic capacities to function regardless of the nature of the environment that's all-but certain to otherwise kill you if you can't figure it out.

I, routinely, provoke that insecurity. I've learned to show considerably less ambivalence about the person after they've been provoked, but it happens just as an ongoing and predictable course of my practice. This is my practice. I analyze. I pull back. I try to identify and speak to patterns, even if they're abstract, but certainly concrete enough for me to anticipate them and work with or around them. I know what kind of response I need built into what I can reliably anticipate is going to be yours. I know how to piss off and get ignored by "the internet," and I know how to illicit a thousand likes. What's important to me is that I'm speaking as closely to my real perspective or agenda as possible, and not being driven by an elusive brain chemical game subject to the mercy of algorithms or inarticulate desires to unhealthily fit in.

I want to fit in, but with an ever-winnowing type of person. I want to be less-wrong in the information I share, but not at the expense of someone's capacity to hear it or learn from it if I can't be bothered to temper how I say it. I want to grow in my capacity to accept people, but not at the expense of their obligation to better account for and relay their own experience. I've been told my whole life that I'm not allowed to expect the same things from other people as I might of myself. I think this is fundamentally wrong and condescending. I think I should maintain the expectation while doing everything in my power to reduce the barriers to any one person getting to whatever heights you think I've managed or been born with.

Here again, we stay lost. How do you remove barriers you can't see or might even be dispositionally against even acknowledging can exist altogether? How many "boot straps" types can even be bothered to acknowledge the impact of the villages they're living in? How many "deeply empathic" people would entertain pairing their sensibilities to the word "toxic" under any circumstance? It's pretty easy, now, for me to see when my forthright manner acts as too blunt an instrument. Can you see where your baseline disposition and sympathies cloud your judgment and capacity to act more accountably?

I feel like "accountable" itself is poorly understood. Just count! Count the disquieting contradictory thought. Count the intensity, frequency, and severity of the feelings. Count the attempts to mitigate or times you recognized forgoing to do so. Accountability doesn't mean wildly wielding an axe to bring down dramatic consequences upon everything and everyone that wasn't noticed until now. It's just asking yourself, over and over again, what can I control about this situation? What can I act on that speaks to my values and perception?

Let's take the real world example of me and Byron. I can't control his perception of what he thought he was doing in service to the kid. I can't control his awareness of any creeping mental health issues that might have arisen. I can't control whether or not he responds affirmatively to my new boundaries. I could control telling him what those boundaries were altogether, so I did. I can affirm that I'm only going to communicate along the lines that hopefully help the boundary conditions get met before I'm willing to get more colloquial or back to friendly. I can respect that he told me our friendship is "invaluable." I can't truthfully say I think we'd be using that word in a mutually understood way until I see practical, tangible effects upon my life that counteract where I feel I am as a direct result of my expression of friendship getting grossly taken advantage of.

Until then, I'll treat him like I would any client. Show me. I'll patiently-enough nod along, provide whatever perspective or reframe that I can, and remain open to demonstrated behavior changes. I don't have to throw myself back into his fire. If I'm going to claim a desire to protect and maintain genuine friendships or care for those in my life, I'm not going to treat myself with the ambivalence I see others suffer from themselves every day.

I choose that level of discomfort. I only mildly complain today, as it's gotten dramatically better, about doing things alone and never having anyone to hang out with. Byron was my go-to spot for killing time or hanging out. Not once in my free time have I said, "You know, fuck my boundary, let's hang out there!" How could I look myself in the mirror? How could I advocate for you establishing better boundaries with people in your life? How could I ignore what I would characterize as gleeful and willful defiance of doing "better" than playing out battered-wife excuse making? I will not play-act friendship with someone who can't be bothered to work as hard on themselves or in service to me as I've been for them. That's not the kind of friend I am, so it's not the one I'll let back in lightly.

What's normal, though? No matter how bad someone fucks you, forgive and pretend to forget, right? They're "family." Life's too short. It is what it is. They didn't mean to or weren't aware. That's not who they were in the past. Holding grudges is unhealthy. Your insecurities around being isolated or alone betray you. Your obligation to play along and appease your mutual network takes over. Whether any real healing or mutual understanding comes into the equation is perfectly mute because we need to just move right along and "love each other."

I watch that dance justify literally every conceivable level of atrocity. It is the exact same self-servicing motivatedly ignorant pattern. From your god's behavior right on down through your secret satisfaction and smirk at punishing your pet a little too aggressively just that one time. What you don't account for counts on you to carry out its consequences. And you are, every day, in big and small ways, and it's predictable and fixable, but only with stuff like this. You have to own it. You have to "yes, and" like it's an improv class. You have to perpetually entertain the thought that you are a misguided monster, but that fact doesn't have to dictate your behavior going forward nor need to illicit some special amount of stress or talking in circles.

Then you might have a prayer of genuinely helping anything, because you see how you're otherwise fucking it up within yourself. You can resist the insistence to move past meaningful details. You can point to specific repeatable demonstrations of your values. You can see other people responding to your confidence of relatable recognizable capacity, and not the shadow game of peacocking virtue signaling and mantra echoing.

I will spend thousands of dollars, use all my tools, and spend every waking hour I have trying to help. I think most people I've met would say the same thing. Who is actually doing so? And in service to whom? Do you trust what drives them? Do you see equitable put in get out dynamics? Or is it codepedence? Or insecurity? Or some noble story of infinite sacrifice and unconditional love?

I'm willing to set the conditions because I expect better than what's normal of and for myself. Were circumstances reversed, I wouldn't treat you as I've been treated, and most importantly, have the demonstrated behavior from myself to trust. I've spent the time and money. I've opened the conversations. I've challenged the mismanaged powers and privileges. I've risen to the challenge of creating circumstances that inch me closer to what I actually want or think is better versus what's expected of me. It never ends. Every second you pretend otherwise, you disappear, and I have to fit your abstract abdication into my specific constructs.

[1115] Count On It

I'm a big believer in cutting out noise. My house, and much of the improvised things I've build testify to that. My car doesn't need a bumper to drive. When I get it in my head that "this is the thing to do," I spend the money, get up and out, and make my future working reality a measure of incorporating the new piece of information. I don't "wish" and "hope" and wait and stir things that prove to be unhelpful or impractical. This highlights not just my approach to counseling, but my experience of the barriers in translating my approach to both clients and the ones who hold larger dollar amounts.

You only think you know what you're talking about. You only think there's a relatively narrow lane in which you can walk or operate. This fact proves controversial. Practically speaking, this means if you look or sound like something that the person you are speaking to is unfamiliar with or unrehearsed and learned about, there's a fleetingly small chance you're getting any information through. If they "need" an expensive professionally produced and scripted elevator-pitch video with cliches and smiles in order to give you money, if you submit anything less, you're unworthy by default. It's as much a class thing as it is a basic translation thing.

When I worked at DCS, supervisors who respected evidence and the sovereignty of families were easy to work with. They never suggested I needlessly harass and question or re-question to the point of destroying rapport. When I attempted to explain to aggressive and presumptive supervisors what evidence was, why I get more compliance not acting like a dick, and the basic morality of treating people with respect, it didn't translate. Every day I'd get some kernel of advice or direction that, had I complied, would step me over the cliff of maintaining self-respect or effectively doing my job.

Drug addiction, counseling, mental health - there's a whole pop-up industry of cliches, happy-sounding videos, testimony, and opportunistic "harm-reduction" platforms eager to bill your insurance. They all look and sound professional, but 2 pointed questions to any of their clients obliterates the veneer immediately. They aren't giving you specific work to do. They aren't interested in your individual story. They don't care what you accomplished, how, or whether you're developing habits that are self-perpetuating and translating across different struggles you will encounter in life.

The reason the statistics around addiction look so bad is because there aren't enough people who are accountable and consistent able to demonstrate and encourage what's needed to maintain sobriety. There's a fundamental people issue at bottom. People aren't accountable, it's not just those with a substance abuse issue. People don't understand the language of day-in-day-out that isn't emotionally overwhelming struggle and insecurity. We have literally trained ourselves by the millions to accept the worst possible attitudes and platitudes as it pertains to healthy behavior and thoughts.

I want to scream every time I'm asked what my "mission" is. I believe in being clear and specific in your goals. That's not what they're asking of me though. They're obligating me to degrade and make vague a pleasant-sounding propaganda-adjacent and familiar thing that they can comfortably pass off as agreeable and allowed to perform. Every individual is different, but they rhyme. if you tell someone, "My goal is to get to know someone intimately enough that I can point out their thought and conversational patterns that interfere with their ability to act on goals as "simple" as doing their chores or as complex as managing the testosterone rushes that got them imprisoned." That's not, "I want to support those struggling to succeed!" But that guy gets the money, because it translates, and it's familiar, and it doesn't "feel" like it's "too much" or "all over the place."

Evidence only matters to those who understand and respect evidence. If their concept of evidence is numbers they're not going to investigate, or statistics they're not going to contextualize, or surveys they're not going to concern themselves with who answered and why, then you have "nothing" by telling them individual accounts of growth or problems solved. Why, didn't you "help" 100 people like the large organization next door who sees 200 every month? I promise you, and they know this too, that large organization may physically see people pass through its doors, but it has no idea who they are, its "help" is infinitely broadly conceived, and there is zero accountability until someone dies, and then probably not even then. This has literally been the case at a methadone clinic I worked where 4 people died, and nothing changed.

A good portion of my life has been the struggle to translate. I know, daily, what it is to be dispositionally overwhelmed and perpetually misunderstood. No amount of work I do gets across unless you're on the receiving end. I can't explain enough. I can't sacrifice enough. The words mean very little to almost everyone I've remotely tried to get involved. They do not understand what it means to bond and encourage and establish boundaries and expectations. They just don't. They swim in waters that are incidental. Recovery and growth and counseling are about ongoing conscious decisions and reflecting and accounting for success or failure. Your familiar codependent relationships aren't that. Your fluid privileges and colloquialisms that explain away your doubts or guilty conscience aren't that. Your too-comfort betrays the entire life-long process and habits. Addicted or not.

I can't tell you how many people, almost boastful and proud of themselves have asked me, "Well, why don't you apply for grants?" As though I am not currently, haven't invested in alleged professionals, or didn't also have that as my first idea. I can't tell you how many people hold seminars spending hours telling you information or advice you'll find in the first 5 pages of any book on the topic they're pretending to be informed or insightful about. I can't express the frustration of trying not to scream, "I just want to fucking tell you the evidence and show you the work!" As though the project is magic and convoluted. But it is, by those who don't understand and don't care to learn how they're shitting in our collective cereal with their power or victim complex.

I want you to tell me each week how many times you noticed and recorded when you were getting unnecessarily shitty with your child or partner. I want you to tell me how many times you caught yourself getting exhausted or frustrated with your work environment. I want you to tell me how many times you qualify the things you say with "I know that's stupid" or "I'm so dumb." I want you to figure out what you've been avoiding, how it affects your thoughts or actions, and to notice there's a direct line between how you feel, and whether or not you actually do something. I want you to do that until you have as many words explaining your emotional and behavioral patterns as I do so that you don't need a counselor to point out when you're doing it again. I want you to understand, because you've practiced, that confidence is earned and a learned behavior. I want you to trust your system for evaluating new or difficult information.

Can I fit that on a bumper sticker? Fuck no. Can I "neatly" explain what it takes personally to be the kind of person who can engender that in someone else? Hell fucking no. Anything remotely good about me or that people recognize as "I want to be more like" or "I want to live a similar way" I've worked though literally thousands of pages of self-reflection and arrivals at next courses of action. I didn't rest on a cliche. I didn't deny until I got so comfortable denying I forgot that I was even doing so. I'm still doing the work. That's the fucking point. It never ends. I've arrived at a certain comfort with the discomfort that I did not have in the past when I was more obsessive and compulsive and poorly coping. I talk about what is currently working for me, or not, and why.

We need to explore together what your story looks like. I'm not in the business of just talking at you. I'm not just going to read through some random psychology material and pretend like you "get it." I'm not going to blissfully ignorantly play out my unresolved trauma and ignorance through you because, ya know, I got into the field cus my own life was crazy and now I wanna help people! Cool. Help them what? Overcome your blistering blind spots and inadequacy now licensed and running wild? No, really, cool.

I hear more than anything from people something like this:

"Well, my counselor/therapist is nice, but…" Nice. There's polite, well-meaning, maybe even decently informed people all over the place. But. What is that but? They don't handle the running rotation of poorly managed groups. They don't get to know you and your situation, your language, your habits. They don't have the lived experience, nor overcoming and learning from message, to translate something purposeful and meaningful into your language. They don't charge less than $100 an hour. They're "nice" people who are "smart enough" to read a book and get a degree, maybe, and then greedy over-eager exploit machines keep them just happy and comfortable enough to not think too deeply about their actual impact or complicity. Your counselor read about this breathing technique, do they use it? Never. They're "non-judgemental," so they just won't speak when their judgment might make them say something that conflicts with their patient's "comfort."

I should not hear, routinely, "You seem like you actually care. You actually give me things to do. You ask me about my life. " That is a fucking travesty and shame on our entire system, not something special about me.

If you have "values" that don't translate or you refuse to account for their practical fallout, they don't amount to shit. Think every dipshit "pro-life" consequence we're dealing with right now. Think every "loving" family that routinely exploits and emotionally abuses because, "That's how I was raised." Think every negligent cultivated attitude that keeps us hateful, afraid, exhausted, and proud of how little we know or attempt to fix. The hard part is admitting just how full of fucking shit you are and how not powerless you are. Coping with your growing awareness and obligations is the adult human thing to do. The rest is reactionary animal bullshit. Try explaining that within a culture where we already believe we've arrived and understand things as well as we need to. Didn't I mention my age, degree, and perfectly suited experience?

[1043] One Step

The ten second version of my Saturday night/Sunday morning is that, on a trip back from Fort Wayne, I pissed off the kid, he pulled over and kicked me out of my friend's car while waving his airsoft gun around and ranting about how he does whatever he wants and what it is to be a man. The several pages that come next are going to build the months, if not almost two years-long context around that moment.

Most of you know my friend adopted a kid. It was a kid from his caseload when we were at DCS. He's known him since he was 7 or 8, and he's going to be 18 in July. He's, by the numbers, the highest you can score across categories recording trauma. He's had, or continues to have, every "behavior" dumbass eager Christian foster homes blithely discuss before they figure out they can't handle it. He's adopted the hood gangster affect, changes how he talks, walks, and is always, always, "on" in some form of aggressive tip, be it in name-calling or slamming cabinets in pouring himself milk. That is, to hear my friend tell it, if there's anyone else around and it's not just the two of them.

This is the same kid who found his dead brother, cousin, and cousin's fiancé after, in the months before the murder double homicide, my friend warned the kid if he kept antagonizing his brother, something like that tragedy would be the result. My friend had made a certain kind of pact with himself, that if he was ever going to foster or adopt, it would be this kid or this other little girl with her own sordid story of abuse and behaviors that he could navigate in a way others couldn't.

To my friend's credit, while it is an extremely weird habit and pattern, his "adoption" of disaffected white boys and seeing them all grow up, not precisely in the best place mental-health wise, but not having committed suicide, all with professional jobs, homes, or a connection that sees them reaching out for decompression or hang-out and come-to-Jesus sessions that don't spiral more than they need to. That this kid, with his extra-special aberrant status would kind of fall into his lap feels like so many mile markers on a highway we've been driving down for 20+ years.

The last few times I've written, I've wondered why so many "simple" things about what I desire are so hard or expensive to achieve. I've asked how much agency or control we really have under the spell of our pimps or cultural paradigms. Rarely anymore am I looking for the lesson, more than underlining or reiterating things it can be hard to build into new normative behaviors. Regardless of your trauma, level of emotionality, discomfort, or specific story of woe, you either discover and practice the littlest pieces of control and accountability, or you don't. It takes one moment to eschew your better demons and best ideas, and so practice, and honesty, and articulation deeply matter.

With all that in mind, if your goal in taking on a child is to merely "keep them alive," my friend is doing very well. If it's to expand their horizons and attempt to plug them into the larger world, no one is more keen to travel with the kid, take him to art galleries, buy him things related to cars and video games, and invite him along to the shows or activities he might otherwise be doing. Most parents, at least the ones concerned about how "the world" is going to perceive their children, know the task is much harder than keeping them fed and culturally enriched. And don't get me wrong, my friend knows this as well.

Here's the big "but."

This kid is mean. He's mean-spirited. He's volatile. He's aggressive. He's as unaccountable a person as I've ever encountered in life. I've worked for DCS. I've worked in prison. This kid is meaner and more disingenuous than people barely older than him serving years of their life for things he glorifies. Anyone who's been or has a teenager knows they're irrational and a certain kind of frustrating or "crazy." But you also probably have a strong instinct of when you're feeling particularly hormonal or out of control, and just being mean for mean's sake. It's unclear if the kid can differentiate, but again, to hear my friend tell it, when no one else is around, he's otherwise pretty decent and "normal." So?

We're beginning to shape the "have it both ways" portion of the narrative surrounding this kid. The fact that he can turn off and on whether he wants to be decent is not points in his favor. It shows that he's being as deliberately malicious as I accuse him of being. If I thought he was just "stuck" in some form of extreme PTSD or disassociative acting out, I'm backing off. I'm not writing this, forming some damming opinion, nor expecting him to behave in any other way than someone who functionally doesn't have their brain in their possession is going to behave.

My friend is extremely indulgent and entitled. I don't mind those character traits in and of themselves as, obviously, so am I. This influences his approach to creating a "stable" or "therapeutic" environment for what I call his "charges" more than "disaffected white boys." You're depressed? He'll take you to the woods and do some shamanic acid session. He'll get food with you and smoke you out. He'll let you rant about your blind spots and the consequences they've wrought indefinitely. It feels bad to be broke, abused, neglected, and lonely, like so many of us are, so if you get around him or he decides to care for you, let's flood your experience with the opposite of the pain.

The strategy has kept many a potential school shooter or suicide statistic alive. The strategy is incomplete and is being taken advantage of by the exact kind of mean-spirited violence engine that thrives on chaos. My friend drives a Camaro. That is, he did, before he functionally gave it to this kid who doesn't work, barely does chores, can't refrain from getting suspended or expelled every few weeks, and uses it to drive a series of high school girls back to their apartment to fuck and dismiss with some regularity. When my friend's cars are busted and the Camaro still works, he's coming to borrow my, also old and broken vehicles, because he doesn't want to leave the kid without a car.

The kid's "therapeutic environment" consists of constant access to vapes, I think Delta-8, weed, all of the accompanying parts that enable smoking from torches or pieces or batteries and surely a dozen other things I couldn't name. There's a tightrope you're walking at any given moment regarding his stability, and that's not to be disrupted. If he doesn't have a car, he doesn't get to go to his usual spot to get the "lesser" drug from the reliable spot and people they've coordinated to facilitate. Drug use is literally built into this kids DCS safety plan, because for years every other form of intervention has proven to cause more harm, stress, and drama than anyone involved, including the judge, cared to keep returning to.

It feels like now is the time to tell you, as I was being kicked out of the car, the kid referred to it as ,"my whip," which it absolutely is not, and he's had a melt down upon the realization of such in the past. Yelling at my friend, "That's not my car, that's your car. I don't have anything around here, none of this shit is mine for real," not an exact quote.

Anyway, some of the consistent interests the kid has shown are in guns, violent Youtube videos, Grand Theft Auto, and cars. He and my friend will talk cars indefinitely. The kid will bring out and clean his guns, airsoft or otherwise, like he's a war veteran trying to stay vigilant. They'll spend hours flipping through different skins and modifications to their in-game characters and cars. I can forgive a kid for being boring and single minded or having shitty taste in music. But he uses his interests to help bolster and glorify his thug-life narrative and demons.

On the way to Fort Wayne, there are decent stretches of straight highway. The kid, smiling, seatbelt-less, gestures with his head back to my friend, "You know, we have to come back out here and see what we can hit (speed wise.) We gotta make a pact though, that if one of us dies, it's not on the other one. You don't gotta feel bad or there's no heaviness or bad blood." Also not a direct quote. As far as I can tell, the kid has a familiar suicidal impulse that I want nothing to do with. I certainly don't want to be in the car with him as he's racing past 120 miles per hour weaving through traffic and riding asses from old people to bikers.

The kid does not seem to retain the capacity to genuinely appreciate the chance he's been given. He was literally on his way to a mental facility or prison before my friend stepped in. On his super speeding racing stints he'd say something like, "I got this bitch all the way to 125 even with your fat asses in the whip." I'm as much for jovial shit-talking as the next person, but that's all he's ever on, and he's proud of the danger and, at least while I'm around, almost never corrected or redirected. It's precisely here you start to flirt with terms like "codependent" and "enabling."

My buddy has his own list of stressors and drama related to his family and a bank fucking him financially. DCS has always played games. His jobs require a lot of time and driving. If the kid was a saint, his life would be particularly stressful the last couple years. With the kid as an ungrateful, hateful engine of chaos, we've seen even periods of remote stability get shaken by a stiff breeze. For every little seeming win, he's just as eagerly prepared to regress and destroy and throw what's been accomplished out the window. I don't care if for the first time in memory the kid is waking up and regularly taking out and cleaning up after the $800 dog he got last week if he's prepared to wave a gun at me when I yell at him to slow the fuck down and stop driving like he wants to kill us all.

We're at the point now where I want the game called. I want to press charges. I want consequences to send the kid where he belongs, which is not in a struggling household with a single foster parent who does not have the time, energy, or intention of the mental facility the child needs. Would they do right by him? Probably not. We live in Indiana and a country that doesn't train or care or invest in dealing with kids nowhere near his level. Is that his, or especially my, cross to bear? I don't think I've for a second supported him getting this kid well before I had any instantiated opinion on the kid for a dozen reasons related to getting our own shit together first. There's many reasons I don't have kids, even if I went to zero concerts the last two years and had thousands to spend on them.

The problem has reached the point where I'm feeling very "me or him." I want nothing to do with the kid. I'm watching my best friend functionally abandon me to the whims and chance of his kid's behavior, and I'm so devoid of how to conceptualize that, that it doesn't even make me feel angry or like I want to move into a space of judgment and resentment. I think my friend cares. I think he tried. I think it's an abject failure. I think I accepted the nature of our dynamic being that of, "You know, I'm not really trying to take the bullet for you," when we were having those discussions as teenagers. I'm not taking a bullet, or high-velocity air rifle rounds, from this little shit.

I handle crisis or crisis-adjacent situations all the time. To even talk about my "anger" related to the situation might give you the wrong impression that I didn't make a calm deliberate call to the police as I heard the tires screeching as the kid peeled away. My adrenaline wasn't pumping. I wasn't yelling. But, much as when I handed my ex the knife to shit or get off the pot with the threat of her slitting her wrists, I don't deal well with living under the sword of Damocles. This kid has been too hot and too unstable from the jump, and the gifts and rewards and placations have done nothing but provide an environment for him to feel emboldened to continue and draw pride from his self-destruction. My friend smokes a lot, speeds, and plays the same games. I don't see the capacity to lead by example along the metrics the kid needs to change. I see an uncle the kid might be allowed to visit in small doses after he's actually shown something worth rewarding.

One of the topics I've been talking about in Groups this last week is forgiveness/grace. How much room do you give? In my view, we never had to get to dropped on the side of the highway at 3 AM after gun waiving, but we did. I was certainly speaking to the issue well before it got that far. How much should we belabor the story of the kid's trauma? Certainly to a serious and far degree, but are we willing to also accept that you can be a fucking dickhead psychopath on top of that? Our job isn't to save anyone. It's to exercise your perspective and try. I tried right up until the point I couldn't stop repeating to myself, "I'm not dying for the fucking kid," and thinking about Ryan Dunn or all the shows unseen and projects not attempted.

I'm not forgiving the kid anymore than I'm forgiving my mom. Like her, he's not equipped to build on and exercise an accountable perspective. His upbringing or genetics broke his brain. The Hail Mary that is my friend attempting to contain this kid is causing me to contemplate in a measured way how I need to consciously uncouple from anything to do with either of them. This isn't a game, for all of my analogies suggesting otherwise. An excellent DMT trip might have released my buddy from a fear of death, but I'm not so ambivalent.

We can return to fundamentals. What can I control, what can't I? I can't make my friend adopt my perspective. I can never be in contact with the kid again. I can deny my truck to be loaned out and say, "You invited his impending meltdown into your home, not me." I can clear my booze and video games out of their house and go back to paying to do my laundry. I can press charges. I don't know if there's an underlying cry for help to release my friend from some sunk-cost fallacy that's rooted itself into this dynamic because I don't know what I can trust in the "I'm sorrys" that change nothing and persist in bad behavior, and tales of appeasement held up as growth. That's not good for my friend, for the kid, and certainly not for me.