[1204] Just Chillin

Getting back into my role as an addiction counselor and case manager has me thinking more frequently about the themes I belabor in class.

One of them is “work.” I firmly believe that if you don’t feel like you’re working, you’re probably not doing your recovery correctly. That doesn’t mean you need to be manically occupying every moment so you don’t give yourself a chance to feel. (be it a craving or simple pleasures). It does mean when we’re exploring new boundaries, who is or isn’t supportive and why, or what it feels like to practice something new be it writing, conscious breathing, or exercise, if it was “easy” and you’re “killing time” or professing a cliche like “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do,” you’re lying to yourself.

Trust me, this position is often considered contentious or unreasonable. Surely, all that needs to happen is you being physically present, mostly, within the constructs of a recovery environment and in the presence of counselors, therapists, and peer supports, and when enough time goes by, poof! sober. Sober in such a robust and persistent way it’ll grant a new license to be pretentious and judgmental about those who haven’t done it like you.

When I moved to cousin-fuckistan, I routinely underestimated the amount of work it would take to reach a minimum level of comfort. Some people like the outdoors and can handle all sorts of weather. I need that AC. When you go to build something, the right tool makes a world of difference. An extra hand makes several worlds of difference. It started to sink in the resolve, planning, money, time, and disposition I would need to have in order to get the next thing. I started eating before I started, packing water, bringing “extra” tools, listening to my body when I started to get tired so I didn’t crush or cut myself out of fatigue and frustration.

I think it was a lot easier for humanity to find solidarity around things when we were all forced to work to survive. The argument from a conservative is that the negative consequences of welfare trickle down into how we conceive of ourselves as responsible conscious agents. They’re not totally wrong. They severely underestimate the degree to which the game is rigged and exploitation reigns. The liberal argument also rings true to me. But I’ve been around for, let’s say 20 “adult” years, and I’ve found 5 or 6 people willing to bet and work in bids to transcend the game, and the vast majority accepting or more or less making peace with their level of first-world poverty. Financial, "spiritual," interpersonal poverty or otherwise.

We’re working, somewhat, in service to basics. It has us believing that the effort we’ve put in thus far should suffice to get what we deserve. It has us shifting our concept of what we deserve to precisely what we’re getting. Our adaptability is a double-edged and dangerous tool like that.

What kind of work would it take to get to some form of globalized consensus? I mean the kind of world that bakes into the cake of “global understanding” that there will always be a forever-percentage of the most trolly/insane/just-asking-questions types that we can remain persistently confident might never again seize power regardless of their “platform?” How uncomfortable would we have to get trying, trusting, and investing in ways of being? And is it even possible to be intentional about it? I’m not so sure.

When I think about my “politics,” it feels weird to characterize it as some kind of “independent” position. It’s almost never I explain myself to someone, nor listen to where they are coming from, and there isn’t some kind of objective story to be told. I don’t meet people intimately familiar nor interested in learning the stats and science behind abortion before they offer their “strong” opinion about the sanctity of human life. I don’t meet people particularly concerned with “logic” or “existential assumptions” as they tout the dictates of their sky daddies and mysticisms. I think you get to maintain a certain wonder and deference to the myriad means of describing “power” that shapes or controls you without taking the extra step over the cliff and drawing conclusions about fate, ironic metaphysical constructs, or context-independent morality.

I think, for example, if you’re a death cult like Hamas, I want an extremely strong border with you and want to do just about everything within my power to eradicate someone who is willing to carry out the violence insisted upon. That can mean bombs, indoctrination, or painfully slow attempts at integration with the Western world. It probably means all 3 and more. It feels objectively true that debating tactics and timelines all need to be predicated on a fairly straight-forward idea about groups who kill concert goers. You’re also allowed to mourn the innocent civilians they embed with and regularly brag about utilizing in their sympathy campaigns. You can also ask yourself if they’re shielding themselves with someone who’s “soft” sympathies with their position is what got them voted into power in the first place.

But that paragraph alone takes a level of responsibility it’s hard or impossible to do if your identity rests in not grappling with it. I suspect there’s such a stigma around addicts because they’re simply a visceral example of our own posture as it relates to token issues. Who isn’t extremely dogmatic and intractable about any number of unhealthy relationships? Bill Maher recently said we need to move the narrative about personal responsibility and continue to take allegations seriously and hold men accountable through the efforts of metoo, but the women need to leave. The women need to be expected to, in one of his examples, take their private jets back to their loving rich families and stop talking about how toxic Shia LeBeouf is like they’re chained to the radiator.

Whatever it is we think we’re getting from tying our hands to various narratives isn’t as true as we think it is. That’s the work of articulating and reiterating where the lines are, why they exist, and what deciding what hills are worth dying on. I’m as confident as one can be that the next thing I profess to want will take time, effort, doing it wrong a bunch, and meaningfully engaging with the reasons why. The self-righteous are never wrong. The convinced are never patient. The noble and proud warrior can’t pronounce humility. These are defensive positions created by an ego that doesn’t wish to be threatened. It’s saying something objectively concerning about you if you consider new or more information a threat or something to fear.

The human animal is none of the things I talk about. It’s not what our biggest dreamers, creatives, thought-leaders, or scientists discover. The human animal is just waiting for the context, the excuse, to react in familiar and gratifying ways. The human animal wants to fit never asking where. The human animal wants to wink and nudge its way through a seemingly endless game of exploitation and distraction. The human animal won’t do the work. So where does that leave the humans? To my mind, at the mercy of the savagery and inevitable death that drives unbound nature. The appeal of the familiar religious fantasies will clench and suffocate as they do. The sins will pile up, and we’ll call the next, boring, compelled reaction a “revolution” and continue to pretend we’re ever going to take the requisite responsibility.

A client of mine wrote down that she was feeling lost and hopeless. She then said something about her ex and his behavior and, “if it gets to the point…” I stopped her. What? If it gets to the point, what? You’ll then have your excuse? You’re already at the point where you’re feeling what you wrote. There is no “point.” We’ve had several conversations on the best way to address her concerns which she’s provided thanks and expressed relief for in the past. Her job is to ask what her responsibility is to the feelings right now. Not after she constructs a false if-then scenario about him. Her responsibility is to bring the broader context into the catastrophized thought. Her responsibility is to respond to the feeling with things she can do to incorporate it, and barring that, steer away from the worst consequences of it.

I have interactions like that a dozen times a day. Someone might talk brilliantly, intimately, of the right and intellectual way to go about something, but it’s rarely acted upon or not felt. It’s not felt in their bones. It doesn’t serve as a quiet confidence built on example after example. So often it’s the ones contributing the most who feel like they’re not saying anything or “it’s probably of topic” or “I’m talking too much” as though there’s some neat and perfect answer I’m fishing for regarding their feelings and sense of being in the world. I remind them, it’s not just “addicts” that struggle to articulate and own what we’re talking about. It’s everyone. It’s the animals we all are that we’re up against.

The values need practiced and defended at all times. It’s work. There is no amount of shit you will eat that will absolve you of the choice to do so nor transform the flavor.

[1198] Not My Job

If this turns into something I actually post, it’ll be the 3rd time today I’ve tried to write it in a way that is both comprehensive and yet doesn’t annoy the piss out of me.

I’m a “site director” for the YMCA. I refer to my job as glorified babysitting. On paper, including the extremely misleading job listing, I’m in charge of “programming” as well as a host of other administrative things related to ensuring compliance with trainings, overseeing “camp” activities, and theoretically remaining pliable enough to be utilized wherever I’m needed. It pays $17.25 an hour, I make $1,107 every 2 weeks. I drive a 2002 Ford F-150, with at least $1,000 in needed repairs, an hour or more each way to get to my first shift at 6:15 AM. The afternoon runs from 2:45 PM to 6:00 PM, unless a parent is late, like they were today.

At a glance, and by my own perspective, I don’t make a lot, but I also don’t do a lot. This is a statement relative to my history of jobs, often in social work, and one I can now compare to the 2nd job I got addiction counseling that I wedge between my Y shifts from 8:30 AM to 1:00 PM. It pays $21/hr during “training,” which…we’ll get to that, and $23/hr for me to conduct 3-hour IOP groups for people recently sober. A 10-minute conversation with a single person in that environment can be more loaded and complicated than 5 days of poorly-listening kids.

I don’t want either job, I want money. If my time is destined to be utilized in captured ways, I’m looking to maintain a basic sense of belonging or flow as I exercise what’s needed. I live alone, an hour dead into the center of the middle of nowhere, and yet I’m begrudgingly extroverted, creative, and don’t want to sit around all day. I don’t have a particular affinity for kids or the sick and intransigent egos of addiction, but I do have a knack for speaking my audience’s language.

I spoke my supervisor’s language, as well as 6 other site directors’, at the Y to get hired in the first place. I am overwhelmingly on time, communicative, and accountable to the expectations of my various roles. I used to be the type to never take days off. I’m not saying that as a point of pride, but to hint at the depth of my former pathological allegiance and sense of pretentious pride.

Today, I recognize more both about myself and the environments I work than I used to. I don’t believe the grass is greener elsewhere. I don’t believe most places are run particularly accountably or by people with any real competence for it. I don’t expect everyone at all times to rise up and be the hero that champions higher pay, proper protocols, and meaningful consequences for those who betray the “values” we’re allegedly in charge of protecting or instilling.

I still have values. I still hold expectations. I still aspire to more than merely talking my way into new ill-fitting environment after new ill-fitting environment after I’ve drifted too far into a personal financial crisis. These values get aggravated the moment I’m met with the practical reality of navigating someone, technically, in charge of me, but clearly barely in charge of themselves. They become even more aggrieved when I’m forced to “need something” from those people, and they lack both the capacity and willingness to entertain a real way of meeting that need.

One supervisor, for example, ChatGPT’d me an answer to my informing them of the hours I was hoping to finagle. She doubled down in her response. When someone has no interest or capacity in engaging with you they’ll do things like, “Per our discussion 6 months ago when you were hired…” or “The site director role requires…” They’ll cc HR on the email, because you’re clearly becoming disgruntled by the side-stepping and ambivalence. They’ll throw up their hands and shrug their shoulders about the necessary consequences of you attempting to weasel out of the strictest interpretation of your role that serves their purposes in any moment.

These, mind you, are the same people who said, literally no less than 5 times, how little the role paid and were quick to offer all of the 2nd jobs their other site director’s take. It’s something of a point of pride? They just all believe in the cause so much, it seems, that they’re willing to sacrifice adult wages and ever-fleeting time so they babysi…I mean, enrich children’s lives. Should I recall that part of our conversation too? Or, what about the part where you said, “I’ve been trying to get them to change that job description for months because you’re right, it doesn’t match at all what we need you to do.”

I have 6 people that work under me at the Y. 4 of them make $20/hr or more. One of them last week said, “That’s messed up. You’re in charge and run the program, but they’re paying me $20?” My direct supervisor has lamented this, but then always tags the conversation with how little she makes. Her boss has been roped into discussion and offers nothing. His boss avoids the issue and is noted for having shit on my friend who used to work directly under her after my friend attempted to fix that discrepancy. It was one of several reasons that contributed to my friend quitting as common sense was routinely rebuked, and often devolved into Mean Girl politics.

Anyway, I’m at a crossroads, and have until May 9th to figure out if I want to keep playing along. I’ve yet to email my counseling job the hours the Y says I need to work, and I’m not looking to add anymore messiness to their operation that I’ve somehow refrained from speaking more about yet. The Y is the current devil I know. When it’s smooth, it’s still annoying, but tolerable. When literally anything comes up that feels like an unnecessary fight, I’m daring the universe to push me over the edge.

The relationship is over, if it ever really began, and I’m not exactly clinging to it, but it’s hard to directly compare my hatred for job-searching and restarting against my hatred for these disingenuous and not-so-secretly mean-spirited exchanges. One of my supervisors still holds a grudge that I expect kids not to be covered in shit as they go to lunch. You think a person like that is working overtime to keep me around? She literally is like Y lore for not even doing the bare minimum of her job.

If I leave, I’m still driving, now an hour and twenty minutes, to work each day, but I’m able to sleep in until 6:30/7 instead of 4:30/5, and getting home before 3. I could devote my freed up time to learning and getting certified in insurance sales, and attempt to break into where my friend that left the Y started working. It’s also a space endorsed by another friend of a friend who has been doing it for a decade. I’ve a standing goal of finding a fully remote job, and this has presented itself as a reliable-enough road to that.

Then, I’m no longer playing frisbee and basketball every day. I’m not crafting or making volcanoes. I’m not really getting outside. I’m not accumulating the knock-on effects I’ve yet to even explore of having a role that isn’t the heightened drama of social work broadly. I get along with my coworkers. I’ve earned a place of trust with my school and respect from my kids. Those aren’t nothing. They aren’t paying the bills, but they are a far cry from the types of things I utilize in describing what I hate about work, poor authority, or society in general. I’m not particularly sentimental, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve definitely felt more human, and it’s made more sense why people fist-fuck themselves in service to others within systems that can’t be bothered to get their shit together.

It’s a different kind of role. Even in counseling, the onus was on the adults to follow-up with me and my free nonprofit service if they really wanted to keep in touch and weren’t just talking out of their ass about my impact on them, as “addiction services” teach you to do. I’m second-guessing the impact I might have on the kids. Or, at least the kids that like me, as if I believed any of them hold particularly reasoned, strong, or salient opinions. I’m also feeling “old,” and not like I accept negligent authority for its own sake, but that am able to tolerate certain manifestations of it better.  If I never had to write another email, I’d probably never again flirt with getting fired.

I’m also on the road to exhaustion. I’m already “behind” on my IOP notes, not because I haven’t written them, and not because they take even 10 minutes to get entered into the system. The “start-up energy” and “messiness” of that work environment is regularly impeding my ability to develop a flow and system. I’m extremely competent in building “loose” obligations into a machine, and right now, there’s a larger machine that’s crippling my capacity to do so. I’m told things last minute. Schedules aren’t kept. Rides show up late. Expectations vary wildly between other IOP counselors. Meetings appear to be held and cancelled at random. I came in an hour early today do notes? As soon as I unpack my computer and open the browser, they want me upstairs for a new-to-me team meeting, even though I’ve been in “training” for a week and a half.

Am I still in training, and getting the training pay rate? They don’t know, because also they forgot to get me enrolled in payroll, so I’ll need to fill out 8 missing punch forms they’ll send me…eventually. Is yoga every Wednesday? Yes, says the office manager. It happens to be in the middle of your 3-hour IOP session, but whatever. Also, it’s not on today, so that 25 minutes of going upstairs and waiting around, yeah just head back down and cross your fingers your group regroups in a timely way. Teaching material? It’s in a binder around here somewhere, let’s make sure we never quite show you where 7 minutes before each of your groups when you might need to print 100 or more pages. Do I work from 9 to 1? or 8:30 when you want me on the meeting as I’m driving there on raceway 465? Good question, let me check on that. You ever been attacked by 6 pissed-off women at once who cite their PTSD about men after you asked them to not talk over someone who was sharing?

I can do just about 4 hours of that once a day provided I have low-stakes routines and games to play a few hours later. I will not be attempting to increase my hours if I leave the Y.

I’m stifled. It’s different enough from stuck. My goals have transformed to include some measure of stability or desire to see different fruits of different investments. I don’t want to perpetuate treating work environments and the people in them as disposable as they insist on making me feel. That’s giving them too much credit as though it’s intentional or that anyone can truly * make you feel one way or another. Of course, superficially and colloquially they can and do, but what kind of counselor would I be if I wasn’t interested in the conscious clear-eyed choices there are the moment you recognize and distance yourself from the feeling? I don’t want to go out on a reactive email. I don’t want to get caught pleading with, literally, a chatbot employed by someone wholly nonplussed about the smell, or taste, of shit. I don’t want to find myself racing towards the next iteratively negligent space crafting new naive narratives about its potential.

At least I have 9 stays to stew.

[1153] Mean

I’ve written maybe 7 pages over the last week of noise. I’m not in a wholly chaotic and ambivalent place, but zeroing in on something specific to explore has been elusive. Maybe this will get me there.

A few weeks ago, I came across an explanation for why so much abhorrent behavior is tolerated in different work environments. There are things I, and people in my circles, find it “incomprehensible” to do, and a common refrain I hear is some complaint about why a colleague gets paid more, isn’t fired, or is otherwise ignored when they do something that, my friend or higher-achieving person, would never.

The explanation was that we’re more a collection of average-to-shit than not. When you have someone who can legitimately do something better than you, you’re a threat. Almost always you’re going to have a boss that is exceptionally average, typically lazy, and aspiring to the middle of the road maintain basic survival space. This was true when I worked at a movie theater all the way up to the literal head of the Indiana Department of Child Services.

“Average” is the key word. Most of us, probably too often, can speak to areas in which we excel. We ruminate particularly deeply on our strengths or past achievements when we want to fuel a narrative of what we’re entitled to or our worth. As a society, I would put money on the idea that almost all of us have said something to the effect of, “I hate people.” Whether that’s true or just true-enough, it’s a gut-level reaction to our approximate engagement with “your average person.”

I try to depersonalize how I understand the average person. Every baby that’s born functionally resets the species. Whatever genetic information that carries through, it’s only informed in a passively selected way. All of the religious baggage you might wish to stain that baby’s brain with, all of the “cultural norms,” or pathological circularly reasoned spaces need practice. The infinite sea of things that baby will stay ignorant about as it grows up will be as diverse as any individual, but no less infinite.

What happens if you are “generally” an improvement on what’s average? Say you’re pretty. Say you’re smart. Say you’re exceptionally agreeable. You don’t have to be above average to recognize the potential desirability and exploitability of people like that. You can simply want to jerk off to a pretty face, pawn off the responsibility for cleaning the oceans, and abuse the persistently self-immolating patience of your exhausted-mommy-esc spouse.

When one of those people gains the confidence or self-awareness, now you’re in trouble. The smart person might dictate, in excruciating detail, how you aren’t living up to your responsibilities. The pretty person recognizes the control they have over your emotional well-being which might translate into a certain control over your finances. The agreeable one plots underneath the outward displays of social chaos as no one suspects they have an agenda beyond affirming yours.

When you’re average, you’re safe. You don’t become a target. You aren’t immediately resented. People aren’t deeply suspicious that you’ll just “do anything you please.” I think back to the party house. I engineered the conditions, but at a certain point, I became like this evil mastermind presumed to be…I guess…pulling the strings of hundreds of people coming over almost every weekend? People were practically sling-shooting their sense of agency and self-control at me if anything remotely went wrong towards the end of the party years. “We” were no longer partying together, I fucked up for organizing it in the first place altogether. You certainly can’t be blamed for moving into what I pitched, explicitly, as a party house, right?

As average habits go, finding someone to blame is as biblically cliche as it gets. Even when we may be more accurate than not in assigning the blame, we’re still exercising the wrong muscles. I’m a big Bernie Sanders fan. I think millionaires and billionaires are “victims” of our disingenuous systems. Why? By the numbers, you can call someone rich. By their psychology, or history, or wisdom, or rules we incentivize them to play by though? I blame the species-level messaging. We’re still scapegoating our own poor understanding of macro-economic systems. We’re still refusing to lead with a collective ethic versus entrench behind our narrative presumptions.

That is, if we don’t generally, on average, believe and behave as if power and money are corrupting forces, in our heart of hearts, we’re not going to do the practical work to claw back the money it takes for all of us to live better. It’s analogous to addiction. We’re absolutely sold and stuck on agency-crippling notions. We refuse or are never invited to do the work of explicitly stating those notions. So, in the abstract, in the grey, we flail. Without a goal, we default to the norms. We succumb to induced states of propaganda and irrelevance.

I think average is unduly and overwhelmingly deadly. Average is the output of unsympathetic, unconscious, and ambivalent natural selection. What’s “natural” is going to be insufficient if there’s any real “we” in this collective exercise to survive beyond this given moment. We need to define and enable other areas of exceptional human behavior and achievement. We need to do it in the same way we do with Hollywood. I want the Brad Pitt’s of social work to be making 6 figures, not their greedy share-holding bosses or subsidized firm bilking the government. The money is, and has always been, there. The values aren’t.

I genuinely struggle with the idea of wanting to “excel.” I want to be, not just better than average, but exceptionally good at things I do. It’s a borderline pathological disposition that’s taken me many years to find a remotely mellow way to relate to it. I’m literally thankful for getting older and having some energy zapped and thus forced to slow and calm down if I didn’t want to hurt myself. My experience of life has often left me dumbfounded in how people respond to the desire to live and act in service to “more than average.”

It’s worse than that though, because I’m still scarred by the responses I’ve gotten from people for being basically human or competent too. When I called the police to wellness check a friend who vague-booked a suicidal-sounding message, the look on like 7 people’s faces around me was like, “Why bother?” I still can’t fucking figure that one out and you’d think I wouldn’t need a larger display for why I shouldn’t have continued being friends with them. Each client at DCS I informed of their rights or treated with respect and not as though I was a wanna-be cop who needed to threaten them, more than half of the leadership maintained the not-so-quiet condescending and flabbergasted posture because, in their minds, you get better outcomes when people are scared, angry, and lied to?

Round we circle to looking like a threat. When you hold an above-average decency and engagement standard, the insecure cunts who’ve bullied their way to positions of power or influence know that, were you ever in direct competition to something, people are going to prefer you. People are going to be looking for the solutions-focused patient leader more than the threatening asshole. (Innate fascist tendencies and patterns aside. Or, once they subside.)

If I’m not doing something that I create, or where I can be more or less left alone, or where I can do a dozen other things that serve as coping, I’m stuck in an impossible situation. I can’t help but notice when you’re being inefficient. I can’t help but notice when you’re getting in your own, or especially my, way. I can’t help when people like me more than you. I can’t help that I’ve developed in a way that does not allow me to accept “average” where better can be achieved, often with less effort, once we’ve made a detailed account of the nature of the process or problem.

I’m not on auto-pilot. I’m not using every opportunity to speak with someone to unload prepared remarks or cliches. It is what it is? It’s also not what it’s fucking not. And it’s also not making much fucking sense, stressing everyone out, and does not have to be this way. We need to recognize we’re in a constant, moment to moment battle, for control. Control of what? Hopefully, with any sense, how we define and practice our values. How we dignify our work and time. How we celebrate and long for each day instead of justify and excuse all that we haven’t lived up to.

[1151] Friendly Refiner

 A good portion of how I understand the world is extracted from conversations and observations on relationships. I’m a pretty big believer that you can get to know a ton about yourself through introspection, but it’s still less than half of the necessary information if you don’t invoke who is, has, or you’d like to be shaping you.

For many years, before I ever knew what it actually symbolized or its history, I wore a yin yang necklace. I was literally drawn to it, noticing it dangling from a display at the Lake County Fair when I was in middle school. To this day, 25-ish years later, I’ve never read that deeply into Chinese philosophy, because the interconnected and counterbalanced symbol itself pretty much matched my intuition. It helped to have a kind of reminder imprint.

Balance is a much different place from dependence. “Codependency” is when there’s an excessive emotional or psychological reliance on a partner, and the other enables. These are not distinct and discreet measurements when you’re attempting to assess “excessive,” and as a matter of basic existence, one might argue we psychologically rely on our loved ones, networks, or imbued sense of self bred from our culture.

One of the things I’ve had to practically discuss and work out is how to balance healthy doses of traumatizing and often nakedly destructive forces against the appropriate level of State intervention, or against an individual’s sense of self and safety and security. At DCS, with a policy for children to remain with family if at all possible, that’s remaining with a sometimes wild cast of characters. In addiction counseling, you get clients describing physically and emotionally abusive partner dynamics all the time, and yet, they’re so otherwise unstable, that the abuse becomes “less bad” than being alone.

I think this is a really hard thing to understand for most people. One reason, life might not be as bad as it definitely is if you’ve occupied a certain level of wealth for a certain level of time. The exact same kinds of drama and mental health issues do not play out the same between the people attending their remote counseling session from the bench they slept on, and the people who can go to adult summer camp indefinitely. If you tell a story of someone’s impoverished circumstances to a “regular” middle-class person, they’ll tell you and them exactly what to do based on their sense of horror about it all.

Thankfully, I’ve had limited exposure in my personal life with cop-show plot levels of relationship dynamics. It’s not zero, but it’s never been remotely close to chronic. This means when I’m reflecting on what I think a “healthy” relationship is, I have the prolonged explanations and explorations of dramatic incidents from my life. I also have the dynamics, few and far between, that have sustained my more positive and prescriptive behavior.

One of the places I’ve landed is the question, “Do they even treat you like a friend?” I’ve struggled with the word “friend” for a long time, but even my proved-to-be-superficial relationships were friendly in a way that I often see missing in people’s dynamics. It’s like a movie trope to see two outwardly hateful people speak terribly to one another or occupy their own physical space, and then something weird happens that sheds a light on their deep and abiding love for one another. I think that’s a horrible and entirely misleading picture.

You can’t really see how someone is being a friend if you don’t know what constitutes you being one. I have a knack for being everyone’s “not-therapist.” Being up my own ass, reading all the things I do, and desperately trying to cling to my life values each day has lent itself to an awareness and perspective that I’ve received a waterfall of feedback suggesting it’s helpful. Getting certified as an addiction counselor was a pretty natural extension of my practice already, and if I had the money I’d become a therapist just because.

I’m also “too giving.” I want to be wanted. So when you need something from me, I’m extremely likely to go out of my way or do anything I can to help. I’m so like this, that I can recall the handful of times I’ve ever told someone no when their issues had reached a point that I would no longer be able to balance.

These two pieces alone give me enough of the half of a relationship puzzle to inform whether or not I think you’re being friendly in return. I don’t think you need to be a not-therapist to me nor be willing to give me any and everything at the drop of a hat. I do think you need to respect and recognize those things about me, and not take advantage of them. What would taking advantage look like? Attempting to use me to justify, instead of explore and fix, the things on your mind. Attempting to squeeze my effort and goodwill until I’m threatened financially or my life ends up in danger.

The third thing about me is that I’ve developed a really good ability to read and connect with people. That’s a deadly tool in the hands of someone who isn’t concerned with being transparent, friendly, or balanced. It follows then that I’m my best version of being a friend when I listen, give as much as I can, and refrain from unduly utilizing what I know about how you operate.

We make this very complicated for ourselves. An example that stuck out for me once was a speaker talking about how if our pet got sick and we picked up a prescription, we’d make sure it got the whole thing at the same time every day with the right food and cuddles until it was better. We won’t take our own prescriptions, if even go to the doctor. Now, this example is royally fucked by the practical issues of the American healthcare system, but the sentiment rang true at the conceptional level and in my experience working with people.

I know people who will work two jobs, take care of kids, put up with endless bullshit from their emotionally unwell parents or siblings, get demeaned by a boss, deal with health issues, and the impending psychological terror of whatever anniversary that’s coming up that they’ve never coped with. They’ll simultaneously struggle to take even 30 minutes for themselves a day to breathe, relax, or watch their favorite show. It’s a package of guilt, chronic stress, and “survivor mode.” They forget how to be friendly to themselves.

One of the things that confused and bugged me for a very long time was how to wrap my head around my friendships petering out. Beyond the ones that just went silent, there’s the ones that went out with someone lobbing some observation or judgment about who I was or what I was thinking, as if they ever really cared to know in the first place. I wasn’t giving myself credit for both the kind of friend I was trying to be, nor recognizing that simply existing around each other or being polite is not the same thing as establishing a friendship.

I discovered “normal” people were mostly in the pageantry and pretend game. They need you to perform and defer your actual sense of self and agency to their insecurities. I’m the type of person where literally anyone I might recognize or have enjoyed their company for an hour, I would invite “back in” in a heartbeat. I’ve been pretty confident in myself and who I am for a good portion of my young-adult to adult life. My perception of your, at the time, positive energy or influence is the thing I’d seek more of. I’d know it’s there. You can’t deny it, even if you’ve drifted into normal life morass as we’ve gotten older.

Maybe a way to illustrate this is to think about Christmas cards. If you or your family sent those out, how many people made the list that you might never talk to for years? It’s like your friend’s list on facebook. There’s like 10 people that sign on anymore, and if you’re lucky, 1% of them will notice when it’s your birthday. That kind of superficial engagement passes for normal “friendship.” It always felt fake and like a waste to me, and even when I tried to spice it up with personalized and creative messages on birthdays, they seemed to fall flat or get ignored over time.

I’ve got a lot of practical behaviors that inform my sense of friendly behavior. I’m not trying to yell. I don’t expect you to do anything for me that I’m unprepared to do for myself. I’m not lying to you about what I feel or don’t. If and when I have the money, I’m excited by the prospect of buying your ticket, meal, the gas etc. I’m one of those people who is physically unable to stop himself from voicing what he thinks is fucked up, and if that’s something about you or how we’re relating, I’ll do so out of respect and hope it can be fixed, and in a respectful way. I’m not going to ghost you after years nor stay vague and passive aggressive about the road forward. If only! I was treated the same way.

I believe it’s important to living well that you find your center independent of anyone else. The moment I return to the kind of teenager I was ensconced in limerence, be it with a person or too-compelling idea, I’ve hit a codependent state and am looking for ways to enable it. The adult version is to belabor the story of how many years you’ve been with someone, or employ a cliche about not knowing who you’d be without them, or reflexively listing all of the services they provide you that justifies whatever you need them to.

I do not think you can truly be of service to other people if you’re unable or unwilling to figure your own shit out. What happens when someone you care about dies? They’re going to. Sooner than you think. Mostly sooner than you think because you never think about it. What happens if you get critically injured? I think about this one all the time. If I lose a hand, I’m thinking about how to get a chip that let’s me write with brain waves or a robot one that types faster than I ever could. The point is about looking forward and rooting in the idea that life, my life, is worth it for it’s own sake, despite what may happen or my inability to square my ideas with my actions in any given moment.

I think we collectively reel at the idea of abusing animals. We’re animals. We’re our own kind of confused, dumb, and helpless. Give yourself pets and treats. Find habits and ideas you can cuddle up next to. Ask yourself what the people who treat you best would do, and then if you’re doing the same for yourself. If not, that should give you pause. If you don’t have people treating you that well, that should inform some larger shifts in your behavior or priorities. They will become you way more than you’ll become them, because they don’t have a real and friendly relationship with themselves, so neither will you.

[1061] Superstar

I feel like I'm not sure how "anything" works. The ways in which my life semi-does all boil down to being alone, spending money, or having a conversation almost entirely by myself. This line makes sense to me. So did the ones before it. I can follow the sense they made onto more thoughts and sentences I hope describe an antagonizing feeling. I don't, precisely, know what I feel. I just know it's "off." I know the handful of thoughts about specific individuals or scenarios sounds "angry" or "shitty" or "judgmental" in my head. I'm frustrated, in a sense, with what I perceive to be so many people castrating themselves and acting like they don't have a choice.

I had one gentleman substitute his opioid addiction for a gambling one. The moment you reach the point in the discussion about what he can do, literally that second, delete the apps, he's arguing that he's done that before and just downloaded them again in the past. You know how you lift a weight once and then you can enter the body building competition?

I have one lady who is emerging as the queen of thinking herself in circles and refusing to follow any conclusion through, even after she notices a change in how she feels when she half-ass does so. Each week a version of the same conversation that's not, in reality, a conversation at all. It's a merry-go-round.

I have my "healthiest" people get their boundaries or ideals tested in the lightest of ways, and newer, more nuanced, but still addictive coping mechanisms come in to pile layers of what feels like needless complexity on enough problems already. And often enough, that complexity manifesting as a new man in their life. That is, when it's not an old man professing to be a new man.

I have friends, literal counselors, who get themselves on the verge of heart attacks and abject depressive chaos, endlessly doubling down on the exact wrong behaviors they're literally supposed to be capable of counseling others away from.

I have a lingering absurd scenario I'm growing more desperately desirous of bringing some resolution that seems to threaten my last bastion of what I thought could be the basis of at least one stable friendship in my life.

It makes the idea of "helping" or "trying" feel so shallow if not altogether hallow if it doesn't speak primarily to how you wish to help and try in service to yourself. Perhaps I'm just "lucky" I've done the work in that regard.

Another week, and especially now that I'm leaving some of these groups, the adulation is pouring in. How? How am I helping? I'm making you think? I'm calling you on your shit? I'm friendly and non-judgmental enough to keep you talking? I want to believe I'm helping, but in a major way, the problem isn't something I can fix. Life fucking sucks. It's a miserable place with death around every corner and most everyone and everything gives no fucks about you. You're prey to those in power. You're on the wrong end of the bell curve. You're sick, you're broke, and you're a blip on the ambivalent ass of existence. No shit you're an addict, what else could you possibly be? Surely a great many things, but addict first, right?

Even with "things" going "mostly" right or appreciably along a sense of stability, they're still shit. There's still plenty of suffering and absurdity and "stupid people" to be had. Oh, how my clients this week wished to complain about the stupid people! And then they get frustrated and want to smoke, or take it out on their kids, or flirt with their favorite path to self-destruction.

We need to wise up. I think the wisdom is bred from literal work on specific things we claim to believe. Our language is dog shit. It gives us glancing blows without landing the emotional umph that prompts behavior change. We're not working to talk better. We're not pairing our words with anything meaningfully manifested. We're not working to create a place that reflects effort, growth, and sanity. We're fucking around with memes. We're silent. We're complaining into the abyss on an ironic ride to hell.

I get so discouraged when I think about what it is I do to try and remain okay, and how long it took, and how many aspects still go miserably wrong all the time, and I'm supposed to translate that into digestible chunks for people maybe less equipped? It's not about being intelligent. It's that you have to functionally turn your lived experience into something people can have faith in. Then you have to, in turn, have faith it'll translate and stick? That's fucking gross. I'm not operating on faith. I'm doing fucking work. I'm trying to be accountable by literally counting words and time and money spent to achieve things. You have to reduce all the work you're doing into sentiments that can land on ears that don't speak your language. You're talking about exercising muscles they don't realize they have and which tremble against the wind.

 
With our infinite capacity to reimagine and interpret, what am I even saying to people? Sometimes they'll start a sentence with, "Like you said…" and proceed to say none of anything I've ever said, but damn are they enthusiastic about what it meant to them! What on Earth am I supposed to make of that? What could they possibly be hearing if they're willing, enthusiastically so, to continue "coping" in the easiest and most familiar ways after YEARS of being shown, and testifying to how they've been shown, how it's harmful, unproductive, and not in line with their values? It's ways that keep them sad, unmotivated, defensive, and yet proud to…play along?

"We're all addicted to something."

No. This is one of a thousand pithy sayings used as an excuse to feel better about what you're addicted to. The lack of control, therefore responsibility, is the point, not the deep desire to repeat something. I'm not addicted to writing, or eating, or picking scabs. I'm not addicted to TV or my go-it-alone "fuck you" attitude, or any food I thoroughly enjoy. Pretty much every single time I find myself getting lost or getting tempted to absolve myself of an awareness of my complicity or responsibility, it pops up here, at least to the extent anyone can pull themselves back.

Our cultural psychosis isn't an addiction. It's a mental health crisis to be sure. There's an infinite array of negative self-destructive feedback cycles we dip in and out of. But we're in severe denial about how many times we're capable of doing or saying "more" or something "better." I don't allow you to be held-harmless like you're at the peak violent throes of an addiction. You know damn well what's your fault, what's in your control, and what you're attempting to excuse and distance yourself from. You're not calculating a brilliant strategic approach, you're a pussy and a liar and you refuse to allow yourself to hate that about you as viscerally as it needs to be felt in order to change.

I'm no more willing to invite the vast majority of fights offered to me than I am willing to get sucked into the black hole at the center of anyone's individual universe. That doesn't stop me from recognizing my fight, my playing field, or my goals. Here's another 1,244 reps.

[1017] Sweet Nothings

Oh wow, it’s that rare morning blog because I fell asleep at 6PM yesterday and have therefore been up since about 2AM. I need to rush this and get moving as I still work today and get to see The Punch Brothers and Bela Fleck this evening.

Yesterday, two of my clients were in crisis. This is one way of describing their negative experience that was imploring me to help or fix. One seemed to be flirting with suicide after his recent relapse doubled-over on itself the last few weeks, causing his wife to leave him. The other was in a horrific accident, breaking several bones and requiring multiple surgeries and plates to repair. Both have been without their medication.

When I said recently that I didn’t know what I was built for, I can’t recall if I alluded to working the sensitive power dynamics of DCS, but the situations that arose today are analogous. People, literally begging, me to be the only one who can help them. You stay patient as they cuss. You hear the hopelessness and exhaustion in their voice. You find the words to downplay the insistence that they consider you a “friend.” You make sure to not enable the self-pitying dialogue that feeds escalation.

And on an entirely different level, I’m just turned off by the whole thing. The frustration I think a lot of people have with addicts is that, when times aren’t so dramatic and out of control, the actual work of getting better gets ignored. Then, a crisis hits, and it’s not just bad, but it’s almost perfectly situated to target and try to tear down those who are trying to help. No one can do the work for you, and sometimes the work is finding the civility to suffer as though you have any respect for how you can make others do so.

I feel angry when people who have, seemingly dozens of reasons, to better themselves or push and try harder, fall off quicker than I might in service to something “dumb” or “simple” like amassing “fuck you” points or engaging in some other form of indulgence. The amount of effort and energy it takes to be a dramatic whirlwind of chaos that sucks everyone else up into you would be impressive if it weren’t a disaster.

This is where I think people so unfairly pigeon-holed me in describing my “negativity” years ago. What did I do with all of my negative commentary or sentiment? Show up, work, build, and look for a way out. I invited the conversation still no one wishes to have. I didn’t destroy myself with an eye towards bringing you down with me. I say a fair amount of forlorn and angsty despotic things, but I hold no genuine pity for myself or situation until I’m incredibly sick. I’m always looking for the way out, the joke, or the opportunity to genuinely address or fix whatever the problem is.

And I don’t know how to conceive of that propensity as anything more than a choice first. If an addict is simply someone who can’t conceive of themselves as making choices, it’s perhaps more innocent when the behavior reaches aberrantly destructive and hateful places. One then must wonder if they are capable of choosing their apologies, choosing the occupations under which to work themselves to death, or choosing to “reduce harm” in signing up for a program that has a remote chance of obligating them towards practices that enable mindful choices.

The “saints” and “I couldn’t do what you do-ers are hailed for their patience and compassion. There’s a routine “thank you for your service” kind of pageantry when people learn that you’re in counseling or other forms of social work. People know, deeply, how much they’re their own kind of addict or infinite excuse-making and selfish being, and that core belief prompts a reflexive burst of “thank you!” or “good on ya!” guilt management system response. So many in the field have been victimized themselves, and whether they actually know how to or not, they want to prevent others from going through what they had to, or give them tools that worked for them.

But there’s a mismatch. People have to go through, in a most important sense, things alone. You have to discover what it means and feels like to choose something. You have to own your pain and feelings. The “tools” for doing so manifest as you exercise the incorporative and corrective behavior. I’m practicing patience and processing and “coping with anger” as I write this. Waves of calm or resolution wash over me when I finish something that needed said. When I want to break, I say so, and like “magic” that breaking point turns into fuel for the spite engine or clarity that allows me to go eat or start my day.

This is work. This is at least the 1,017^th time I’ve worked on my patience, anger, angst, judgmental attitude, and perspective that makes me want to burn everything down and pretend something “new” is in fact that or worthwhile. I don’t just recognize there’s a difference between my mirror-neurons reaction and my choices, I’m literally practicing the differentiated nature of my being as I type.

The social work field is a place where you have to exist in the suspended state of your uneven clients. They don’t know who they are or what they’re capable of. They have strong conceptions of what they can destroy, lie about, or how power can only work against them. And you have to press right up against them and whisper about the thousand competing narratives and opportunities every moment a mere choice away. When they swing so wildly the opposite direction, it’s hard not to think less of them than you might your pet. What kind of wild animal doesn’t just charge its caretaker, but does so as a matter of routine or pride? What kind of animal kills itself?

How many of you have occupied a role in which people have begged you? I remember begging my mom not to gut my stuffed-animal friend. I associate that level of helplessness with one of the most severe trauma-inducing moments of my life. I was also like 4 or 5, and the argument about how helpless I genuinely was could hold up. Is that what these situations ask of me? Am I to reduce people to helpless children in how I conceive of what I might do to “help?” Does that not feel incredibly perverse or egotistical?

No one resolved my situation but me. I talked about it. I joked about it. I wrote about it until I no longer had an emotional response when thinking about it. I feel the hollowness and echo of how cold the world can be, and arm myself with the knowledge that it’s there and ready for when I need it. I don’t operate from a place that everyone I meet is ready to kill me or my friends. I don’t pretend like isolated horrors tell a comprehensive story of my being or humanity. This, again, begs the question of what to make of any individual’s awareness and approach to their addiction or “addiction” broadly as a concept.

I conceive of most people as addicted to bullshit. They can’t help but abscond with the truth; they do it fluidly and reflexively. They lie like they breathe and then lie about others’ ability to see it. They’re addicted to silence. It’s the first clue you’re full of shit when you can’t talk about everything right or wrong with you. Or, more insidiously, you only talk about what’s wrong with you as deep cover for bullshitting yourself about the responsibility you won’t take to do better. The endless rehearsed reiteration of all the past drama gets stuck on repeat. “The only reason” you do this or that pretending to be reasonable. I feel most powerful in the moments you betray how full of shit you are, and it’s why I have almost no respect for authority. It’s incredibly rare to hear someone talk with measured qualifying statements verses proud pontificating of “the rules” or their righteousness letting ignorant dictums do the work instead of practicing accountability.

I hate conceiving of the positive things my clients tell me as lies. It’s annoying to hear “I really think you make a difference” from someone contemplating suicide 2 days later. I don’t want to be texted “Why the fuck did I leave the house just to not get help” from someone 2 hours ago saying “I’m glad it’s you who called me.” I’m over the, “You seem like you actually care!” sentiments from people who don’t seem to care about themselves. That is, they don’t practice the things I tell them I do to care about myself and that we’ve learned scientifically can foster care and investment in yourself where you previously couldn’t. Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar screaming in my head, “Save yourselves!”

[905] Kick The Habit

I'm fucking frustrated. I have no real problems, so I get to hyper-focus on the little things that disrupt my perfect circumstances. I'm looking, again, for another car. Cars are generally several thousand dollars. Every last fuck online has zero concept of how modern banking works and the ability to pay with a credit card. They're smug about their cash insistence. They're short and offer opinions on how scammy it sounds to expect them to have a bank account.

It's invariably deeper than that. It's the “easy” things going awry generally that keep me pissed off. At work, I'm a “counselor” for drug addicts. As a center, we don't have the “easy” things in place to provide even the basic structure and routine we're implicitly expected to demonstrate for a class of people who struggle with holding accountable routines. The vast majority don't have the “basics” in place, before pick-your-dumpster-fire scenario enters their life. Whether it's basics in terms of budgeting or peek behind the curtain of consequences of “critical thinking.” A good portion of my day is insisting we practice breathing.

A theme for the last few weeks has been presenting itself. Those that are “good” or “better” are routinely attacked. It's not some righteous battle where the lesser fools insist on humility and a comprehensive accounting. It's the sea of resentment that must be actively combated in order for anything worthwhile to last or register in the first place. Having a goal makes you a target. Being able opens you up to an endless attack, not even just from the outside. You get to undermine yourself and find every damning assessment and insecurity more compelling than any step forward.

In the many years I've internalized a sense of my being and described the kind of world I feel like I'm obligated to creating, I still haven't learned how to square that with how infinitely destructive I view the context which I'm working within. I try to bring a little life and access to information to my door? Cue the shit-talking nurse about what is or is not supposed to be on doors. Just...because? (I put pictures of books on my door and offer them as free downloads at work. The gossip train clued me into that apparently rubbing someone the wrong way.)

So infinitely petty, yet I find it so infinitely objectionable it gets to be a piece of my breakdown. I'm not curious of her motives. I'm not intrigued by her decision making. She's just another piece of compulsively shitting on things that are good, potentially useful, and indicative of an intention to give and try in spite of circumstances that are less than ideal.

It's been over a month since I made my case for the hiring bonus I'm absolutely owed. I know they don't care about me. I knew that coming in. So, I'm fighting. I'm reminding. I'm patiently biding my time, looking for other jobs at the same time, and trying to figure out just how much room I'm going to give myself in un-earned overtime and time spent watching Excel training videos to quell how sick it makes me to jump from one incidentally monetarily useful expenditure of my time to the next. It was 3 weeks before I was shouldering other counselors' work. I already know the path to being able to do even more.

I never seem to matter outside of the incredibly small bubbles I try to create for myself. In my bubble I build things. In my bubble there's buffers and a coherent through-line towards one or more coinciding ends. My bubble, which I was hell-bent on securing, if nothing else, costs about $300 a month to live in before I need to sacrifice “comforts.” I get exhausted leaving my bubble. Any city feels like a “big” one, with too many people doing too much nothing, and waiting to offer their ill-advised “thought” about what it is I wish to do or who I think I am.

You know you don't even need a license to be the level of counselor I am? Do you know what it feels like to create from a hodgepodge of psychology literature I've found useful insta-group discussion topics and activities that people are raving about to their licensed counselor who then asks me just what it is I'm doing that's so worthy of such enthusiasm? The bar feels too low. The suggestion is that our systems of educating and licensing are not doing the easy or bare-minimum things in how they're conveying information or why.

I doubt this transitions well, but I've never found “it could always be worse” thinking useful. Maybe it couldn't. Maybe it's as bad as it can be or has ever been, but no individual is going to have the ability to see so by definition. It's a hopeless kind of thinking. It roots you in the misery and simultaneously disengages your agency to do anything about it. It could always be worse? What's worse than you being a useless sack of shit throwing up your arms and resigning yourself to fate? That sounds like the worst to me. That sounds like you actually crave something worse to experience so you can let yourself off the hook for how pathetic you're currently behaving. No, there's nothing worse than absolving yourself of the fallout of inaction and inattention. The asshole that says “it could always be worse” is merely saying, “At least I don't feel responsible for it.”

I think at some level the tide is turning on the hapless victim complexes. Twitter still gets its way occasionally, but practically it's sinking in that none of our hands are really clean, and the exhilaration of religious fervor for any idea is its own kind of self-destructive addiction. “Addiction,” is a loaded word too, with very little needle movement on how we come to understand it culturally. I speak of addiction as “compulsion,” because the science tells me so. I don't call an addicted brain “degenerative.” I think abusing your compulsion in service to bad shit is what degenerates it. It's working just fine, with horribly inappropriate tools.

I still compulsively clench. I still compulsively hate. I still compulsively rack my brain for a moment's release from the thought that I'm miserably failing myself and future prospects by not either getting viciously efficient about money or ruthless in exploiting people. Mine would be the wide-eyed pure kind of evil pursuit though. I wouldn't compulsively try to tear things down. I'd be deliberately dismantling that which I don't respect enough to believe it deserves to exist. It'd be cartoonish villainy born from misguided pride and resentment more refined and justified than that of the unwashed masses. It would also be exhausting and counterproductive.

I know somewhere not-that-deep in my psyche I keep myself at a certain level of debt to trigger my “practical” sense that protects me from aggressively employing my other inclinations. I have many years under my belt that affirm my capacity to sit and save and survive on 1/10th of what I've been making the last 3 years. Sometimes when I say out loud how long I've spent doing certain jobs I find it hard to believe. 2 years at DCS? 1 year delivering food? 3 years piecing together this land into something I look forward to returning to each day? 14 years making errant appeals to get organized and budgeted into transcendent shared goals? 17 years writing about how to make sense of my place at any given point in space and time? I haven't gone anywhere, I've just continued to incorporate more tools. I've just watched myself do exactly as I told you I would.

Who cares? I don't lol. I care about so few, so little, and less every day. When that changes, the thought of having too much money, access, or responsibility won't feel like a matter-of-fact manifest destiny atop the bodies of the savage and unworthy. Maybe it would feel like I got a tool I could actually use in the right circumstance for the right job. Until then, just like the growing stockpile of expensive toys I can employ to build something – one day – I'll sit, and wait for the rain to clear, or the cost to go down, or until I find more someones it feels worth working in service to.