[1208] It's Just That Easy

There’s something so fundamentally human that I think I will go my entire life unable to grasp “completely” or “seriously” or “empathetically.”

I don’t understand how people stay convinced.

I consider myself a deeply critical person. I’m exercising my judgment about everything, constantly, and it’s why I have simplified heuristics to remain sane. My cars are often old, dented, or cost less than my guitar. I just need it to get me where I’m going and it’s the greatest car it ever has to be. I have no genuine opinion that stems from the type of car that I have.

By contrast, I routinely experience people who functionally identify with their car and consider it an extension of their personality, taste, wisdom, etc. What this does is removes any obligation to say or think about anything “objective” regarding the car. Who cares how it was made, if it’s safe, or if it’s famous for being preferred by some notable despot of history, it’s my car, man, and nothing you can say about it matters.

I’m stuck just seeing “a car,” and it’s a “nice” car or “good” car if it cars correctly. If I need it for a more specific purpose, again, all that’s implicated is my sense of meeting the need. I don’t want to make a long trip in the backseat of a sports car. I don’t want to load wood onto the hood of my Buick. I love my truck because it helps me get work done, not because, “Geeerrr, man, truck!” Or because I want to be seen some kind of way. Incidentally, almost always if someone’s a cunt riding my ass, they’re in a truck.

To me, when you’re convinced, you’re stupid. You’re consciously and deliberately motivated to stay a specific kind of stupid to maintain some relationship to the identity you’ve…let’s call it worked-ish out. You train to prefer dodging skepticism, questions, or critical thoughts about whatever you’re convinced of. This is the maintenance of toxic family or relationship dynamics. This is religion. This is the heights of vitriol in music preferences. This is the irrational basis for war and control.

I’m extremely unconvinced. I’m interested in immediately changing something I’m doing particularly egregiously wrong. I know you can only have so much evidence and there’s always confounds, but I’m starving for ways to do “it” or “things” or “life” in ways that don’t make the whole project feel pointless and stupid. I feel incredibly alone in that posture. I’ve met maybe a handful of people interested in operating the same way, and often it’s extremely domain specific.

Well before the cesspool of the internet, I’ve been the kind of person who has fielded an immense amount of feedback about who I, allegedly, am. Boy howdy, do people sound convinced. I learned very quickly how that seemed to be most often what someone was willing to share, often a less than flattering opinion about how I talk, think, or behave. For most people, I suspect when they encountered the same thing it was pretty disorienting. The people I meet in counseling have an endless treasure trove of the traumas of youth and generational passings-on. I wasn’t one to be convinced. I immediately had thoughts, notes, and questions.

My mom used to call my brother and I “Serbian princes.” She considered us, as single-digit aged children mind you, on some pedestal because my grandmother would cook for us, and otherwise treat us nicely, I guess? My mother grew up in a verbally and mentally abusive home. She saw fit to pass on the tradition. She, clearly, was convinced about herself whatever she was told. So convinced, she found the wisdom to beat, belittle, and terrorize children. Also, you’ll be excited to hear, my brother doesn’t consider it abuse! He’s convinced! Pay no attention to me who has literally removed children, as a DCS assessor, from their homes for 1/10th of what happened to us. Same state, different decades, makes all the difference apparently.

I don’t want to be the kind of person who’s stuck doing something categorically stupid indefinitely. I think violently and routinely beating children is pretty stupid. I think using power in aggressive and domineering ways on people in sensitive situations is stupid. I think conversations where neither side complete sentences and begin to get loud are stupid. I think bending over and asking to take someone’s rapey dick move a little deeper is stupid. I think pretending like you’re too busy, too moral, too smart are all categorically fucking stupid.

I got a classic “criticism” in IOP class the other day. “What could you possibly teach us about addiction if you ain’t going through the same thing?” Many people in recovery, because they’re people, not because they’re in recovery, make a show out of how convinced they are correct. He’s right, no? Addiction is something so categorically different, defined, and dominated by those struggling with it. Obviously. Every scientist studying it. Every debate. Every counselor worth a damn is, or was, chronically abusing a substance in spite of the self-destruction.

Or, this is such an unimaginably stupid question, that it sits squarely at the center of my opening confusion. I don’t know how to sound that stupid on my worst day. I have no analogous topic or sense of defensiveness about something in my life that is like, “Oh, yeah, I sound like that when we talk about…” For most people, it’s their faith that occupies that space. They believe what they believe, circularly, forever, because. I don’t have that. I’m certainly not convinced of any given sky-daddy, nor am I convinced I have any fucking clue what it means to be alive, dead, or inextricably intertwined with everything.

I think it’s stupid to adopt catch phrases. Free Palestine? From what? The terrorists they elected to routinely terrorize? From the influence of Iran? Or are you, most likely, pretending to be an expert on global affairs, religious extremism, or Israeli foreign policy, and accidentally doing an antisemitism? I don’t have to be an expert to listen to 10 hours over 5 days on my drives to and from work the opinions of people who’ve lived, studied, or hobnobbed with the players involved for longer than I’ve been alive. Do you know what my opinion is after all that? You should listen to them too, and share who you’ve been listening to. Then, if we both want to pretend we, as individuals, have a dog in that fight, maybe we talk a few days later.

But people are convinced! The narrative is popular, therefore true! All my favorite bands and friends are saying it, and what’s ever gone wrong with punk or youthful energy? If there was a habit I wish we would adopt globally, it would be starting most sentences with, “I could be wrong, but here’s what I think.” Not picking a side. Not judgmentally labeling someone. Not decrying some grand victimized frame and indictment of power as though you have none.

When you’re convinced, you’re forgoing responsibility or choice. The conclusion gets to do the work for you. More importantly, it gets to take the blame when things invariably go awry. When you demonstrate to me how convinced you are, I return to one of my simple heuristics. “Oh, this is stupid, time to move on.” You’re not actually convinced, you’re woefully incomplete. You don’t like how that feels, so you anchor on literally anything, but especially on things that are culturally normative. Your car. Your girl. Your politics. But always your indignant posture that you met someone who sees through it and how it works instinctively, begrudgingly.

What are we to make then if you’re over there stewing and waiting to decry, “Ha! Fool! You’re convinced beating children is wrong!” Am I so unserious a thinker that I made some gross oversight? Or, in your eager temptuous posture did you not just highlight the nature of what I’m talking about? Are you genuinely trying to debate a child’s experience of abuse, or obfuscating because that’s all you know?

More to the point, I’m not convinced beating children is wrong. That’s not my framing, nor my language. I would describe, in detail, the research, the litany of people’s experiences, and my own, and use a mountain of evidence to say something like, “I’m 99% sure abusing a child is unlikely to get the desired outcome of doing so.” The more specific the scenario, details about the players involved, the better. Unless your goal is to fuck with that child, you’re probably doing it wrong. Don’t you want to know that?

[1204] Just Chillin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1198] Not My Job

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least I have 9 stays to stew.

[1129] E.G.O.A.T.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

[1115] Count On It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hear more than anything from people something like this:

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

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

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

[1040] Take Me Home

At a basic level, what I "really" want is incredibly simple. It's so simple, I find myself pushing astonishment at the amount of effort I exert in trying to get it. I'll spend thousands to spend time with a friend who I can trust actually likes me and isn't looking for a reason to get upset. I'll try to start companies to get paid, not even obscenely, but looking for the "comfort" of not always describing things in debt-ridden terms or that comes with comprehensive insurance and a decent car. I just, on a whim, started another one of my hasty wood-working projects because I didn't know what to do with my energy and wanted to test out my cleaned-up garage-esc space. Just having something to focus on that involved my tools and hands has brought me to 6:30 AM, only a tinge tired.

I don't actually understand why it has to be so hard. I don't know why I have to have a predictable amount of dread at the prospect of going to work for people who don't give a fuck about me. I don't know why I have to dream about the circumstances that will make sitting and reading a book feel justified. I don't know why most people most of the time can't be relied upon to grab regular drinks, movies, shows, or otherwise.

It occurred to me that I've been trying to convince myself to "go harder" in service to my business. I want to manage a business, people, and have a spattering of clients. Starting a business is none of that. Starting is pleading and fighting and taping together pieces that need glue and nails. Starting is putting a hundred things out of your head in an active way so you can focus on the next phone call, email, or form you can't define with no one to help you. I want people out there going door-to-door or to businesses to convince others to donate in service to care. I don't want to be the salesman, because I'm not selling anything. I'm a good counselor and manager. I just want to do the work.

I could be a good wood worker. In whatever I find to do part-time, I'll be good at that too. It takes a while, a sort of by default patience, that has to occur in order for me to discover how "simple" whatever it is I'm doing actually is. I used 20 different tools to cobble together this bed bench. I didn't even get a splinter, and I made the thing with my shirt off.

There was a reddit post about some person in an intentional community saying they have 4 or 5 families living together on the same land in a couple multi-family spaces. They were friends growing up, and through college, and then transitioned to the community they created. What was the secret? What are they hiding? It's hard not to feel perfectly objectionable and "crazy" in my constant advocacy to change or join up or experiment. I'm not jealous of those who can pull it off, I just get angry. Are my circumstances a particular kind of fucked? Are my "friends" somehow more pathological in their behavior than I might diagnose "the masses?" Am I setting such a terrible example that I've been allowed to persist within some kind of desperate and sick complex you've been salivating while watching this whole time?

I feel good just hanging out. I feel good using expensive appropriate tools to create fleetingly passable things. I feel good when I work with someone who takes themselves seriously enough to push through discomfort and skepticism. I don't actually want higher-order indulgence or a fuck ton more money. I want to be able to live approximately as I already do, not in debt, with a persistent presence of one or a dozen people I care about. I want help. I want to know I'm not insane, and that's impossible to do alone. What's the next example I need to set? Who am I not being enough like? Am I uncreative or uninspired?
I don't know where to turn, so I'm over here hyper-cleaning my house, binging shows and movies, and making ear-shattering noises with scrap wood.

[1008] Big Gulp

I feel like a tea time chat. It happened again, as it often does. I’m “technically” on the clock and at work. I’ve had one group today, and my next is at 5. This “in between time,” is often an anxiety-inducing affair. What, exactly, am I doing? Today, as the first rumbles of stomach-dropping started, I had the thought that I was “experiencing the reality of my full potential.” It immediately calmed my gut. Wait, what? I felt all of my possible choices and like I could perfectly well engage in any of them. It was excitement at the prospect of experiencing the reality of any number of consequences, and knowing it wouldn’t matter.

Say, for example, I up and quit my job. I know exactly what I’d be doing with my time. I know how full I would feel diving into the layers of what it takes to get this counseling operation running. I can go eat, or watch TV, or pretend I have enough tasks to eat up my time with spreadsheets and outreach. All of it, ultimately, doesn’t matter, at least it won’t impede me moving forward in the ways I would argue I prefer. I can’t move any faster or slower than I’ve been. Each time I’ve been presented with an opportunity to make a meaningful step forward, I’ve taken it. I have no reason to worry outside of the general random tragedy of life and how it may impact me at all times.

I can’t get that insight or phrasing unless I experience the anxiety first. An incorrect goal would be to say something like “I never want to feel like this again.” I think we haphazardly set ourselves up for failure with ill-conceived sentiments like that. If only, it was imagined, I wasn’t depressed or anxious. If only all of these variables weren’t. When you do that, you can’t weaponize your feeling into a viscerally felt and actionable stability. My so-named “anxiety” is the consequence of my training myself not to just be excruciatingly angry all the time. That mild “tickle” about competing courses of action is power. I’m aware first, then it can be a blog or cold call, or follow-up.

I really do want to quit. It’s for all the reasons I state often. It’s not mine, it’s not on my timeline, it’s not the kind of challenge that will beget growth or a sense of pride and dignity. It doesn’t pay enough for my ambition. It’s building more immoral behavior into its base of operations regularly. If I quit today I’ll owe my hostage-taking company two grand. I haven’t actually received any money from submitted claims yet. The practical reality of a paycheck continues to overtake many disgruntled lists. But I could quit, and that power is anxiety-inducing. When I get moments where I entertain how to navigate the consequences of doing so, I’m anxious about the credible confidence I have in my capacity to pull it off.

I feel like that sentiment harks all the way back to when and why I first started writing. In turning over how people engaged in shitty relationships, I inevitably shined upon how I could manipulate and under what circumstances it would feel more or less appropriate to do so. My awareness and ability to do so lends itself to being aberrantly good at things like DCS assessment and counseling. I know what makes me tick, so I know what makes you tick, even if you never quite land on language you would espouse as confidently. I also continue to learn that the moment I lay too far off a manipulation, you tend to use that room to hang both myself and you.

We could look at my business partnership. I don’t have to talk Hussain into working himself to death. He had that complex before I ever met him. I do have to be a cheerleader. I have a certain confidence that in his world might feel more like a desperate need. No matter how good a job he does or how hard he works, he has a gaping hole that needs to be filled with his effort and definitely not his father’s money. I trust his capacity to work even harder than me. I have to persistently counsel that he take time for himself and feel good about each tangible step we move in the positive direction. He knows we’ll get there because he’ll cut it out of your chest if necessary (or, his own, he’s a nice guy.) I know we’ll get there because we both weaponize our different types of pathological working behavior into tangible results.

Is it malicious or bad to recognize how he works? No. Were I to task him with “doing everything” because I know he would drive himself insane in order to do so would be. Is it manipulative to lean into my strengths when it comes to logistics or paperwork or contract formation? The moment I use that power to cheat him out of money or engage in some kind of hostile takeover it would be. We have our lanes, and they are both necessary for a successful operation. It doesn’t help either of us for me to be naïve about what I am or am not good at, nor downplay what power I do or don’t have. That’s why the design and distribution of power needs to be an exchange, not a grab, or a lust, or a desperate stumbling into.

I have the power to keep the peace, redirect the conversation, and hijack your brain. It’s literally my job. I prove to myself how much I can throw you into a place of self-reflection regularly. I can walk you down the road of questions you haven’t asked yourself in a specific order to draw a specific conclusion. I’m asking myself the same things, and humanity has been asking them since the beginning of the capacity to do so. If and when you experience the same kind of anxiety, accurately described or not, what happens? You use? You deny? You cut? You get distracted? You otherwise engage in some automatic addictive behavior to suppress?

I remember some moments of my life for their outsized capacity to speak so loudly. I remember when I literally, bodily, couldn’t be persuaded to be as “down” or “depressed” as I had been in high school. In the middle of The Will to Power, I just stopped reading, like Forrest stopped running, and stopped conceiving of myself in the way that was driving my desire to wind up reading things like The Will to Power. I remember consciously deciding that problems did not need to include yelling. I remember when that started feeling like a choice. I remember when it stopped feeling like “someone” or “something” “out there” was going to “fix” literally anything and my trust eroded. A sense of agency and intention are trained skills, not divinely bestowed nor an entitlement of any vague semblance of consciousness.

Almost every day I hear a story from someone describing “what happened to them.” It’s incredibly rare that the story identifies more than one place where the person might have intervened beyond at the end, and rarer that the intervention is necessarily healthy. We’re always picking up the pieces. We’re describing after-the-fact our later impression of what happened, instead of waking up to the moment and choosing a path. “My mom yelled at me for an hour!” What? Why not in second 5 did you not say “I won’t be yelled at,” and leave? Why did you “fix” that situation by cutting yourself, inducing a calm, so you could sit back down to be yelled at for another hour? This, and more, are the literal realities people share about their experience of time and decision making. What’s your personal analogue?

I’m not blind to the fact that I don’t just “want” to find more people to hang out with, it’s a necessary mitigation of my awareness. I don’t want to be corrupted by my power or singular window. I see it happen in bits and spurts whether it’s in some indulgent spending or conversational liberties towards the pliable. I need exchange. I need shaping as much as I can shape. I know people “adjust” themselves around me, just like I tailor my engagement professionally. But that’s what I hoped to avoid in donning the “friend” moniker to people and letting them run wild. That’s my persistent appeals to hang out with my otherwise preoccupied crowd that doesn’t so much conduct themselves like the college people. That’s my striving to create big and powerful entities that can operate by principles that no individual can tend to be trusted with indefinitely.

It's voting season. I can’t trust everyone I know to do so. I can’t trust my neighbors, the people I counsel, or those currently at any level of power, to not be literal fascists. My “power” in the context of any given crazed and irrational individual is immediately humbled and reduced if not for a shared exchange of an awareness of the problem and institutionalized accountable ongoing mitigation of the consequences. Whether that “institution” is the company I try to create or the relationships we build, it’s not a mere discardable artifact of an otherwise meaningful and purpose-driven existence. It’s a necessary component that needs nourishment and defended. It’s an awareness of what matters and why so we’re not driven by marketing, trauma, and blind fearful ignorance.

Each stomach drop is conceiving of “the whole world,” mine, yours, and the one we can occupy tomorrow, depending on my next keystroke, phone call, or deliberate pause. It’s not a power you should ever get too comfortable using, and it’s not a power I want kept to myself. I also can’t pretend that everyone is entitled to it or can use it responsibly. Most lottery winners blow through the funds in a few years. We’ve hit the historical lottery, country of origin lottery, monetary lottery, and often genetic lottery, and we’re teetering on indefinite self-destruction. What’s missing from our awareness? What’s your move when you feel that anxiety-inducing sense of power and obligation?

[933] Brick

I've felt a bit off. Something is missing. About a week ago I got a 24 hour flu, and the subsequent recovery from that kept me a touch achy and thinking I had all but erased any remote cardio achievements.

There are real problems. Is that a particularly controversial or difficult thing to state? We have real, honest to goodness, can kill us all, problems that permeate to the basest levels of our psychology. We have big broad “ism” problems. We have interpersonal issues. We have logistical nightmares. We have the haphazard violence of accidents and ambivalence woven into every moment. Why, ever, do we choose to make that even more difficult? Why compound the problem?

This is one of the questions at my core which drives my behavior. Am I just hurting myself? Is my life needlessly burdened by tying itself to some idea, person, or task that may have stopped making sense? If a rock is in my shoe, I take off my shoe, remove the rock, and proceed to walk the already difficult path. This is not to say I only ever do the “logical” or “easy” things, but it does mean I try to remain conscious of the conditions under which I might choose to hop about and kick the rock to a part of my shoe perhaps not directly under foot.

Today, much is referred to as “problematic.” From your jokes to turns of phrase, the idea that you would emulate something from a culture that isn't yours, the fact of your job or choice of associations. One way or another, you're always the problem, killing the planet, fueling capitalism, capitulating just inadequately enough to the incensed to remain frosty for a target bigger than you. “Identity” is up for grabs, and those on the attack will be dammed that you get to dictate yourself before they're done thrashing.

Writing is my perpetual grasp at an identity. Some of my most persistent memories are of being curious how to engage the world. I didn't know how the adults could sit around a table and talk for hours. I didn't know how people answered questions on game shows. I didn't know what it was to be charming more than fumble within mutual immaturity. Abstract concepts remained that way because it didn't occur to me to unpack every syllable that gave me pause. I want to know better. I want to do better. I want it to be easier and easier with each attempt. I want to fit everywhere I go.

Of course, I'm me. I don't fit. I imitate. I adopt the language. I build an entire psychological housing for a perpetually defiant and spiteful narrative underpinning my motivation and instincts. “Fuck you, watch me.” I can't speak to people without pissing them off. If it isn't that viscerally demonstrative, they maintain a defensiveness almost by default. I'm reflexively critical. I exist in a state of doubt. I'm daring you to be accountable to your word. I'm longing for the recognition of what mine is worth.

“Me,” is not something that can “go with the flow.” I have to speak up. I get headaches when I don't. I feel sick to my stomach. I clench my jaw. Mind you, none of these things happen when I'm merely managing or working through something difficult. I can do physical labor all day and not clench my jaw. I can try to parse every word in some argument and not have a headache while doing so. I don't feel sick at the prospect of starting or running a company. Those conditions are inflicted upon me when they arise from avoidable circumstances. When I can recognize the environment as destroying me, and can't change it myself nor expect you to give a damn, I suffer. Or worse, I can change it, but it means I have to get that much colder or ambivalent about you.

I haven't found a good fix for this. I'm occupying many environments at once. I can always alleviate the pressure here and there by putting a show on, putting you on mute, or wrapping myself up in some physical task. But, overall, my environment is not the one I want. It's still begging for the bills to get paid. It's still feeling the giant “fuck you” from the organizations I've worked for. It's still dependent on the sense of time and agency from people who've likely consigned themselves to miserable fates years ago.

I need a partner. I don't mean romantically necessarily. I need to meet my match about some foundational things. I need someone who sees things as urgently as I do. I need someone who has just a touch of elevated yet healthy anxiety about waiting just one more day. I need more tangible examples of what I know I'm worth to act as a balance against the distractions of time in between.

I shouldn't have to have “dumb” conversations about cause and effect or what constitutes “work.” I think a component of my “new” anxiety is how much more precious every second of wasted time on bullshit feels. I don't want to be in a dozen meetings and still left with nothing to do. I don't want to be having a meta or meta-meta-conversation analyzing why you can't give clear direction or complete a task in a time-respecting way, then positing it's really to do with my feelings that there's any real problem.

What I want is so simple. It's so simple it takes 100 hours of paperwork, weeks of miscommunication, the tact or organization to stay budgeted above water in the meantime, and a propensity to do several other things concurrently, you know, just in case it's not so simple.

Again, I pause, and take in my home. I put all this shit together. I put a new cat in it. I got power to it. I have supplies in the mail to hopefully fix the heat long enough. I'm full. I'm comfortable in my free chair I got with my awesome truck. I'm still at a certain peak. I saw an awesome movie yesterday, painted a bedroom, had help with a concrete run. I got my concrete vibrating motor working today for 60 less dollars than I thought it was going to cost. Barring extraneous spending, I'm already owed enough money to keep me solvent through the end of the year.

My life still happens in spurts. I certainly exist in between those spurts, but I'm not actually only and perpetually down to just...wait. I'm not keen to the excuses you use to feel better about how bad a job you're doing. I want to ride the energy of what I've done into the things I can't yet imagine. That doesn't happen, at least in a psychologically gratifying way for me, two or three days at a time every week or two when I have the money, time, energy, or help. I want the dominoes falling continuously. I don't want to wait for you to get better, I want to fire you and move on. I don't want to wait for you to remember what we talked about, I want someone chasing down the piece we need to move in service to any conclusions we drew.

This is a propensity that can get out of hand. This can lead to a lot of waste or potentially hasty decision making. The problem is that I'm 33, not 13. Most of the things I want to execute I've thought out for quite some time, or made moves in service to. Even if the precise mechanisms might change, the manner in which they operate has not. I know how to budget. I know how to efficiently invest. I have an imagination for the feasible permeating tracks I can take in business or with the land. In my own way, I'm inching along on the land in not pretending I don't have a working back or desire to fight the ever-encroaching pounds. There's always something to do, even if it's just log the next episode, but it won't suffice for taking the ride I wish to be on.