[1025] Bang

Do I have to talk about it? No, not really, but it’s probably more unique and entertaining than what you’ve been up to today.

I feel like it never fails. When I think I’m going to be “done” with my day, wrap up the last of my responsibilities and psychologically transition into the headspace that anticipates drinking beer at Winterfest and seeing a comedian, pain and tragedy knee cap me at the finish line. Mine is a profession where I’m walking the razor’s edge of others’ sense of stability. A “normal” work day might end with someone genuinely expressing how convinced they are that today is the day to die.

There’s procedures, of course. When someone tells you in 5 different ways with a tone that leads you to believe they’re serious that they’re on the suicide train, you’re supposed to get their answers to a questionnaire! The questionnaire will then determine if you need to create a “safety plan.” The ensuring that you have this timely documented will protect you from liability when you’re otherwise ill-equipped counselor might open themselves up to (not really) consequences if they botch the engagement.

This is what I’m paid less than inflation-adjusted minimum wage though for, right? Not to just cope with derailing where my head wants and needs to go for “self-care,” but juggle life and death? You know what you tell a person who’s on the verge of killing themselves? It’s a gamble. You’re not in a conversation or negotiation, you’re on the other end of a desperate confessional. And your alleged supports are tried-and-true social-working despots who know well in advance that they can’t really save anyone nor is it necessarily their fault if someone dies. It’s not an unpersuasive or unreasonable place to come from, but it is woefully incomplete.

This is the kind of danger you run into though when you take this “wide net” cavalier approach to admitting people under the auspice of “some help is better than no help.” It’s presumably better for profits or for your self-conception that you’re reaching more people, but it plays out as a series of cascading mini catastrophes. We attempt to “counsel” people in groups sometimes comprised of people who haven’t been in the program for even 2 months. During that 2 months their attendance might be miserable, and we might discover they have some pretty severe mental health concerns that this environment is in no way equipped to deal with.

What happens to the group? They see someone “nodding,” and they have no idea if they’re just tired or high. They hear someone slurring. Is it a speech impediment, or are they drunk? They hear someone manically ramble. Are they just high energy? An anxiety disorder, unmedicated, turns a member incredibly hostile. Depression, abusive relationships, and ongoing illegal activity in the misappropriation of medication gets downplayed as mere details undermining the broader effort.

This last week I’ve had people do a timeline exercise. They put emotionally compelling instances from birth until today on a list, their ages next to them, and then we proceed to develop questions to unpack what’s on the line. If you have a traumatic memory at 6 and then the next one at 18, what was going on in those 12 years between? If you have 7 tear-inducing thoughts all coupled over a short period, who was around? Who died? Did you move? Did you drop out? Did you switch from incidental use to harder things? It gives you a chance to create a flow that unpacks deeper memories and magnify areas of your life you’ve condensed in the stories and habits of your self-conception today.

I’ve talked with some of my clients for 7 months. I’ve learned more about them in one week with this exercise than I have the entire rest of my time. Everyone’s been molested. Everyone’s had their favorite and most important emotional support die on them. Everyone’s witnessed or on the receiving end of violence. Everyone’s still blaming themselves for things they did as children. Human depravity knows no bounds, and it’s working its way through our bodies and minds like air and water.

You know how you conquer addiction? Incorporating the feelings associated with all of your disassociated memories. You break, by recognizing and redirecting, the automatic response to mask, blame, hide, or self-destruct. You know what you can’t really do surrounded by people you don’t trust 5 to 15 minutes at a time once a week? That isn’t to say there aren’t productive groups or people who take thing seriously and consistently attest to the utility and appreciation they feel. But we’re playing doctor. They have brain boo-boos, I provide the Band-Aid version of surgery.

My suicide-ideating client said she needed to be locked up somewhere. She had been thrown into her dark place by getting treated incredibly unfairly by probation, a therapist at shithole-doesn’t-begin-to-describe-it Centerstone, and against her best effort to keep it together in spite of her mental health problems and relatively new introduction to the program. She needed to take a call from probation while we were talking. She didn’t respond to my texts for 10 or 15 minutes, so I called in a wellness check. She didn’t meet their criterion for forced detainment and transportation, and she agreed to go to the psych ward. She told me she lived 20 minutes away and would text me or have the hospital do so when she arrived. She had packed and said she was leaving as we hung up.

An hour later, I text her asking if she made it, she responds she’s in the town that’s about halfway there. I’ve heard nothing else back.

As with most people, I can usually identify when you’re cursed with being too smart for your own good. She’s highly emotionally intelligent and intuitive. She’s one who came into groups swinging with awesome contributions and no pussy-footing about discussing explicitly what she needed. That kind of gusto and confidence is, unfortunately, a red flag in these kinds of environments. She’s not an entitled rich person with every reason to believe undying delusional self-confidence is going to result in continued unearned prosperity. She’s desperate. She’s like my guy who complimented and thanked me for how much help my advice was contributing to fixing his marriage, and wouldn’t you know it, he wants to be a counselor too! And he would greatly appreciate any information I could provide.

The next day, he’s calling me and the office over and over again, before work, and while I’m in group, panicking over slipping up and failing a drug test while on probation.

Then it comes out his mental health, that he was in control of on medication, is not where it needs to be because he can’t find someone to prescribe him what he has been taking for 6 years. My advice, 15 steps ahead of what he needs to focus on, is twisted into this “help” that realistically barely, if ever, accesses the roots of any given individual. I’m expected to maintain a certain level of persistent positivity and “support,” as the waterfall of unaddressed and potentially un-addressable issues eeks out over months while we’re otherwise talking ourselves in circles.

While you’ve been reading this, have you just been screaming to yourself the “obvious” answers and conclusions I should draw from this? Are you so deeply thankful that the people I describe aren’t you? Do you thump your own tale of tragedy and mental health struggles that keeps anything new neatly boxed in and away from your responsibility? I do. I call every person their own black hole for a reason. I write dispassionately, forever, because they are variables on the stream of what I’m conscious of, but not to be blamed for. I care, right? At least enough to not let my “intellectualizing” turn into the psychopathic antagonism or negligence of my colleagues and colleague-adjacents.

The struggle is not the notes. The struggle is not the hour or two I have to do something annoying, be it in service to the housekeeping of the job or to try and get someone pointed in a not-dead direction. The struggle is with the shape systems are destined to take when people are at the helm. Is this the best we can do? If she’s dead tomorrow, do I shrug it off and say, “Hey, I tried!” and point to the risk assessment I attempted to do? You know, the thing that’s hard to interject between each line that might then signal a “click” and destroy your ability to keep her talking after reducing her to the paperwork.

I don’t take any special pride or feel some sense of nobility as a feeble Band-Aid. If, and it’s a big if, you encounter people genuinely interested and capable of “fixing” themselves or “stabilizing” and creating whatever their version of “better” is, they’re still human. They can persuade themselves they’re worth nothing, the effort doesn’t matter, no one cares, and it all ends as the inevitable heat-death of the universe. And they’re right. They’re not more or less right than if they described the exact opposite opinion of themselves on some transcendent upward spiral. But they’re right enough for them in any given moment that they wish to be convinced of what they say or feel, and wish to justify their next act.

That we feel equally justified to persist in our ego and psychological trappings forces me to consider the desperate psychosis of the culture writ-large. You see, in reality, we’re complicit co-conspirators in the unsustainable exploitation of literally every resource. You can chalk it up to law-of-the-jungle and natural cycle dynamics if you please. You can extoll the virtues of capital and technology to obscure the underlining intentionality and machinery. You can maintain a persistent moral delusion and solipsism or be born dumb enough to never find yourself even considering. We must wish to die too if this is how we’ve chosen to go about caring for one another.

[917] Succor Punch

 

Considerably more needs to be said on this notion of “helping.” I felt it when I ended my last blog, but I knew the phrasing was incomplete. I've criticized vague notions of “help” in the past when I watched Kristen in particular seem to come home, daily, exhausted and suffering her shitty work conditions at Centerstone. I think it's one of the fiercest drives of evolution and most exploited if not misunderstood as well.

What does helping mean to me? Help is differentiating between what I think I want and need from what someone else may tell me. Help is working in service to proven modes of being that exist above or beyond current turmoil. Help is attempting to be prepared for things we will all inevitably need help with. Help means to not cripple myself with bad ideas or behavior before I even begin. I can't help if there is no coherent notion of what “I” am bringing to the table. I can't help if I couldn't pretty quickly come up with a comprehensive account of how help manifests. I can't help if I can't recognize or acknowledge when something isn't helping.

I think it's really easy to see when you look at social work contexts. The difference between a seasoned, hopefully not jaded, case worker and someone just out of college is their notions of what can and can't help. Sending service providers to the door isn't a quick fix. Berating or chastising someone in crisis is a chosen punitive naivety too many feel unpersuaded to stop. What helps? Your word choices, body language, and ability to recognize who or what you are actually speaking to opens the door to helping. Your ability to remain healthily skeptical verses insecurely judgmental keeps you on a helpful path. Can you hear a genuine cry for help or specific need without imposing one you think you're most situated to employ?

I've been tasked with “helping” at a couple food pantries. Food pantries exist because of presumptions about food insecurity, guilt over lazy mishandling of waste, and no doubt the people volunteering feel some kind of way regarding the help they are providing. The vast majority of the food gets thrown away. The waste, potential compost, might go into raised garden beds installed around the properties from which a handful of people nibble. Is it broadly a “helpful” thing to do? Is it helping the “right” people in the right way? When the pantry has an overwhelming amount of fruits and vegetables, no one's eating them.

A thinking person might get the idea to hold food preparation classes on how to make fruits and vegetables into something palatable to the American diet. Maybe the compost fuels flowers or native species conservation efforts. Maybe less ambitious, there's a tweak that ensures the disabled aren't forced to inch back to their homes in the rain, spilling their food in the yard and struggling to pick it up. You could go your whole life given narratives around what people need and hearing of the organizations tasked with helping those in need, and miss the underlying issue completely. It's only recently dawning on us the extent to which income inequality has ruined basically everything. While a system overhaul appears needed to help that, how can you localize your effort to remain helpful up and down the layers of your potential influence? I think a lot of basic income experiments are currently speaking to this awareness best.

Help comes not just “in” defining a problem, but how you do so. For the longest time, I conceived of my problem as a lack of money. While, factually, I don't have the money to snap my wildest dreams into existence, I feel I've grown up and can better define or drop altogether my notions of the “real problems.” Am I dreading the ever-crushing fascism? Sure. Does it have anything to do with the extremely dirty house I helped clean or disabled gentleman I helped carry his shit for in the rain? In probably the most abstract way possible if you don't have a solid conception of “us” and how we treat each other. I'm currently providing counseling to anti-vaxers. I've fought persistently to prevent or close DCS cases for Trump supporters.

I don't think the problem of persistent existential crises are solved begrudging any one ignorant individual. I think you have to identify the drivers, both internally and externally, that instantiate the behavior. I think Bezos knows considerably more about what drives our suicidal gilded consumption than the poor person who “prefers” instant macaroni to cucumbers. I think the hard task is sussing out for ourselves new notions of help before we lose ourselves in “passion” projects “assisting the needy” through countless hours of bureaucracy or power mongering.

For most of my life, I've had very little idea of what I might actually to do help myself, let alone anyone else. I get criticized for my advocacy of writing and touting its cascading benefits. “I don't like to write!” “It doesn't work for everyone!” “No one wants to become a blog!” I think these ideas are quick to miss the point. It's not the writing in-and-of itself that's useful. It's that I go into it looking for what to do. Bezos doesn't just organize a factory a certain way, he's looking to become efficient in his exploitation and process. He's trained our “now” impulse to track with buying shit, so “help” looks like the myriad layers that go into facilitating that. I've certainly thought that in order to feel better I just needed to buy that next thing.

If you look at my actual spending though, I've done a lot of work to dial back action in service to that impulse considerably. “Toys” and “Entertainment” have accounted for around 6% of my budget combined over the last 5 years. My understanding of my biggest problem was not having a long-term affordable means of stabilizing my entrepreneurial impulses, so, functionally all of my money has gone to “Home Maintenance/Utilities,” “Automotive/Gas,” and “Restaurants” in the same period. If you're lost in conceiving of your own problems, look at what you're spending.

I've tried to turn my life into a question of efficiency and what it might speak to. I wanted to “hurry up to slow down.” I was constantly, feverishly, trying to “work” or “help myself” with things like the coffee shop. I wasn't making nearly enough money. I wasn't giving myself any time to enjoy anything. I was becoming hyper-aware that energy is not an inexhaustible well from which a body that's not sleeping or eating right can draw from. I had to train myself not to feel guilty about being stuck in “on” position, whether it's my brain nagging or just being up and out in the world doing something.

Learning how to engage or cope with “now” is the infinite task. I'm all of me that ever was or could be in this moment. It's changing. It's overwhelming. It needs to be attended to actively, patiently, and with the grace and civility I would grant a child learning something new.

I haven't quite felt right all day. I'm in a role as “assistant” to the resident coordinator for the housing authority. As far as I can tell, it's my job to babysit a printer, and help unload a pallet for a shanty food pantry. It's 12 hours a week at $12 an hour. The idea was to use the role to be on the front line of public housing's transition to not-so-public housing. I would be an on-site service provider, either doing case work in helping people get signed up for things, counseling, or more intensive engagement like DCS prevention. When half a dozen people want to skip right over the dirty home, if I can wrap it into something that Medicaid would pay for, I can comfortably and confidently just get to work before the problem gets bigger or your children are removed.

It's been about 3 weeks of...office. I sit around. I've had 5 or more discussions about my calendar. It took 2 weeks just to get into my email, where no relevant information resides, besides questions about my wackadoodle schedule. I'm told they have a general purpose or mission to get all of these metrics recorded about the neighborhood and records put in about what we helped them print. They have on-site volunteers who regularly do the pantry. I'm supposed to be moral support? We throw out several hundred pounds of food at the end of each pantry. People aren't hungry here.

In any event, I'm struggling to keep myself oriented on all of the little things I could be doing in service to the actual small service provider business we started. You know what's hard to do when the schizophrenic non-resident shows up to speak to herself in front of the computer for hours at a time? Parse through Medicaid policy. There are people who need transportation. There are people who need signed up for disability and SNAP. There are people who threaten their ability to stay in their home because they associate with violent offenders who have been banned from the property. There are people on the verge of getting kicked out for cleanliness. Why am I babysitting the sign-up sheet and peaches?

I'm also in the middle of watching this lecture series on the “meaning crisis.” John Vervaeke explains the history of how we came to all of these notions about ourselves and how or where we fit into existence. He discusses the ways in which we can bullshit ourselves around compelling sophist rhetoric and remain unable to map our thinking and behavior onto the actual world. In practical terms, it's my struggle with constantly having to navigate and play to people's feelings verses speaking to and working with people on the “real” page able to articulate and move towards a shared goal.

You see a dirty home as “administrator” and file a report, send out an inspector, leave a threatening letter, and wait. I see a dirty home and say, “We should clean the home and learn why it got that bad.” I can hear all of the trauma-thoughts and rationalizations from the home owner, and remain non-judgmental nor paralyzed as I see how it fits into greater and more comprehensive contexts. You can arrest your action because of limited license you think your role boxes you into. I'm a person who takes as many things as he can, and works them into higher-order working models of how I think you should be.

That is, when I actually can. Right now, I can blow $15 going to town, hit plasma donation in a mild-panic for the time constraints on my lunch break, then sit and sweat on the patio as people saunter in dismayed there's only fruits and vegetables and high-end organic milk or cheese they'd never touch. I come home, and I'm alone. The call of “chill” or sleep is increasingly loud. I'm trying to take back my space for all of the tension and fervent energy I was constantly trying to turn away from resentment. I'm unhappy at how relieved I'm able to immediately feel that I'm not coming home to a fight. Being alone isn't great, but it's better than fighting.

My head hurts. I've got little energy. All of the little projects or house chore I might do aren't disordered enough for me to feel bothered nor of any immediate impact once they're done. I don't have the brain space for more lectures as all of the new terms I'm hearing aren't settling in nicely. I barely want to watch TV. I'm worried that were I to try a video game, I'd find a way to piss away the next three days straight. Did I mention my head hurts?

I'm working with this family that has seemingly done everything in their power over the last two years to enable the worst behavior of their 18 year old. He was a month away from graduating from the army. He doesn't have his license. He's got his own shitty background with a negligent mother, but today, he weaponizes his personality and his parents' weakness to be generally shitty and entitled and emotionally destructive. I'm there to be the “bad” guy who gives them license to take away his video games and get him working, get his permit started, and have him eventually out of the home. I don't know that I trust the parents to actually holding the line and sending him to the homeless shelter if and when he does not meet his obligations.

This family has a dying mentally handicapped daughter they have to center their world around her care. The daughter has breathing issues. They aren't vaccinated and “have their reasons.” The absurdity really knows no bounds. I feel considerably less guilty at whatever rate we may be able to bill their Medicaid.