I hope this one does the trick. For weeks I've felt like I'm floundering. I can't commit to the process of finding a job. I can't feel "more serious" about pursuing my hobbies or side-projects that might eek out a means of profitability with enough investment and focus. I can't justify sitting back and just watching TV or looking for the next show to attend. My mind has been all over the place, and for someone who exists with that as a standing condition of existence, it's felt acutely elevated.
Evidence of this state of mind is me making a doctor's appointment. I don't really know anything about ADHD beyond the amount of kids I came across with the diagnosis and the increasing cultural awareness of the behaviors associated with it. So much of it is as familiar to me as the feelings of when I read/learned about autism. I've never been one to much care for many people's claims regarding a diagnosis or the implications that followed. The more I start to meet "pathological" impediments to my sense of well-being or capacity to get shit done, the more my sympathies grow.
I discussed recently how I can manage well-enough with structure. In a closed-enough environment with rules and consistency, it can be really easy to downplay or ignore what about you that looks to derail. Most jobs pretty much insist you have to get up at a certain time, pay attention to the commute, fall within the guidelines for behavior to not get fired, and keep the threat of not keeping the bills paid hot enough to justify indefinite suffering or excuses. The longer I go left to my own devices, I feel consequences of a lack of structure compound.
One way that happens is the "drama" of the space between doing things gets elevated. If I'm not otherwise plugged into something, it lends itself to irrational negative emotion. This gets complicated further because I'm, on the whole, generally muted emotionally. Whether we want to chalk that up to a learned behavior trauma response to my upbringing, autism, or deliberately cultivated practice given age, wisdom, and the nature of my professional responsibilities, I'm willing to entertain it's all that and more. Practically, it means I will never be persuaded by the "passion" or "depression" or "anxiety" or "angry" that others claim moves or motivates their behavior.
In fact, particularly with the word "passion," I regularly discuss how much I hate that fucking word and how stupid or misleading I think it is. It's employed to downplay the circumstances and privileges that enable someone to pursue one route over another. When you don't have these swings in emotion, very little signals to you to change, dramatically or otherwise, whatever you're currently doing. I'd like to believe it makes a certain amount of sense the reasons I build through writing and conversation to do one thing over another. Whether or not that's the case you only care to the extent it affects or entertains you.
Broadly speaking, you're not invested in my well-being because you have your own life and things to suffer and barely figure out as well. That sentence feels like a major part of "the rub."
I feel myself envying anyone with a community. Even shitty communities, there's a sense of togetherness, belonging, understanding, and consistency that I sorely lack in my day-to-day. For most of my life, I've felt explicitly on the outside playing observer to how people treat each other, what you're "supposed to" say, or trying to figure out what "really matters" in the dynamic.
If I thought to myself, "How do you get a girlfriend?" No exaggeration, 9 out of 10 relationships I would observe would be explicitly abusive. No, not everyone was beating the shit out of their girlfriend, but yes, both parties were using emotionally manipulative and personally guilt-inducing behavior to maintain that dynamic. In fact, the older I get and the more I've watched relationships maintain or falter, it's not like that pattern has gone away, but the "healthiest" couples realize, maybe in their mid-to-late 30s that they have been behaving in those fucked up ways towards each other and start therapy.
This kind of disconnect permeates pretty much every level of my life. I'm not, nor have ever been, "normal." Yes, I exist like all things, and there is nothing new under the sun. I'm not claiming "special." I'm claiming "aberrant" or "noticeably and consistently different." I'm the only Vulcan on board. There's a whole fucking planet of Vulcan's, but I'm the only one on my particular ship.
This means when I sit here, contemplative, with a level of "anxiety" that I will never score higher than a 1 or 2 on a scale from 1 to 10, I may or may not address that by a dogged pursuit to "fix" what is probably 10 different things nagging that at one time. I've been paying extra attention to how all-over-the-place my mind is when I've got nothing in particular I care to focus on. I can start vacuuming in the middle of making a sandwich. I'll start a movie in the middle of another paused show.
Incidentally, as I finished that last line, my dad calls me and we talk for a half hour.
My dad is my most consistent force in my life. When people are acting like complete shit-heads, I'm not looking over my shoulder for my dad to fuck my life up or take advantage of me or threaten my safety like my "best friend." When I talk about the projects on the land I wish to focus on or when I needed to get things done to make the house livable, like how I imagine some people's friends and families work, he offered and continues to offer to come down and help me. If I were to strip away a lot of the nonsense related to my approach to work or fantastic dreams and what I am or am not doing every day in service to them, it makes an incredible amount of sense for me to spend more time in the region with him trying to grow the gravesite cleaning and yard work business.
My closest friends continue to maintain different forms of distance. They have their own families and paradigms. Very much to his credit, I do believe Hussain would help me with a project on the land and has offered to do so. That's not, like, the only or most important criterion for whether or not I can call someone friend, but it's akin to the question of "Who helps you move?"
Who enables your expression and embodied physical manifestations of space? The drywall in my house was a result of my dad helping. My nice electric guitar my dad again. He's also the most frequent one coming along to shows. The..whatever's left of it…garden outside and room extension have everything to do with Allie. The vehicles that have gotten me all over the midwest have been worked on, for free, or bought from Hussain. Jess, Hussain, Brandy, and before the break Byron came to shows. That's pretty much my network of people I see or interact with in person with any remote regularity until I get a job and meet coworkers with no desire to unionize or talk about anything that helps us transcend our capture.
I also feel like it's not for lack of effort or compromise that I find myself most-often alone and wondering what to do next. I've tried to start the regular meetups with not just the people from college, but different coworkers over the years and with Hussain and Byron. Whether it's just to grab a drink or hit the bowling alley, or see a movie. I want to be clear, it's not that I can't or can "never" persuade people to hang out or chill, but doing so is distinctly not the priority. One might disingenuously personalize and take it a step further to consider themselves the lack of priority, and while that is practically true, it's not an honest way to comprehensively understand the dynamic. People care about themselves waaaaay before they "don't care" about you or what you're up to.
The psychology of this is spoken to by too many things to account for. We blame the isolating echo-chambers online. We can point to the dire economic situation where "the jobs report is improving" has nothing to do with even the concept of a living wage, savings, or what it means to live day-to-day. You have dedicated institutions meant to obscure how we talk about or understand how to "fix" anything, and overwhelmingly you meet people who are just exhausted and adopting versions of "slave ethics" in order to cope and squeeze what little positivity they can out of their circumstances. If that comes with waterfalls of denial, compulsive abuse, or sweet smelling stories of personal dignity and direction, all the more comfortably they sit with no one bothering to notice or care how they play out.
I think about the conversation I got into with Smash, and at one point I said something that triggered "that face" that people get when they are convinced you can't be persuaded or have said something so egregious they both feel sorry for you, angry at themselves, and abjectly hopeless in considering there was a point to beginning the exchange at all. What, of course, separates a Smash from a regular person is that she pushed through it and we found a better place to resolve whatever the discrepancy was at the time. That's a special capacity and awareness we don't practice culturally. If we're already suffering, working incredibly hard to deny or downplay it, what purpose does more serve?
I put it to you that I'm just an extension of my circumstances first. Before I can ever attempt to "personalize" something or claim some power of "will" and freedom to express it, I'm just reporting on the cold, the silence, the self-reports, and variations on the theme of "I'm confused and struggling." I'm not a lowly detached desperate-for-any-kind-of community person flinging out theories about how life works or doesn't. I'm reflecting on my own, not-comfortable-enough or not-comfortable-in-the-right-ways circumstances as well as the literally thousands of pieces of input I've received professionally.
I think there is a palpably different experience between "life is hard" sentiments and "there's a concerted effort to keep you feeling empty and desperate." I think we're suffering the latter. I don't think it's precisely a "conspiracy," but I do think it has a lot to do with us losing a sense of honesty and ownership regarding what we allow to pass as acceptable from each other. I think we're like Byron, allowing the consequences of our behavior to pull guns on each other, and without irony or malice, remain perfectly baffled about what we should be expected to do to be accountable to that.
The "middle-ground" Nazis play the same role. The vast majority of Germans were not in the S.S. or filling up mass graves. They were still Nazis. Apologists for Trump, fascism broadly, religiously-motivated persecutors, and every single time you point your finger before you recognize your own hand plays the same instrument. This is how people get so comfortable ignoring atrocious behavior. At absolute bottom, they know they're doing the same thing. Or, they know they don't care.
"I'm not doing the same thing!" You protest. No, you're not butt-fucking children, but you thought about it, because I just typed it. You didn't enjoy the thought, but the more specific I get about that old Catholic dick inching towards that blonde-haired innocent little booty hole, I take over your mind. Your infinite sea of ridiculous and random thoughts is a source of infinite guilt, denial, distraction, and confusion by default.
If you expose yourself to information often enough, you might think to yourself, "Man, I have a problem with how often I think about butt-fucking children? Does that make me a pedofile?" Of course not, you just work at DCS. The problem is not the thought in and of itself, as any meditative practice will teach you. The problem is not recognizing how much your environment is disconnecting you from a feeling or capacity to get your thoughts organized and acted upon. You're being intruded on. But, worse, you're intruding on yourself with algorithm-assisted means to make you feel good about it.
The best person who has ever existed is still a mammal, a person, and completely fallible in the ways you are. What better way, Jesus story, to comprehensively justify and placate all "sin?" You are born, often enough, into a culture that insists you don't question the dictates of your prophet, lord and saviour, or all-powerful "mysterious force" that absolutely must "make sense" when infinity is over. It's an analogy for your infinite potential. It's a way to not fall into literal insanity trying to calculate the combinatorial explosion that is existence.
Say I return to my younger self. Say I ask "innocent" questions like a child would and tried to analyze the current landscape in front of me. "How do I be an adult?" Take a job that doesn't pay enough, fall into debt for literally any reason, but definitely for school, health issues, and car or mortgage payments. "What does it mean to love your family?" Put up with them just flatly and consistently disrespecting you, from your sobriety to anything you've accomplished, and make sure you show up to any and all gatherings regardless of the gossipy hateful things that have been said and done every day in between. "What does it mean to be a 'good Christian or Muslim?'" Protect pedophiles, cheer Hamas, deny science, control women…
Our narratives are generated from broken internal systems. We don't identify how they break. We double down on mistakes until we turn them into virtues. We act confused and innocent when asshole autistic-types like me bite down on these discrepancies and shake them with as much or more religious conviction than you've ever experienced. Appeals to do things "differently" or "better" are viewed with hostility and suspicion. We'll find ourselves undermining others in their effort to do so just in how we talk about them. Extolling the pageantry over what practically happens.
Then, I need to come full-circle and figure out how to blame without blaming. I need to figure out what's the next piece to take responsibility for and hopefully more deliberately than not choose a course of action that accounts for how perpetually harmless you're going to hold yourself for our collective dynamic. Consolidating and sacrificing aren't optional for "things" to start changing for the better. We're not hungry, there's certainly plenty of food, but we're absolutely starving. We show up when it's "convenient" or if we're desperate, which means we're not showing up at all.
I need a robust network of both accountability and potential. I'm so at the mercy of that need that I've tolerated years of emotional abuse. I want friends so bad I'll talk about them in quotes for dozens of blogs for years and years before it sinks in they aren't friends. For every tool at my fingertips, I'm not inspiring anyone to join me, play music with me, build anything, or contribute in any way to the effort of creating a means to own the work we put into the world. It's not exactly that the more I look the less I find, but even some of these Upwork hires are helping me compare and contrast what they've accomplished in a few weeks compared to me and "my network" over years.
Intellectually, I'm comfortable with things constantly in flux. As a human, I would appreciate stability and predictability along certain metrics until the day I die. I don't ever want to be confused about the location and safety of my food. I don't want to feel like I'm gambling on whether or not I'll get to keep my stuff or have my house burn down to humble me and teach me the value of still being alive. I don't want to occupy an environment that's Mad Maxing every time I leave my house because the collective psychology is arrested by violence and in-group out-group primal instincts. We either drag what we want the future to be into the present, or we suffer the fallout of machinery that compiled all of the survival mechanisms naturally-selected to keep us alive so far. The infinite vacuum of space is "natural." Not good or bad by itself, but wholly antithetical to life as we know it or would prefer.
Showing posts with label Autism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Autism. Show all posts
Monday, December 18, 2023
Saturday, August 12, 2023
[1057] Distance
Today's feeling like it just might pass on by. I thought I might get up fairly early and do some work outside or more advance note prep. Instead I stayed in bed extra long. I got up and started reading some old blogs. I've made some coffee. I'm just in a kind of holding pattern until I hit the comedy club I hate tonight, Helium in Indianapolis.
My latest quasi-obsessive and frequently returned to thought is about getting an official autism diagnosis. In the blogs I was reading, I was searching for the key word "sociopath" and reading what I said about myself over time. I think the first time I ever mentioned it was in the 100s, 2007 or 2008, and pretty much every time I describe it as something learned or peg an example of how "not really" I could be described by it. Being "cold" or shutting down and methodically observing I've come to understand as forms of self-protection and coping. But, also, I suspect part of what felt so natural about doing so was me leaning into my natural pre-existing condition.
There's a universal theme in every piece of writing. Distance. I'm outside looking in and breaking down and try, desperately, to figure out the lesson or course of action or cause of events. I treat everything like there's some literal 1+1=2 going on, and it's an obligatory task and responsibility to input all of the variables. Where "people" or "the world" want to build a story about their relationship to math, I'm trying to do the math. They'll tell me, "Math is hard! I suck at math!" Then they'll stop. That's all they need. That's the important line in the narrative that explains why they will never attempt to do math again. It tells you they suck at math, and if you invite them to do it, you're telling them to feel like they suck or are helpless, confused, overwhelmed, or an infinite list of negative emotions associated with math.
I have a friend who is reflexively dismissive of getting a diagnosis. There's many reasons underlying her position I could extract just from my own observation of her relationship to her own health. She's half-heartedly argued about the greed and incoherence of the medical system which I'm sympathetic to, but I consider diminishingly ancillary points in lieu of my larger goal or the potential utility of the diagnosis. I don't want to be at the mercy of something I can't conceptualize more explicitly. I want to feel the potential and see the utility in ways I can't when I remain in the realm of speculation or strong suspicion. Circumstantial evidence has convicted many an innocent person.
You, apparently, don't know what it's like to be "stuck" in an observer state. Literally every single thing I may say or write is, seemingly by design, going to antagonize, threaten, question, or cause a level of psychological harm in a "normal" person. When you adopt similar attitude affects of trauma, it sends a false signal that we're more alike than we are or understand things in the same way. Being a general odd-ball who has learned how to play along invites hundreds of misreads and false hopes every week. You're hurt and feeling crass, so my jokes or demonstrative way of being register as a way to access your inchoate "realness" as you recover. Your insecurity gets betrayed when the cute-enough whore is effusively complimenting and appreciative of your presence, in all sincerity to be sure, but a robust long-term solidarity or bubbly attraction is incredibly unlikely to be maintained.
In my reading today, I read where I was feeling guilty when I noticed a girl was into me. I knew then, as I know even better today, people don't really recognize or see "me." What they like is what I've learned how to do, and that makes you feel all the more distant and like you have a responsibility to report more than be in the moment or appreciative someone's there with you. Because, are they? No, not really.
I can reliably and predictably do things in ways others can't even describe back to me. They just know they feel a certain way depending on what hat I'm wearing. I'm a really good professional counselor. I fuck up and say things in very messy ways rarely, and know how to account for them after I do. I see the face of "wheels turning" when I describe certain subjects certain ways. I see posture relax. I see smile cracks. I see head nods and notes getting taken. I recognize when the tone has shifted from combative defensiveness to acquiescing awareness. I suspect you won't find a single counselor at my company who would describe what they're doing as even 5% of what I put into a single paragraph. ::nods to Nietzsche::
Why would I say that? They tell me, and you, what they're doing as a form of professional narrative.
They're first and foremost "trying to help." "You don't get into this field unless you wish to help people." "You don't work here unless you're passionate about others or reducing harm." At DCS, "We all care about the children" very regardless of actual outcomes or behavior of our least qualified staff. They want to "provide services" and employ "therapeutic interventions." Every field has its propaganda because, at scale, the human condition requires the narrative, not the truth.
What am I doing as a counselor? I'm staying curious about what's true, or true-enough, for you to change in chosen ways. I'm looking to divorce you from as many cultural narratives as you can get your mind around, and hand back the notion of agency and accountability. That's an incredibly difficult and ridiculous task that takes a lifetime to get even a little good at. Every day, until you can train to occupy every moment, needs the affirmation. Every shade of gray or black in the latest attempt to bleach the scene needs acknowledged. Every poor choice of words that keeps us psychologically trapped needs challenged. A prolonged holistic impression of where and how each of us exists across time needs to be constructed, then deconstructed and reconstructed along metrics and choices that serve your values and needs. Practically, specifically, that looks like self-care, boundary discussions, self-reflective writing, and genuine expression of the depth of your feelings.
The last, maybe week or so, has started to make the nature of "the narrative of people at scale" clearer. I've attempted to analyze and compensate for aspects of my disillusion as well as what I perceive to be an emotional breakdown from my business partner. What's "more true" or "less wrong" about this point in time? Am I missing something important in how I describe people's reticence to actually, you know, do anything constructive about a problem? What forces are at play that make it hard for my partner to relax while I'm rocking out and hitting clubs? What should my approach be, professionally, personally, in this monolith of "basic" and consistent human tendencies if I'm not going to win, will never be in the club, and still desire some sense of accomplishment or belonging in an otherwise hostile or ambivalent space?
I could get a "perfect" team together, and as it grows or we increase caseloads, fundamental trends and truths of the human condition will take over. This is a blindness in people who rage against "systems" or belabor "isms" and "ists" in their human narrative "explanations" I'm tempted to conceive of as pure "placations." Our brains thrive on lazy short-hand in lieu of introspection. Pick any antagonist, you're always off the hook.
I want to spend a little more time on the idea of the space being "hostile." It is to me. Women describe hostile working conditions with unwanted sexual advances or threats to their professional prospects. Abusive households conform to implicit rules around the aggressors. The psychological boringness and pedantry of bureaucracy is intuitively designed to obscure the underlying violence of our under-examined behavior. I feel under attack, constantly. It doesn't seem like it, because your narrative, your culturally imposed and simplified "we all agreed to this" tells you I'm decently employed, own property, white, tall, powerful, straight, a man, etc. If I think I'm "smart" you have to hear "narcissist" or "manipulative." If I think I'm "right" you have to hear "defensive" or "complicit." If I think I'm wrong, you have to hear "guilty" or say to yourself, "I knew it!"
You have to.
That's the survival rule. You have to remain under the protective social and psychological shell or something akin to the whole of the universe starts to unravel.
Aren't I proof enough? Your "friends" will abandon you. You'll look combative. You'll seem angry and, most importantly, unjustifiably so. You'll seem restless and disorganized. You'll be a perpetual target for criticism for all of your "unrealistic" posturing. But mostly, you'll just make people feel uncomfortable, and they don't need anything fancy or more complicated than that to cut you off.
The real and proper psychopaths among us construct narratives more deliberately. They too have a narrative, but depending on just how aberrant an end it must conform to, the self-justified universe constructing just takes that much more reinforcing facts drawn from the depravity or misdirection of the culture writ-large. That's political propaganda. That's religious indoctrination. That's your favorite interview with a serial killer. The Unabomber got a lot of boring factoid prediction things right, and critical, relatively straight-forward, if not timeless, aspects of wisdom and accountability horrendously wrong. They all do.
When the goal is "try to help" or "provide resources" or "save" or make a habit of othering or blaming that "ist" or "ism" with psychopathic efficiency you arrive at the conclusion to an argument you weren't even aware you were making. Your fight or flight amygdala feels better, so, you win, always. You're correct, always. You're doing exactly what you say you're doing, always. Because "evidence" doesn't exist in the narrative. It's ideological possession. It's an existential exercise of bullshit.
As such my, or any, writing, in that it exists at all, is a threat. If you write about yourself, you'll start to discover things you weren't so good at noticing beforehand whether you wished to learn them or not. You'll be killing yourself. You'll be concurrently failing to mourn the parts that are dying. Who's doing that shit? You literally exist as a substate of the collective narrative. You have no conception of yourself or what exists beyond it. The acid trip went horribly or you were too scared to try it in the first place. The moments you tried to be brave and ask a question or stick your head out you were summarily dismissed or whipped. You don't know where to get the tools and those alleged to have them hurt you even more with their narratives. Someone, please, pass the heroin.
I was under a powerful narrative delusion about who my friends were or what they were supposed to mean to me. I'm certain I still am, but not in the way that's going to stay my hand anymore.
I'm lucky that, if I'm technically "disabled," I think that I'm literally unable to experience the addictive identity crisis which makes analysis like this functionally impossible. I'm lucky that if I'm going to be condemned to obsess about anything, at least it won't be trying to hide or accelerate my destruction. My order is your disorder. My literal ordering of my thoughts and deliberate conducting of myself in the world makes you "hate" "me" until something breaks you or you discover some "safe" way to break yourself.
The number one thing I hear feedback wise from my clients is, "You seem like you give a shit." Whatever else they say, it generally summarizes and condenses into that sentiment. In their-narrative-speak there's terms like "seem" and "give" as though what I'm doing is "only" an "impression" or that "shit" is something tangibly handed out. In my world, I ask them deliberate questions. I share the most explicit understanding of my perspective in analogous situations. I write. I go to shows. I build my house. I buy toys that make me happy. I practice skills that keep me from getting "stuck" in stories that make me want to kill myself or others.
I seem like I give a shit? I don't. I don't care what I "seem" like. I don't know what you mean by "shit." I'm not giving you anything but an opportunity to answer a question you haven't asked in your own muddy terms. I wish to live in an environment that isn't trying to kill me for being accountable or doing shit that makes the most sense. I wish to achieve my goals without wasting so much time trying to translate idiot-proof things (to other autistic-types), but act as insurmountable barriers when the cultural narrative can't conceive of what I'm talking about. I don't wish you harm. I'm rooting for you. "You seem" doesn't mean anything to me, just like all of my behavior, example setting, work, or blogs don't mean anything to you. You're not practicing like I'm practicing. I'm not talking like you're talking. In fact, you're not talking at all.
My latest quasi-obsessive and frequently returned to thought is about getting an official autism diagnosis. In the blogs I was reading, I was searching for the key word "sociopath" and reading what I said about myself over time. I think the first time I ever mentioned it was in the 100s, 2007 or 2008, and pretty much every time I describe it as something learned or peg an example of how "not really" I could be described by it. Being "cold" or shutting down and methodically observing I've come to understand as forms of self-protection and coping. But, also, I suspect part of what felt so natural about doing so was me leaning into my natural pre-existing condition.
There's a universal theme in every piece of writing. Distance. I'm outside looking in and breaking down and try, desperately, to figure out the lesson or course of action or cause of events. I treat everything like there's some literal 1+1=2 going on, and it's an obligatory task and responsibility to input all of the variables. Where "people" or "the world" want to build a story about their relationship to math, I'm trying to do the math. They'll tell me, "Math is hard! I suck at math!" Then they'll stop. That's all they need. That's the important line in the narrative that explains why they will never attempt to do math again. It tells you they suck at math, and if you invite them to do it, you're telling them to feel like they suck or are helpless, confused, overwhelmed, or an infinite list of negative emotions associated with math.
I have a friend who is reflexively dismissive of getting a diagnosis. There's many reasons underlying her position I could extract just from my own observation of her relationship to her own health. She's half-heartedly argued about the greed and incoherence of the medical system which I'm sympathetic to, but I consider diminishingly ancillary points in lieu of my larger goal or the potential utility of the diagnosis. I don't want to be at the mercy of something I can't conceptualize more explicitly. I want to feel the potential and see the utility in ways I can't when I remain in the realm of speculation or strong suspicion. Circumstantial evidence has convicted many an innocent person.
You, apparently, don't know what it's like to be "stuck" in an observer state. Literally every single thing I may say or write is, seemingly by design, going to antagonize, threaten, question, or cause a level of psychological harm in a "normal" person. When you adopt similar attitude affects of trauma, it sends a false signal that we're more alike than we are or understand things in the same way. Being a general odd-ball who has learned how to play along invites hundreds of misreads and false hopes every week. You're hurt and feeling crass, so my jokes or demonstrative way of being register as a way to access your inchoate "realness" as you recover. Your insecurity gets betrayed when the cute-enough whore is effusively complimenting and appreciative of your presence, in all sincerity to be sure, but a robust long-term solidarity or bubbly attraction is incredibly unlikely to be maintained.
In my reading today, I read where I was feeling guilty when I noticed a girl was into me. I knew then, as I know even better today, people don't really recognize or see "me." What they like is what I've learned how to do, and that makes you feel all the more distant and like you have a responsibility to report more than be in the moment or appreciative someone's there with you. Because, are they? No, not really.
I can reliably and predictably do things in ways others can't even describe back to me. They just know they feel a certain way depending on what hat I'm wearing. I'm a really good professional counselor. I fuck up and say things in very messy ways rarely, and know how to account for them after I do. I see the face of "wheels turning" when I describe certain subjects certain ways. I see posture relax. I see smile cracks. I see head nods and notes getting taken. I recognize when the tone has shifted from combative defensiveness to acquiescing awareness. I suspect you won't find a single counselor at my company who would describe what they're doing as even 5% of what I put into a single paragraph. ::nods to Nietzsche::
Why would I say that? They tell me, and you, what they're doing as a form of professional narrative.
They're first and foremost "trying to help." "You don't get into this field unless you wish to help people." "You don't work here unless you're passionate about others or reducing harm." At DCS, "We all care about the children" very regardless of actual outcomes or behavior of our least qualified staff. They want to "provide services" and employ "therapeutic interventions." Every field has its propaganda because, at scale, the human condition requires the narrative, not the truth.
What am I doing as a counselor? I'm staying curious about what's true, or true-enough, for you to change in chosen ways. I'm looking to divorce you from as many cultural narratives as you can get your mind around, and hand back the notion of agency and accountability. That's an incredibly difficult and ridiculous task that takes a lifetime to get even a little good at. Every day, until you can train to occupy every moment, needs the affirmation. Every shade of gray or black in the latest attempt to bleach the scene needs acknowledged. Every poor choice of words that keeps us psychologically trapped needs challenged. A prolonged holistic impression of where and how each of us exists across time needs to be constructed, then deconstructed and reconstructed along metrics and choices that serve your values and needs. Practically, specifically, that looks like self-care, boundary discussions, self-reflective writing, and genuine expression of the depth of your feelings.
The last, maybe week or so, has started to make the nature of "the narrative of people at scale" clearer. I've attempted to analyze and compensate for aspects of my disillusion as well as what I perceive to be an emotional breakdown from my business partner. What's "more true" or "less wrong" about this point in time? Am I missing something important in how I describe people's reticence to actually, you know, do anything constructive about a problem? What forces are at play that make it hard for my partner to relax while I'm rocking out and hitting clubs? What should my approach be, professionally, personally, in this monolith of "basic" and consistent human tendencies if I'm not going to win, will never be in the club, and still desire some sense of accomplishment or belonging in an otherwise hostile or ambivalent space?
I could get a "perfect" team together, and as it grows or we increase caseloads, fundamental trends and truths of the human condition will take over. This is a blindness in people who rage against "systems" or belabor "isms" and "ists" in their human narrative "explanations" I'm tempted to conceive of as pure "placations." Our brains thrive on lazy short-hand in lieu of introspection. Pick any antagonist, you're always off the hook.
I want to spend a little more time on the idea of the space being "hostile." It is to me. Women describe hostile working conditions with unwanted sexual advances or threats to their professional prospects. Abusive households conform to implicit rules around the aggressors. The psychological boringness and pedantry of bureaucracy is intuitively designed to obscure the underlying violence of our under-examined behavior. I feel under attack, constantly. It doesn't seem like it, because your narrative, your culturally imposed and simplified "we all agreed to this" tells you I'm decently employed, own property, white, tall, powerful, straight, a man, etc. If I think I'm "smart" you have to hear "narcissist" or "manipulative." If I think I'm "right" you have to hear "defensive" or "complicit." If I think I'm wrong, you have to hear "guilty" or say to yourself, "I knew it!"
You have to.
That's the survival rule. You have to remain under the protective social and psychological shell or something akin to the whole of the universe starts to unravel.
Aren't I proof enough? Your "friends" will abandon you. You'll look combative. You'll seem angry and, most importantly, unjustifiably so. You'll seem restless and disorganized. You'll be a perpetual target for criticism for all of your "unrealistic" posturing. But mostly, you'll just make people feel uncomfortable, and they don't need anything fancy or more complicated than that to cut you off.
The real and proper psychopaths among us construct narratives more deliberately. They too have a narrative, but depending on just how aberrant an end it must conform to, the self-justified universe constructing just takes that much more reinforcing facts drawn from the depravity or misdirection of the culture writ-large. That's political propaganda. That's religious indoctrination. That's your favorite interview with a serial killer. The Unabomber got a lot of boring factoid prediction things right, and critical, relatively straight-forward, if not timeless, aspects of wisdom and accountability horrendously wrong. They all do.
When the goal is "try to help" or "provide resources" or "save" or make a habit of othering or blaming that "ist" or "ism" with psychopathic efficiency you arrive at the conclusion to an argument you weren't even aware you were making. Your fight or flight amygdala feels better, so, you win, always. You're correct, always. You're doing exactly what you say you're doing, always. Because "evidence" doesn't exist in the narrative. It's ideological possession. It's an existential exercise of bullshit.
As such my, or any, writing, in that it exists at all, is a threat. If you write about yourself, you'll start to discover things you weren't so good at noticing beforehand whether you wished to learn them or not. You'll be killing yourself. You'll be concurrently failing to mourn the parts that are dying. Who's doing that shit? You literally exist as a substate of the collective narrative. You have no conception of yourself or what exists beyond it. The acid trip went horribly or you were too scared to try it in the first place. The moments you tried to be brave and ask a question or stick your head out you were summarily dismissed or whipped. You don't know where to get the tools and those alleged to have them hurt you even more with their narratives. Someone, please, pass the heroin.
I was under a powerful narrative delusion about who my friends were or what they were supposed to mean to me. I'm certain I still am, but not in the way that's going to stay my hand anymore.
I'm lucky that, if I'm technically "disabled," I think that I'm literally unable to experience the addictive identity crisis which makes analysis like this functionally impossible. I'm lucky that if I'm going to be condemned to obsess about anything, at least it won't be trying to hide or accelerate my destruction. My order is your disorder. My literal ordering of my thoughts and deliberate conducting of myself in the world makes you "hate" "me" until something breaks you or you discover some "safe" way to break yourself.
The number one thing I hear feedback wise from my clients is, "You seem like you give a shit." Whatever else they say, it generally summarizes and condenses into that sentiment. In their-narrative-speak there's terms like "seem" and "give" as though what I'm doing is "only" an "impression" or that "shit" is something tangibly handed out. In my world, I ask them deliberate questions. I share the most explicit understanding of my perspective in analogous situations. I write. I go to shows. I build my house. I buy toys that make me happy. I practice skills that keep me from getting "stuck" in stories that make me want to kill myself or others.
I seem like I give a shit? I don't. I don't care what I "seem" like. I don't know what you mean by "shit." I'm not giving you anything but an opportunity to answer a question you haven't asked in your own muddy terms. I wish to live in an environment that isn't trying to kill me for being accountable or doing shit that makes the most sense. I wish to achieve my goals without wasting so much time trying to translate idiot-proof things (to other autistic-types), but act as insurmountable barriers when the cultural narrative can't conceive of what I'm talking about. I don't wish you harm. I'm rooting for you. "You seem" doesn't mean anything to me, just like all of my behavior, example setting, work, or blogs don't mean anything to you. You're not practicing like I'm practicing. I'm not talking like you're talking. In fact, you're not talking at all.
Sunday, May 14, 2023
[1037] Shake It Three Times
I'm so thankful. I made it to Chicago, twice, in my truck, and saw Troy Bond, Waterparks, and The Killers sandwiched between in Gary. The weather was fine. The roads didn't pop my tires. My truck didn't scrape the walls of a cramped parking garage. I got to hang out with Smash. I got to spend time with my dad. I got caught up on my TV shows. I cleaned and organized my car. I got great food and good beer. My cats didn't freak out while I was gone. I'm back home at 12:28 AM, wide awake after immediately falling asleep once I got settled in around 6.
I'm living a veritable fantasy in many regards. I'm healthy enough to travel, by myself, to expensive shows I can't technically afford, but no one really bats an eye at the debt figures or downplays their jealousy. I was able to see two of the shows because I work 2 days remotely. In almost exactly 48 hours I should be on a plane to Florida where I'll be gone for 6 days in the "Owner's Club" of Rockville and condo Brandy's parents have up the road. This is arguably the hardest I've ever gone in the "pure indulgence" vein, and I'm counting the party house given I wasn't spending thousands to scale what we were doing.
Big picture, there's a version of what I'm doing that sounds purely selfish and hedonistic. Aren't I worried about pick-your-existential crisis anymore? Don't I think, creepily deeply, that the crowds I surround myself with at shows are statistically full of the dumbest, saddest, and most self-destructive children the world could produce? I mean, they can afford the tickets and get to the venue. I'm often engaged in conversation with people who can't imagine themselves driving for 25 minutes to the nearest comedy club.
I have competing values, but they are anchored by time. I've felt, for most of my life, that time is very short. I've been able to slow it down by hyper-attenuating my experience of any given drama or question. I'm, hopefully, a living embodiment of just how much time we really do have, what can be done with it, and whether or not I can be doctor/astronaut/war hero, I can put up impressive stats on started struggling business ventures, shows consumed, hours behind various instruments, words read and written, miles driven, performances attended, and projects play-grounded. Nothing on that list spot-lit other people.
I read a blog written almost 15 years old where I'm talking about my "robot" or "analyzing" nature. I'm trying to explain why it's impossible to be "friends" with someone I can so easily manipulate. I'm imploring the, college crowd at that point, to not understand me as someone maliciously trying to play with them, just isolated in the knowledge that, in any moment, I can tell the temperature, and I can't understand why they can't. I've never really wanted to have this persistent distance, but it's as real and compelling a fact about my existence as I've ever discovered. It's not me "closing off" or "shutting down." I'm considerably less inclined to entertain the idea I'm a "psychopath" the more I've learned about autism.
I don't just "want" to do all the things I'm doing. I need it. I can't physically function when I come up against feeling too "stuck," be it in a relationship dynamic or a working environment. I need novelty. I need to render some notion of forward movement or progress into existence. I've been thinking about quitting my job. I've been thinking about seeing what I can unlock in myself when I give up the "freedom" to be half-remote 4 days a week to do more in service to my business or breach an entirely new field. I didn't go to school for social work. I didn't want to stay in school until I found a way to make most of my classes related to philosophy, history, and psychology. My innate ability to pick things up or play on familiar human patterns has been plaguing me my entire life. My nearly pathological ability to focus or obsess will manifest in literally any direction I point it, and invariably I will unlock new parts of my story I can't conceive of yet. Why am I not something like a sports-better after building psychological profiles on players and coaches and analyzing stories about their habits and relationships?
It's very weird to psychologically position yourself to fight comfort. I don't want to get set in my ways. I don't want to say, "You'll probably be too tired." There's no more a familiar and shared condition I observe across the people who annoy me the most. I went back and forth for days on whether I should get a ticket to Jeff Arcuri in Louisville the day before my flight. Wouldn't it be "responsible" to be closer to the airport, not spend the extra gas, not throw the logistics of doing your last group of the day into the mix etc.? I felt myself generating excuses to put distance between me and something I sincerely wanted to do. Fuck that, see you soon, Jeff. Let my truck break down on the way to the airport. That just means a touch more in credit card debt or annoying Byron or Hussain with a midnight phone call.
Time is running out, after all. The people who make me laugh or sing will all be memories eventually. I haven't regretted going to a single show. I haven't felt guilty about anything else I'm not spending my money on. I'm merely on the latest iteration of my mission to be what I wish to see. Will a super-fort, health insurance, or sense of community ever make it into the equation? I don't know, and I don't know if I really care or if it matters. Is the world burning down? It seems like it, but I don't really trust myself enough to catastrophize my thinking in how I wish to approach the premise.
I missed my house and worried about the cats. I feel like immediately falling asleep let me reclaim a sense of ownership and safety regarding the space I've built. I have so much to do the next few days. I have so much to spend, be awake for, read about, and drive to. I have so much.
I'm living a veritable fantasy in many regards. I'm healthy enough to travel, by myself, to expensive shows I can't technically afford, but no one really bats an eye at the debt figures or downplays their jealousy. I was able to see two of the shows because I work 2 days remotely. In almost exactly 48 hours I should be on a plane to Florida where I'll be gone for 6 days in the "Owner's Club" of Rockville and condo Brandy's parents have up the road. This is arguably the hardest I've ever gone in the "pure indulgence" vein, and I'm counting the party house given I wasn't spending thousands to scale what we were doing.
Big picture, there's a version of what I'm doing that sounds purely selfish and hedonistic. Aren't I worried about pick-your-existential crisis anymore? Don't I think, creepily deeply, that the crowds I surround myself with at shows are statistically full of the dumbest, saddest, and most self-destructive children the world could produce? I mean, they can afford the tickets and get to the venue. I'm often engaged in conversation with people who can't imagine themselves driving for 25 minutes to the nearest comedy club.
I have competing values, but they are anchored by time. I've felt, for most of my life, that time is very short. I've been able to slow it down by hyper-attenuating my experience of any given drama or question. I'm, hopefully, a living embodiment of just how much time we really do have, what can be done with it, and whether or not I can be doctor/astronaut/war hero, I can put up impressive stats on started struggling business ventures, shows consumed, hours behind various instruments, words read and written, miles driven, performances attended, and projects play-grounded. Nothing on that list spot-lit other people.
I read a blog written almost 15 years old where I'm talking about my "robot" or "analyzing" nature. I'm trying to explain why it's impossible to be "friends" with someone I can so easily manipulate. I'm imploring the, college crowd at that point, to not understand me as someone maliciously trying to play with them, just isolated in the knowledge that, in any moment, I can tell the temperature, and I can't understand why they can't. I've never really wanted to have this persistent distance, but it's as real and compelling a fact about my existence as I've ever discovered. It's not me "closing off" or "shutting down." I'm considerably less inclined to entertain the idea I'm a "psychopath" the more I've learned about autism.
I don't just "want" to do all the things I'm doing. I need it. I can't physically function when I come up against feeling too "stuck," be it in a relationship dynamic or a working environment. I need novelty. I need to render some notion of forward movement or progress into existence. I've been thinking about quitting my job. I've been thinking about seeing what I can unlock in myself when I give up the "freedom" to be half-remote 4 days a week to do more in service to my business or breach an entirely new field. I didn't go to school for social work. I didn't want to stay in school until I found a way to make most of my classes related to philosophy, history, and psychology. My innate ability to pick things up or play on familiar human patterns has been plaguing me my entire life. My nearly pathological ability to focus or obsess will manifest in literally any direction I point it, and invariably I will unlock new parts of my story I can't conceive of yet. Why am I not something like a sports-better after building psychological profiles on players and coaches and analyzing stories about their habits and relationships?
It's very weird to psychologically position yourself to fight comfort. I don't want to get set in my ways. I don't want to say, "You'll probably be too tired." There's no more a familiar and shared condition I observe across the people who annoy me the most. I went back and forth for days on whether I should get a ticket to Jeff Arcuri in Louisville the day before my flight. Wouldn't it be "responsible" to be closer to the airport, not spend the extra gas, not throw the logistics of doing your last group of the day into the mix etc.? I felt myself generating excuses to put distance between me and something I sincerely wanted to do. Fuck that, see you soon, Jeff. Let my truck break down on the way to the airport. That just means a touch more in credit card debt or annoying Byron or Hussain with a midnight phone call.
Time is running out, after all. The people who make me laugh or sing will all be memories eventually. I haven't regretted going to a single show. I haven't felt guilty about anything else I'm not spending my money on. I'm merely on the latest iteration of my mission to be what I wish to see. Will a super-fort, health insurance, or sense of community ever make it into the equation? I don't know, and I don't know if I really care or if it matters. Is the world burning down? It seems like it, but I don't really trust myself enough to catastrophize my thinking in how I wish to approach the premise.
I missed my house and worried about the cats. I feel like immediately falling asleep let me reclaim a sense of ownership and safety regarding the space I've built. I have so much to do the next few days. I have so much to spend, be awake for, read about, and drive to. I have so much.
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