[1065] Good Boy

I don't consider myself a "good" person. More to the point, I don't think the sentence or sentiment makes any sense. I liken it to saying, "You're a good dog." A dog is a dog. It has dog tendencies, and depending on the breed and kind of engagement, you can lessen or exacerbate those tendencies. The "goodness" of the dog depends on variables internal and external. Our concept of a good dog varies with each observer. My good dog responds to commands, doesn't errantly bark, and refrains from tearing my shit or other dogs to pieces. Your good dog may routinely lick you inside your mouth.

I don't consider myself particularly disciplined either. I'm a product of a fair amount of conditioning, and it's hard to think of myself as not constantly looking for ways to push boundaries. I'm like Byron's dog Ike. It knows not to lick me, yet you can see the compulsive lick wheels turning non-stop. He can respond to demands, but is just as likely to take off into traffic. He's incredibly afraid of the dumbest things, but will occasionally decide it's time to throw down and fight at the dog park.

If there is one metric I attempt to remain consistent in, it's in matching my words to my actions. I try to build in leeway for things I'm not entirely sure I can pull off. I might say something like, "If I practice 3-8 hours a day again, I bet I could come close to sounding like that," when I watch an incredible guitar performance. I'll qualify the amount of work I'd like to do with, "If I'm in the mood," or "weather providing" or "if something doesn't come up." In talking or writing like this, I don't ever really need to make promises. I don't need to sell myself or make some "extra" pseudo-commitment profession. Whether I'm looking to be praiseworthy or condemning and judgmental, you can frame it in a sincere and balanced way.

I think about this a lot when it comes to my approach to people who begin to annoy the fuck out of me or who seem to betray me in ways I couldn't find myself justifying. In my reflection on dropping Byron, I spoke to moving out, and the darkness I was kept in. That's been damn near every single year from every single person I've lived with. No one, it appears, cares how much it costs or how much work it takes to get a house you're renting back in order and packed up. No one knew or prepared to work out where they're going to live year to year? No one thought twice about paying the ever-increasing rent indefinitely.

I would never just abandon a living situation that wasn't otherwise threatening me. I would never expect someone to throw out my shit or clean up after me. I would never contemplate moving and just keep that from them. These are the kinds of things that create financial holes, to say nothing of the psychological ones, that can take years to get out of. If it's not deliberately malicious, what can we say about people who are routinely selfish and willing to inflict such drama via, if nothing else and very forgivingly, "absent-mindedness." They dash into the street, and you're on the hook for the medical bills.

I had a client text me, 2 days in a row, about not getting a 14-day script. He's a relatively long-term client. He knows how the system works, or doesn't. He knows I have nothing to do with writing, retrieving, or even looking at and accessing the systems to do with prescriptions. Yet, he felt compelled to interject his bullshit into my day, distraught that having to do jury duty appears to have registered in our software that he didn't have perfect attendance. This isn't a 2 minute conversation let alone a dozen texts over 2 days one. I, because he's a "good" or "nice-enough" client, unwisely, responded at all, very briefly blaming the software, holiday, and finally requesting we speak about it when I'm actually at work. Of course, he kept talking, so I stopped.

There's a "good person" narrative at this juncture that starts to nag you. Don't you wish to alleviate, to whatever degree you can, the confusion of your "good" clients? If it's not going to annoy the fuck out of me (qualifying statement) I don't mind sending a very quick 5 word-ish text. Another member messaged coincidentally about the same time for the box code to get screens. Should she, and anyone who's been doing this program for years and heard the box code dozens of times know it? Sure. She's also a good client, and the box code doesn't obligate me to drama, here you go, I can move on quick.

I can recognize the difference between how either attempts for my attention register. I consciously refrain from saying "makes me feel," because I know it's my underlying habits or desires that fuel just how annoyed or otherwise I'm going to be when you come at me with your bullshit. I didn't have to respond to my first client at all. In one sense, I violated my own boundary. In another, I made a bet that talking back would help more than hurt. In yet another, I was expressly espousing my values to treat my "good" clients with a little more leeway and privilege.

It's not black and white. Depending on how hard I lean into any of those sensibilities, I could nag myself with guilt for not holding strong. I could be conjuring a tale of my desire for taking risks and hedging with unstable and inappropriate means. I could simply pat myself on the back for consciously elevating an individual, even if he managed to disappoint me.

My goodness. It's all so convoluted and layered. It's all of the senses at once, and my unconscious and pre-verbal parts of my brain cycle through each layer until I can land them line-by-line here.

My sense of whether or not I'm "good" has been shaped by how I was raised. My dad being the unconditional love type, and my mom ensuring it was metric and fear-based. I was good if my grades were good. I was good if I responded to the threat of violence with compliance. To this day, I still feel what I'd describe as a "standing guilty conscience" as though I've done something wrong or punishment is inevitable. 

It's not "real" guilt. It's the irrational kind you can't take responsibility for. It's what forms when you've been made into a victim. Your abusive or neglectful caregiver can be as significant a contributor to that as your cultural environment. There's adults still thinking they're going to Hell for jerking off. The Protestant "work ethic" is a recipe for chronic unfulfilling self-imposed slavery. 

The real problem with this not-real guilt is less about the endless ways in which it may play out as selfish and entitled. It's significantly more about realizing how all-encompassing it can become. It's us needing to own how punishing our environments are, so we can form a responsible and accountable approach to what they've done to us. Very few of us appear to even entertain the conversation. It's more of a cultural parody at this point about the levels of anxiety and depression and everyone's need for therapy and simply more exposure and acceptance a-la shows like Sex Education.

We're foundationally irrationally guilty, we don't know of what, and if we don't already feel like we're being punished, we intuit that more punishment is coming. Our insincere parroting of words gives us zero capacity or insight on how to approach this. We reduce what accessing the real and meaningful guilt might provoke in behavior change to the pithy ether of melodrama and religiosity.

I don't wish to be "a person." I want to be me. I want to believe I'm making decisions to orient around things I care about, equitable relationships, and my potential. If my debt was compulsive hoarding to fill a black hole, like it is with my uncle, I'd expect to hear criticism about that from people concerned about me. If my aberrant or impulsive decision-making was courting interpersonal, financial, and legal trouble, a "good" friend or person talks about it. That's the implicit lesson of like almost all TV. There's bonds that can't be broken as they drive towards genuine resolution of the plot. It's another tool in service to rendering us blind when the lines and goals haven't been explicitly written for us.

I can't remember the last time I deliberately and consciously tried to hurt someone. This lack of recall stands against how frequently I've been accused of doing so. Just as it was in my mother's household, before I had the language of developmentally appropriate stages and the neurochemistry of the pre-frontal cortex, I was always in the wrong. Moreover, I couldn't even imagine that someone else had the agency or their role to play. I think about this in particular when it came to throwing parties in college. Hundreds of people's drunken behavior was routinely laid at my feet, and I was right there to pick it up. I didn't think twice. It was "my" party, after all. I wasn't 1 of 5 on the lease, 6 living there. I wasn't 1 of 100 places to drink or act out that IU has to offer. Through sheer force of will and charm you'd think I literally cast a spell on my attendees.

And in a way, by having any intention and direction at all, I did. And if and when that goes awry, the responsibility follows. I'm fine with that, considerably less so with the next step to act like you can party all by yourself. I don't have my hand up your ass mouthing your justifications or holding your jaw shut.

The road from distancing yourself from that irrationally guilty space that blames everything around you to responsible adulthood is a framing and self-talk problem. You may not see the 100 people around you at the party, but I promise you they see a scapegoat. You may not see the work, family, or political environment you're ever-molded by, but they have your number and know what you're good for when they can't be bothered.

I hardly recognize everything I've bought and built to try to find more contentedness and occasional "happiness." I'm not just out here alone playing music all day, deeply contemplating compelling media, and full of cheer for the examples I'm trying to set. I know most people can't even really see me. I know I'm going to be expected to clean up so much dog shit and the other animals are going look on ambivalently to bemused. It just hits really hard sometimes when the bubble you're cultivating gets aggressively barked at or slobbered on. I'm fucking tired of having to treat people like dogs, from my "best friend" to my "good clients," and I literally have to if I'm going to survive. 

I'm the only one who gets to kill me.

[815] Knot Guilty

Ugh.

Let's start by trying to remember and paraphrase something I heard in an article about Sad Radicals. (Never mind, I'll just quote it.)

[The paradigm of suspicion leaves the radical exhausted and misanthropic, because any action or statement can be shown with sufficient effort to hide privilege, a microaggression, or unconscious bias. Quoted in JM, the anarchist professor Richard Day proposes “infinite responsibility”: “we can never allow ourselves to think that we are ‘done,’ that we have identified all of the sites, structures, and processes of oppression ‘out there’ or ‘in here,’ inside our own individual and group identities.” Infinite responsibility means infinite guilt, a kind of Christianity without salvation: to see power in every interaction is to see sin in every interaction. All that the activist can offer to absolve herself is Sisyphean effort until burnout. Eady’s summarization is simpler: “Everything is problematic.”]

This got me thinking about the ideas I've used to exhaust myself. I don't belabor nonsense about insufficient power or feel more than perpetually incidentally victimized by way of general life as it were, but feeling “infinite responsibility” is definitely something I've felt and talked about. I don't feel done. I don't really relax. I take a good majority of superficially good or reliable things and look for ways to poke holes or reimagine as accidental blips of good in an otherwise sea of shit.

What's my salvation? How ideologically driven am I? The irony of the ideologue is to maintain no inroads into thinking they're wrong. It's my general view that most people maintain at least one or a dozen Big Lies at the heart of their being that would more or less constitute the kind of irrational radicalism that keeps them chugging along. I think my only saving grace is the ability to be of two minds perpetually. It is all shit. It is all as good as anyone could ever dream of.

When it continues into guilt, I start to get curious. Guilt isn't really something I think I do well. As in, I don't often experience it anymore. I felt guilt when I was a kid. I didn't know why I was doing things and had little context. The more you own your behavior and speak your mind (or “truth” as people who phrase things ickily might opt for), there's little room to beat yourself up or require and seek salvation. I own my “fuck yous” as closely as I do my praise and enjoyment. When I feel evil and mean, I believe me, and maintain the conversation about the dangers of enjoying the destruction by occupying that place for too long or in questionable scenarios.

Interestingly enough, when you look at the Wikipedia page for guilt, you find:

[Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated universal moral standards and bear significant responsibility for that violation. Guilt is closely related to the concept of remorse. Guilt is an important factor in perpetuating obsessive–compulsive disorder symptoms.]

So maybe I'm massively wrong. Maybe my compulsions are driven by a guilt inaccurately conceived in youth, and my standards are not my own, and the responsibility lies elsewhere. I mean, it'd be nice to pawn most if not everything off on childhood trauma, but I made the mistake of writing a lot. There's only so many times you can reference your crazy mother and get away with it. As well, my compulsions, so-labeled by me and not diagnosed or properly interfering with my ability to handle business, are of the variety that annoy people with the real problem of obsessive-compulsive disorder. I have the counting, tapping, making things “even” boutique problem.

There's certainly always a veil of “all I haven't done” or generalized fear response for things I assume I've done wrong which absolutely ties in neatly with my childhood. I didn't do drugs on vacation and I don't hit on people at work, but when HR calls wanting me to screen, I assume the worst. The more I read this Wikipedia page, you could say I've a Freudian, more than an existential, form of guilt, were I in need of claiming it.

But back to the original quoted paragraph. Seeing sin in every interaction is a good one. I've been there. I still see enough disconcerting and dispiriting things constantly, but I'm more resolved to people's overt hopelessness, uselessness, ignorance, or naive selfishness more than maliciousness. The image of pushing a boulder up a hill comes to my mind often and has been considered as a tattoo.

Work feels like that. I'm not getting anywhere but onto the next not-quite disaster. The same tired lines, waiting for you to stop crying, emails with no or bad answers. There's no growth, nothing changing. People just default to cliches. You'd think something as theoretically dynamic as individuals and how they manage to hurt and neglect each other...well, let me stop myself, I said “individuals.” I'm just dealing with people. People stopped being interesting well before I got this job.

I want to take a break. I want to feel like I can take back more of my time without delving into spite. I want the prospect of typing the same stupid lines the same stupid ways to not provoke sheer exhaustion and the impulse to start acting weird.

I talked to the head of the agency on Monday. We sat down for lunch for a little over an hour. We discussed race, day-to-day office interactions, big-picture software and organization dynamics. We're both readers and constant thinkers so it went smooth and didn't show any obvious major failings but for all the things I must assume she thought about a few of my choice phrasings. On the drive back and in these following days, it's only sinking in further that there is no “top” person of any consequence that can move pieces any faster than one pawn at a time. I'm not under the illusion that the bluster of legislation is the hot ticket to be of influence either. Even when you buy your legislators, there's no guarantees. And with all the money in the world, you still die of colon cancer.

It all, always, resolves to you as an individual. You have to cross thicker lines when the otherwise adopted boundaries become too restrictive. That is, if you can't detach or negotiate, which I'm proving to myself I can't or would be unwise. Guilt in this train of thought would serve as a restrictive agent and as empathy for the hapless souls feeling as desperate around you. Good thing I'm still not prepared to claim it.