[1060] Copying Mechanism

If I had to bet, I would put money on the vast majority of people falling into a camp described as, "I can't trust myself." It doesn't mean they haven't opted for a form of living that looks functional, feels stable-ish, or would pass as "adult" to a random onlooker. It doesn't mean they are racked with medical-grade doubts about every little thing they may choose to do. It doesn't mean that any given moment may be an opportunity to "lose it" or "break down," as the basic throughline or coherence one needs to exist gets erased.

It does mean most people aren't inviting the counter narrative into their personal story of experience. Only the morbid, or "mean," or socially disingenuous and disabled do things like that. You're not even going to let your subconscious whisper "divorce" on your wedding day. Your baby isn't going die before you. Every statistically likely consequence of your eating and driving habits aren't going to kill you like you're really part of that majority.

The horror. The horror. When we're introduced to this horror in the infinitely creative ways from early drug use, abuse, medical trauma, general neglect, or by virtue of our miserably encoded genes, we cope or die. What we've discovered as we iterate on the DSM is that pretty much everyone is getting their ass kicked in measurable and consistent ways. It's from things we can more or less approach methodically, therapeutically, and with an eye towards consistent accountability. Can approach. We don't really, but the option is there.

I have the precise opposite problem of the vast majority of people. I trust the fuck out of myself. I trust I can engage in unspeakable terror. I trust I can accomplish things people routinely regard as "dreams" or "exhausting" with a persistent "matter of fact" attitude and growing mountain of evidence. The shocks to myself are derived from compounded ignorances or unlucky and ill-timed grievances stacking too close together. Maybe I wake up sore with a headache, step in cat shit on the way to the bathroom, go to flush and water's not flowing, try to get it working and break a nob. My phone goes off with the dumbest of dumb work emails dragging a corpse of a conversation from a week ago…Stuff like that.

I can certainly imagine that, but it's a lot harder to cope with it in real time, especially if it's that slow creep that doesn't tip you off that you need to stop and breathe or redirect. That isn't so much horror though. That's not imagining people close to you dying. That's not watching your body tumble down the highway after a semi-truck oopsie.

The thought doesn't actually kill you or them. But we treat it like it does. We fluidly dip into language like "karma" and the power of "intention." As if we routinely watch those who we chant "burst into flames" towards spontaneously combust. Challenging, painful, or difficult thoughts are met with reflexively coping. Whether you find a chemical to grow physically and psychologically dependent on, or another person, or a hobby, the reflex to survive gets to work.

I want to make next week in my groups about "commitment." What are you committed to? How? Why? I have a good number, about a quarter, of my people with terrible attendance. You can chalk some of that up to "life" and kids, but the vast majority is people who, instead of being honest with themselves about what it takes to be of sober mind, still prefer to defer to their feelings. They wish to employ the usual methods, the familiar, the rehearsed, ways of feeling better.

You see, maybe they're "too tired" today, so they'll make up for it at a later group. "With everything gong on," it just slipped their mind. Maybe they have a particular grievance with me they're less than bold or honest in relaying. Either way, the story of their sobriety or sober thinking needs to conform to the coping patterns already in play. They're still going to get their medication. They don't even really connect with those people in group anyway. What's the big deal?

I've been doing this job for 1 year and 3 months now. I've never missed a day that wasn't allotted to me. I've never missed a group that wasn't an obligation I planned for that coincided with extra work on my plate outside of work hours. Incidentally, I'm not "committed" to Groups. I'm looking for any route away from it that I can find. Importantly, I'm committed to myself. My needs, my desires, and my narrative is what is under threat through my obligation to Groups. (Or, capitalism when you want to get large and abstract.)

What is it, do you think, that separates me who can make it to 12-18 groups every week for 15 months and the person who can't make it to 1 every week for a month? Bear in mind, these are virtual groups. You don't need a car. You could be on any wifi. You can use anyone's phone, computer, or tablet. We offer a program that gets you a free phone.

Do you think I enjoy every single person and every single group every time? Do you think I'm wide awake and motivated every day? Do you think I don't have a dozen other things on my mind or things I'd like to accomplish? Why, it's a serious question, am I able to pull off this obligation in a way that garners consistent positive feedback from both client and leadership alike, but you might not ever meet me sometimes your attendance is so bad and you've hopped from make-up to make-up until I discharge you?

I'm there for me, not you. I'm there for money. I'm there because the schedule allows me to maintain my behavior towards attending shows, getting work done around my house, and facilitates me meeting and building rapport with what I hope is a huge number of clients I eventually steal. My sober mind is fundamentally rooted in a picture of what I need to maintain what I have, grow, challenge, indulge, and hopefully continue to honestly share. You not showing up isn't saying anything about me, it's the attitude you have to yourself. It's why you don't trust yourself. You can't even be trusted to run a program for an hour from your phone and keep it together long enough to hear ideas that are different from the ones you already have about yourself.

That defensive posture kicks in. You'd rather just not hear it at all, because to you, it's not an open exchange of new ideas. It's a damning indictment. It's an unfair judgment. It's an attack. It's a challenge when you're already too busy and too exhausted and never asked for it. It's work, and you're busy justifying working yourself to death at whatever it is you're already doing. Where do I get off telling you you shouldn't work 14 days in a row? Don't I understand you have bills and a family!? How dare you say I should put distance between me and my abusive mother! I love her!

The stories we tell ourselves matter immensely. I suspect it's the heart of why no matter what someone has accomplished or people they touch they still get suicidal. David Draiman, with his incredibly sad eyes, explained he almost killed himself in February were it not for his son and the Disturbed fans. I don't know all that he can or can't imagine about his life and place he holds in others', but I do know that level of sadness and isolation is available to us all. We drink from that poisoned well without acknowledging it as a series of suicidal acts.

Dipping in and out of this book on masochism (Thanks Brandy) has detailed for me what I've spoken to in the past, but this has elaborated it further. There's sheer joy and positive emotion we can generate from pain and self-destruction. I watched a video of suicide bombers picking which hand had a rock in it so they could get the honor of blowing themselves up. The, donkey-looking dude, was beaming. He was getting hugs and cheers from his brothers. He is (was) utterly convinced of where he is going, the righteousness of his action, and how to solve his problem with whomever the bomb was slated for.

Suicide is a commitment to a narrative about how you feel. There is no "disease" that pulls triggers. There is no infection that makes you crave too many pills. There is no pathogen that drags razors down your wrist, ties knots, or turns exhaust fumes into your favorite scented candle. You should be very careful about how and whether you subscribe to any narrative. You need to be actively participating in writing one. You should be deeply suspicious of the ones that make your sense of personal responsibility abstract. You know, like how "sin" is bad, and in the mind of the faithful, at least one on my caseload, that means equal parts butt-fucking children or being gay. Jesus doesn't obligate you to think critically or make distinctions.

If your sense of commitment looks like "extra" energy to get things done that matter to you, I can vibe with you. If your commitment makes you kinder and more patient, it makes a certain sense to me. If your commitment isn't pie-in-the-sky about what you can do or how you may feel, then I may start to trust you're grounded and genuine. If your commitment is time-bound, specific, open to being criticized, and accountable, then maybe we can agree it's real and worthwhile.

Conversely, if your commitment is exhausting your capacity for truth, we might say you've been committed to the mental asylum of your situation. If your commitment has you offering dozens of excuses and attempts to make it sound better than it is, you're just at its mercy, of which I promise you it has none. If your commitment prompts you to be reflexively arguing for why you're continuing to persist, a good part of you knows you shouldn't stay, but the broader narrative you've concocted gives you ample, if not infinite, opportunities to keep the justification game running.

My narrative is constantly evolving. I want it to. I need it to. I've had incredibly small-minded ideas about what should constitute my commitments and why. I have incredibly damming suggestions regarding what the narrative of my behavior or perspective should mean about me. At bottom, because I show myself the ongoing story and work to develop an individual window and nurtured nature, I can continue to land on points I trust. Sorry not sorry, it's not all of you, my hoards of fans, nor would it ever be my theoretical children. If and when you all die, including my phantom offspring, what's left? If and when you all leave me or stop talking to me or stop giving any remote fuck about spending time together or sharing anything (Oh shit, 99% of everyone I've ever thought to call friend?) where do you think I'm gonna go? Hang out with Chester?

I'm committed to whomever I may be right now. What I do or don't know gets to show up here. I'm committing my time to this exploration. I'm entertaining the horror of being ignored and abandoned. I'm letting the depth of the isolation give me pause to find how to capture the void. I've murdered my non-existent children. I've parsed and separated what I'm doing for money or as a series of obligations, from what I feel needs said and done.

 
Every single concert I go to almost everyone is there with their partner, family member, friend, or half a dozen other people. I'm there for the music. After watching and overhearing, now 93 shows this year, I think they're after a story about what fun or healthy people do. I think they need eyes or someone's hand to hold or someone to be in a picture with. I don't trust that it has anything to do with whatever individual they're with. I think there's a reason the most populated non-festival shows I've gone to this year are "themed" drug use (Dead & Company) and depression/suicide (Disturbed).

It's a bother to know "too much" regarding yourself. It doesn't always make a "reason" and an "excuse" or "self-justification" perfectly clear. But this is why you work to keep talking. This is why you look for people who trust themselves enough to offer you fair observations of yourself. Because we're still all made of the same shit and plugged into the same environment. Getting some clarity on that I'm working to make it only cost $5 instead of $60 or $110.

If I'm not suicidal and I feel like one of the loneliest people on the planet in a way I'm tempted to call distinct, but wise enough to know is cliché, how? If I'm angrier than anyone you've ever met and keep nearly all of my conversations clam and civil, what's going on? If I think life is mysterious, but mostly a goddamn ridiculous joke, game, and you're perfectly reasonable to kill yourself in dozens of tiny joy-inducing ways a day, why do I opt for yard goals, business goals, show goals, and wish to refocus my attention on the 1% yet to flee?

I have a really good ongoing story. I'm not suffering that much in any accumulation of pointy parts of my day and I allow myself to slow down and taste the subtleties in my expensive coffee. I'm listening to the music, not turned towards the crowd drunkenly trying to get the attention of my party or passers-by. I'm open to hearing something new from a band I'm not that familiar with instead of screaming my dogma and treating what they're attempting to communicate as so much background noise. If I were a character in something I was reading, I'd be curious what I was going to say or do next. I'm committed to the character development. Are you?

[913] Pot Committed

What are you committed to?

It's a question that can diverge dramatically. You can be committed to a psychiatric hospital. You can signal your commitment through marriage. The two first google definitions state: 1. the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, etc. and 2. an engagement or obligation that restricts freedom of action. These sound like definitions that beg infinitely large questions about “freedom” and the nature of your “cause” or “etc.”

For me, you could say I'm committed to spite. There are few things that will motivate me, make my brain race to the series of deliberate and methodical actions I need to take, or clear anxious fog than spite. If I did not know that about myself, and then went on to do something significant or showy, I might be deluded into thinking “I” measured up to the grandiosity or was responsible for the show. No, it was the spite. Without the spite, nothing gets off the ground. If you want to examine the spite you might find certain insights about how it operates or different ways to describe it that you find more palatable, but if you pretend it's not spite, you don't have a prayer of understanding me or whatever I've created that might be regarded as significant.

Never will a single word nor overly simplified sentiment encapsulate what's really going on though. Spite won't suffice in place of all the words it's taken to process or experiences which lend themselves to rounding out a perspective. Spite might keep the flame alive, but a controlled burn is certainly preferable and required if you wish to keep something worth sustaining. So, we return to the question, imagining a commitment like a sustained and tempered burn.

Large institutions and interpersonal relationships can inform how you understand longevity. Maybe everyone in your circles is selfish and chaotic, so you internalize that no one is stable and never worth the attachment. Ironically, you can develop the exact opposite sense for the same reason, relying on the stability and attachment of and for yourself in spite of the chaos around you. You know you exist, you're still here after all, but stable and attached can only be trusted or wielded as you see fit, never extended towards things fated to abuse.

You could blithely remark, and you hear it often, that you're committed to yourself. You don't trust anyone. You hate to ask for help or favors. The running narrative is almost perfectly devoid of the different contexts you exist in or memory of things that compelled your decision-making in the past. This is an exceptionally lonely and often disingenuous place to exist for very long. It's akin to the baseline animal drudging though their instinctive behavior I watch from my nature shows. There's no plan, intercepting of foreseeable patterns, nor idea that there's anything to be done but suffer or greedily indulge in whatever the present moment is offering.

Nothing you commit to will last. Even if you're opting to take the wild animal route, the suffering will either end in death, the march to the next watering hole, or the chance abundant meal and time to play. You can get stuck in thinking you've derived some kind of wisdom in throwing yourself at the fates and arresting your agency as life carries on ambivalently doing the work for you. Rest easy, you're gonna die anyway. No surprise, this idea does not seem to provide people any ease or capacity to rest.

Again, what keeps the fire burning? What are you holding a candle for? What Olympic tradition is worthy of being passed on? Why?

I think of the sunk-cost fallacy. Committed for the sake of it and because you've already spent so much time or money. You could find the easy answer if you can overcome the guilt for your folly or undermined wishes. This is why people in professions of presumed high-value, money or otherwise, kill themselves. They've literally couched their identity, very existence, in nominally communal or colloquial notions of what those jobs and titles are supposed to mean, not necessarily what those jobs mean to them as an individual. Nearly all soldiers come back with PTSD, regardless of their role, some dramatically more shocked, SHOCKED, by all of the death.

Most often, we seem to be committed to things that were insisted upon us. I tried to drop out of college. College was a joke. Whatever you may glean from modernity bemoaning safe spaces, the lack of critical thought, and general exploitation offered by the post-modern indifference to defining and fighting for life-sustaining values, it was a problem at least 15 years ago, and I've recently learned the first gripes were codified by conservative thinkers in the late 80s. Ew. We've also got arranged marriages, notions of “elite” preschools, and the catastrophic fascist destruction from those with an infinite appetite for obstruction, dishonesty, and suicide. The mental asylum zeitgeist rages on.

In some ways, once you acknowledge that depth of the depravity and chaos, it makes what you may choose to commit to easier. Well, I can't fix all that, so let me focus on my kids! Or crafts! Or volunteer hours! Here, a most pernicious pitfall must be attended to, and it's why people self-sabotage and surprise themselves with buried resentments. Are you committed to those things, or are you committed to the shame and guilt towards the chaos? Shame and guilt are shades of spite. They're dependent, a response or initial coping mechanism. People are quick to deny they are feeling guilty or ashamed of something as it might undermine their ability to keep working in service to their kids, crafts, or whatever else. You birthed kids who are often disappointing and who are definitely going to die one day. What the fuck are you supposed to do with those feelings? ::Religion rings its hands.::

Come on, what are you committed to? Denying the depth of your lonely feelings, regrets, and aimless stabs at marginal fulfillment? Are you a task-master who makes lists and crosses them off because you have to? Are you a cheerleader because you believe in the team, or because your tight outfit attracts useful distracting attention and the noise keeps you from thinking too hard?

If your ideas are, none, or handed to you, or incomplete, it's impossible to commit. No definition will announce itself. No meaning will spontaneously manifest. No work has been done to get oriented, let alone embodied, across the worlds you inhabit. You don't know who you are, or at least, feel remotely comfortable with the seemingly contradictory abstraction that you are, so you're paralyzed, or resentful, or ashamed, and written off by a world as ambivalent to you as you are to it.

I'm committed to this. I'm committed to working though my ideas and the attempt to pay attention to how the things I experience synthesize into things I do or do not wish to be a part of my and our world. I don't treat people nicely because I give a fuck about people. I do it because the ambivalent math says the more people who's problems I can generally alleviate, the less problems I'm going to have to deal with. At the very least, the nature of those problems will be considerably harder to generate guilty or shameful feelings about. I can cross my fingers people will “get it” and not behave like I don't want them to behave, but I'm not naive, and I'm confident in my spite. I attend to my experience that is significantly bolstered when I behave one way and painfully hindered when I succumb to many others. I know how to tie the abstract nature of those sentiments into sweat and patience and words that almost force themselves out of me.

Are you trapped, or committed? Are you the cause, or distracted by errant et cetera?