[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?

[1159] About Ten

 I want to run a few thought experiments. The task is to say, “What if what was said is even 10% true?”

I’ve been going back and reading/listening to some of my old writing. Sometimes, I come across a blog that’s blisteringly drunk and “embarrassing” insofar as I might compare it to how I speak and write now. It doesn’t mean that version of me isn’t still there, but I can more easily identify the weaknesses in its voice and character. I care about voice and character because I want to make sense and discover operative ways of being. To recognize, starkly, how often I can get in my own way is instructive.

That doesn’t mean that what I was writing about wasn’t true. You can’t adopt or discover operating principles if you don’t first start with a foundational pursuit, respect, and recognition of the truth. I was, truly, coming from those places, even if today they’re less intense. I can’t treat the sentiments as a raging hot inferno of “things we all must realize” or “be all end all” fatalism of a One True Opinion, despite their phrasing. They are no less informative and emotionally resonant at some level. It’s at least 10%.

This got me thinking about answers that snap into focus if you frame them like this:

“If it was even 10% true that Palestine will not accept a 2-state solution and desires the expulsion and extermination of the Jews, what would you do?“

”If it’s even 10% true there’s genocidal things being carried out by Israel, what’s the next step?“

”If it was even 10% true that an extremely messy and disingenuous political prospect and his followers wanted to overthrow the government, what would you do?“

”If it was even 10% true your partner was verbally and emotionally abusive…?“

“If it’s even 10% true that you’re being lazier, angrier, deceptive, quieter, more obnoxious, defensive, etc. than you need to be, what does that mean for what to do next?”

I think when you do this, it gives you the opportunity to introduce critical thinking. You see responses to absolutist phrasing, and you see the back-and-forth leveraging of specific atrocities and hyperbolic language ad nauseam. “They’re killing babies!” If it’s even 10% true, then surely we can agree it’s atrocious, and then move the conversation into the realm of context and history. Israel didn’t raid Palestine and start killing its children. They’re playing 2 different games. Israel hasn’t mandated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It’s literally impossible to carry on a conversation with someone who can’t qualify even the possibility that “their truth” and “your truth” might exist at all, but maybe only 10%.

That leaves 90% of space for the “real work” of agreeing to context. The 10% is the good faith, but it’s hardly enough to find a negotiated middle or consensus. We complicate this further by misidentifying who or what constitutes an immovable ideologue. I think this is why it’s most important to apply this exercise individually and with regard to your subjective experience.

I’m persuadable. That’s only because I come up with the arguments that make sense to me. Screaming at me isn’t persuasive. Demonstrating you have a looser or incomplete grasp of the facts than I do turns me off. An unwillingness to consider or introduce relevant details does too. If you can’t take what I say and repeat it back to me in a way that demonstrates understanding, I don’t pretend we’re having a real conversation. In the abstract, words are ever imprecise, sure. There is a realm where you understand not to put your hand on a hot stove. Even and especially if you’re the type of cunt who promises you like that kind of pain, hate your hands, and would lay your forearm across the adjacent burner to really sell it.

Most of the time, you don’t need to entertain the “most damming” or “craziest sounding” or, in the language of recovery, “catastrophized” version of events. We feel at 100%. We react at 100%. That’s fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. We’ve thrown this into overdrive with algorithms. We’ve let then 10% of propaganda and arbitrary associations dictate our operating systems. Even if the craziest and most shocking thing was 10% true, the next step isn’t to swing dramatically into the arms of whomever said it or decry the evil as though you’ve confirmed or worked to establish the 90% of the context.

“They’re eating dogs!”

Some cultures do eat dogs. Do I know enough about Haitians? No? Okay, are they one that eats dogs? No? Okay, 10% acknowledgment that dogs are meat to some people, Haitians aren’t one of them. Time to move on.

“Global warming will kill us all!”

If that’s even 10% true, give me the charts, like on the latest series attempting to rehab Bill Gates’ image, that show what’s contributing. Give me a budget. Show me the leaders and investments. Let me listen to the scientists describing the damage. I don’t need to cry and scream with you, nor am I the enemy for my desire to build the context.

Let’s do a personal one. “This job will kill my soul and make time feel insufferable.”

I’ve already adopted behaviors that mitigate this. I fill in dead air with podcasts, shows, and books. I build efficiency if I’m driving somewhere and have several things to get done throughout the week. I document, both work-related incidents and my experience when it reaches acute levels of dread. I’m already prepared to leave and continuously apply or search for the next thing. It’s not either I’m suffering at the ambivalence of my worst phrasing or I’m thriving. It’s all at once all the time provided I do the work of identifying the nature of the context and continue making decisions.

After a while, you might start to phrase it like, “That’s not true enough to matter.” You might start to feel that way so you can move on quicker until you run up against something that does. You don’t have to guiltily indict yourself by saying something like, “I don’t care about dead babies!” or “Fuck climate change!” or whatever the issue may be that day. You can begin to understand how genuinely removed and ignorant you are about most things in any given moment, and how the work to contextualize probably doesn’t interest you. You can put some distance between your feelings and the propensity to feed and justify them.

This absolutely does not happen incidentally or just because you get old. This takes work. You have to actually want to be accountable. It’s only if you want to recognize and entertain without being an embodied perpetual reactionary. This, I suspect, is less than 10% of any given population at any point in history. If that’s even 10% true, the burden to those of us trying to do better is the 90% of nonsense, instinct, patterns, norms, and undulating nature of consciousness as it bumps against technology.

What does that mean for how you should conduct yourself each day? What does that mean for the words you’ll choose? What does that say about the lines you’ll draw for acceptable exchange? What does it say about the work you have left to do in order to adequately shoulder that burden? There’s something to react to constantly. Are you sure you have the real desire and energy to even want to do better?

[1141] Shadow Band

There’s been a decent shift in my energy and disposition since I’ve started applying and moving in the direction of returning to work a “normal” job. My sleep schedule has gone all over the place. I’m finding it harder to focus. Broadly, “adrift” and “pensive” have me in a hole of speculation about how to conduct the next few months of my life.

At the same time, I’m still attempting to consume all of media, so it’s a continuous string of podcasts, music, and TV shows. 99% of approximately 95% of my days are spent in self-reflection/conversation with those. I have a couple people I text each day. Fleetingly, I talk to someone who operates in some professional capacity. If you’re curious, 14.4 minutes is 1% of a day. I don’t spend 14.4 minutes speaking to anyone most days nor 14.4 minutes speaking out loud to nearly anyone most days.

I get this impression, pretty often, that even when a conversation is breached, there’s an insistence to “wrap it up.” I speculate it’s because there’s an underlying fear that things will get “awkward” or someone might get the wrong impression that you, I don’t know, might become too friendly? It’s not that there aren’t the natural talkers and “everyone’s friend” types that you can run into, but it feels very accidental when that happens.

Anyway, I suppose that felt relevant to bring up when I think about the large amount of information I glean from these nerds and their podcasts. I’m struck by how often a theme emerges. We just fundamentally talk past each other.

It’s weird to me because the dance of a conversation suggests there’s a shared space or reality. But the closer you listen, or if you do so at an “overwhelm yourself” kind of rate, you realize each player is kind of doing their own thing and more or less looking for validation. I pause every time I hear someone say, “I think that’s exactly right.” Do they? Do they dozens of times throughout a conversation on whatever the topic freely flowed into?

The same thing happens when you get people on different “sides.” A Conversations with Coleman episode really highlighted this for me. Coleman strikes me as an autistic-type. He wants the facts, details, history, data, etc. and will sincerely try to explore a topic in good faith. He’s willing to entertain mouthpieces for nonsense in the spirit of actively mitigating the development of his own idea echo chamber. It’s a laudable goal, but it’s his and his alone, and the strategy for achieving it feels fundamentally flawed by inviting characters in who don’t so much care about Coleman’s ability to reach truer truths. They care about being seen as legitimate by eliciting any exchange from people like Coleman.

I think a lot about what Michael Shermer points out with regard to smart people being able to construct these extremely compelling and convoluted ways to believe dumb shit. I think people like Elon Musk and Bret Weinstein are poster children for this complex or propensity. The deeply unwise thing to do is presume that just because you’re good or accomplished at one or a few particular things, it automatically translates into broader license for drawing conclusions. Fuck, add Jordan Peterson to that poster.

I don’t think I’m getting “smarter” in my hours of listening to nerd people. Whether they criticize books, describe history, or dig into the weeds of ideological and political projects, they’re all seemingly being driven by a similar pretense. Their particular lens is worthy of your Substack subscription. Their particular insight is novel in how it compiles and describes the subject. Their experience of “this historical moment” is capable and “helpful” in getting a handle on…certainly not what we should do…but maybe we’ve laid the foundation for our next intellectual foray calling out for scrutiny and contextualization.

I’m getting this sensibility that’s empathizing with people who know absolutely nothing about politics, history, or pretty much why anything happens anywhere, and don’t feel obligated to try.

This is in conflict with my baseline disposition that, of course, sought out all of these nerds and subscribed and has been listening to for dozens if not hundreds of episodes each. But when I engage in my Coleman-esc sincere effort to not sound like a fucking moron, who am I sharing it with? My dad and 2 or 3 friends extremely occasionally? I’m not converting my time and energy spent into an infinitely regressing meta-analysis in search of my own following and Better Help sponsorship. I’m not writing digressions like these for official publication. I’m not galvanizing democratic support and solidarity to push new better-informed policy agendas. What’s going on?

My mind jumps into thinking about social media influencers, particularly the pretty ones. You can get millions of people to look at you every day by just putting your hot self on display in different outfits at regular intervals. You can be dumb. You can be naive. You can be vapid and very much a product of your carefully maintained bubble. But guess what breaks through? You’re fucking hot, and eyes equal money. It makes me think of McDonald’s. They aren’t advertising to you, they’re normalizing the very essence and idea of Mcdonald’s as food.

So, today, it’s normal to have strange hot people you scroll through with regularity. It’s normal to engage in “debate,” as though the exchange is at all concerned with what debate actually entails, or that it could be considered an exchange altogether. “Binge” became something of a badge of honor. Ceaseless professing of values and virtue signalling stepped in for civic engagement and meaningful sacrifice.

I’m also struck by how much I don’t really see a “fix,” to what I’m experiencing. You set yourself up for a trap if you conceive of something as a “problem,” more than a simple state of things or small description from your perspective. Say I want to “be more social,” so I’ve attended adult game evenings or been to hundreds of concerts and comedy shows. Do you make friends there? The performance is still ongoing. Volleyball is 35 random lonely dudes, 5 married girls, and dispositions possibly less adept at handling being alone. Softball was people seemingly seconds from changing the rules to allow drinking and smoking on the field.

Are these cunty ignorant observations of someone unwilling to even try? Maybe 5%, but they’re not inaccurate nor coming from a place of disgust or hatred. Add to the mix that I know I’m an aberrant personality who routinely and immediately turns people off to entertaining what I might have to say or joke about. Where’s “my people?”

I’ve never been good at finding a home with a group based on superficial qualifiers. I don’t feel “Serbian” despite my last name being a literal Serbian word for smoked meat. I don’t find solidarity in adopting sky-daddy ideas. I’m technically a Cubs, Bears, and Bulls fan and couldn’t tell you a single player on any team nor when they’re playing next. I’ve watched thousands of hours of “okay” television voluntarily before I’ve made myself look at a game at a bar for longer than 5 seconds. I can’t put together what they’re doing has anything to do with me. My sense of fulfillment and identity isn’t a function of group-think or proxy pride.

Different sports teams I’ve attempted to join as an adult started to drift. The ultimate Frisbee guys wanted to start taking the fun games we were playing to more “professional” levels. The dodge-ball crowd drifted to disorganized chaos. I’d also now have a built in 1.5 hour round-trip drive to most anything I might try to join, and I don’t get enough emotional or physical gratification in exchange for the gas and impending car issues to bother with a sincere pursuit or commitment.

“Disassociation” is a word coming to mind. None of it means anything. It’s all to fill the air and kill time. Whether I get fit or fat, I’ll be mostly alone to do whatever it is I’m doing any given day. Whether I know every sordid detail about Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, or Russia, or never even whisper their names again, I’m not going to speak on those subjects and “move the needle” on entrenched belief heuristics about power and identity. Even on the pages of my “friends,” facebook isn’t going to show you my thoughts and work to stay sane. It’s not a happy picture or doesn’t match your algorithm preferences. This, if it wasn’t for me, would be one more in an ironic fruitless exercise to toss more into the void.

I’ve dug myself such an isolated hole on social media, that even when I share work I do home renovating, my pets, the concerts with the artists tagged, or anything that you’d think would play the “look at me and how happy cool I am!” game of social media, I have literally never gotten more than 5 likes for any reason. The spam bots barely even fuck with me. I’m like not even part of a fucking hashtag community? I watch people get 30 likes for asking what to make for dinner.

I find these feelings, or lack thereof, especially curious because I have non-trivial and non-superficial friendships and family dynamics. They’re in no way the majority of my daily life. They play an outsized role in orienting how and why I think about how my time is spent. A perfect fool would read any part of this as some form of indictment about them or my inability to appreciate and celebrate “enough.”

But then, isn’t it the case for almost everyone to consider their family and friends non-trivial and non-superficial? Isn’t that the way we perpetuate horribly toxic and stressful family dynamics because they’ve been our Mcdonald’s for the whole of our lives and species’ evolutionary history? Our fruitless exchanges and familiar roles providing a comforting feedback loop in their predictable flavor. Do we ever get “enough” of whatever we believe we’re getting from our families?

So much of the make-up of your mind is there for you perfectly independent of whether you have the awareness or intention about it. As you grow more aware and make more decisions, it feels like an invitation to the kind of alienation I feel like I’m describing incredibly terribly from bizarre or seemingly arbitrary angles. My mind returns to my “Older woman who’s been 3 times divorced or had spouses die, has enough money, a long braid or butch cut, hiking boots, a glint in her smile, and knows what she wants by now.” Is she ever rolling 20-deep? She doesn’t need the noise or errant opinions about where to go next.

I don’t socialize like a woman. I haven’t had a vastly fulfilling professional or relationship dynamic for so long that it’s time to rest on my laurels and indulge. I’m not soliciting unwanted attention indefinitely. I’m not seeking solidarity with niche groups, co-opting a fetish or hobby in lieu of an identity. I’m also, if you can believe it, not attempting to hold people to some high pretentious standard of engagement or expectations, particularly when I’m just roaming about the world. I just don’t fit, and I never have, and I see no path to a place where I might.

I’ve been in “desperately maintain” or “work exhaustively for forlorn dream” or “see how much I can get away with before it breaks” modes my entire adult life. The attempts to build things with people are, sometimes weirdly violently, rebuked. My attempts to build competing or parallel ways are wrought with complications. If I “pull out” too far I get stuck in abstract write-forever space and eventually a deep foreboding that nothing matters anymore. Who wants that?

[1121] The Friendly Ghost

Today feels like a day that could be described as "crazy-making."

Am I sick, hurt, or otherwise dramatically impaired? No. There's been a theme and a confluence of forces though. Let's go.

This week, literally everyone has canceled on me. For work, for fun, for things I was anticipating to use to feel useful and good. I spend pretty much all of my time alone, talking to no one, blazing through TV, playing my instruments, reading, or getting myself into some trouble playing with something I shouldn't because I can't stand feeling idle and useless anymore.

I lay this at no one's feet. I could, theoretically more than practically, invest a considerable amount of time attempting to connect to other people, organizations, or things to do so I don't feel as reliant upon others and their consistency or capacity to manage. And, in fact, that's what I've done in getting started with CASA, and hopefully seeing that spin-off into more first-hand interactions with clients, other volunteers, and the inevitable messes that will bring.

First, one of my attempted hires to fundraise ignores my outreach. I thought she was on the verge of stealing $1,200, tracked her down, got a brief invitation to her life's blow-up, and she's since refunded $500, on what she's proposed is a schedule to refund the whole on her paydays. In the meantime, I patiently idle and refrain from catastrophizing her silence, and now 6th missed scheduled discussion, and who knows how many ignored texts.

Ok. I got an early text that client 1's phone is broken and needs to be rescheduled. I attempt to call client 2 around our meeting time, no response. I text if they are okay. I get a "Not at all, can we talk later today?" I text later in the day, no response. That whole day was designed around another person supposed to come out and talk about plans to upgrade my space. They had other life complications with family illness to deal with, so the project lingers.

I'm left with more idle time. We need to be incredibly clear that whatever I feel about that time, it's not being laid at the feet of "everyone" or anyone I refer to. I do not blame a single person ever for focusing on their sick loved ones or deprioritizing whatever we had planned.

I proceed to go about my days. I go to the symphony for the live music playing of Star Wars as the movie runs. An entire section of kids talked, crinkled pop cans, and just generally made it about them for the entire film. No usher told them to shut up. No seething patron closer to them said anything. They just took what could have been a pretty straightforward enjoyable experience, and my inability to mute them turns them into a few aggrieved lines in another bitching blog.

Before the show, I walked around the continues-to-be-miserable city a bit. There's "cowboy" bars with country music that mostly surround the symphony. There's healthy servings of homeless people ranging from decently aggressively shouting to sleeping in places it's hard to tell if they've closed early or closed permanently. At one point, I'm almost certain a dude was following me. I'm in a "major" city, wandering, feeling isolated and arbitrary, and oh, look, there was also a pro-Palestine protest on the circle where they're screaming an anti-semitic chant and parroting empty party lines.

On the ride to the city, I was listening to some of Peter Boghossian's videos. He's known for setting up hot-button questions and agree/disagree lines he asks people to stand on and defend their position. He's, in a world that made sense, simply trying to remind people that we're here to engage ideas and should have a remote sense of what we're talking about or what might change our minds. Overwhelmingly, the people who brave his exercises are not that articulate, nor claim they can be moved, at least in the moment.

I'm now back home, where a comment I wrote on, arguably one of the worst places on the internet, reddit, was removed because I described getting into a "pissing match" in a comment to another person who was asking for feedback on what people might want in a new TV-related website. The term, in and of itself, I was told is the #1 rule that's not allowed and the person wrote "p - - - ing" like that as though it's particularly aggressive language or like I said, "I'll piss in your face, cunt!"

It just echoes that ideological capture and perverse power dynamics that I feel plague pretty much every level of my experience.

I know, as much as I know anything, that no one holding a sign on that boring and sad circle is persuadable. I know that no elderly usher at the symphony feels they are obligated and empowered to insist and correct inappropriate behavior. I know those who are eager to belong, be it through their status as a victim or the oppressed, are going to die on a hill that transcends parody when mocked up against real life. I know that my clients who cancel have a vastly different concept of "get better" than I do. I know the "innocent enough" obligations and life circumstances that relegate time someone might spend with me to be practically incidental.

I also know that I feel that I need to escape this overwhelming belief that I can't trust or look forward to things. It's a feeling that stifles my capacity to invest both in myself and in what I can only speculate others get to feel for what's captured them. I don't believe it's worth it, whatever "it" might be, that I'm going to plan, try, or work on for more than a day or so. It's a hollowness that haunts whatever I might do to prepare, or when I stifle one thing and rearrange another, trying to be there and be present and not suck you into this ever-hollowing sense. I can't fill it with the manufactured drama and concern that appears to fuel so much of other people's experience.

Whatever I do or think I can create, I can't erase the context I'm working within. The world's best talker in a country where they don't speak the language is flirting with homelessness and starvation. The shared values and understanding that comes with an ongoing relationship or dynamic of cultural expressions and sets of experiences I just don't really have. It's not "never," but is 6-10 times a year I might get to spend time with my dad or a friend doing something fun count as the kind of fabric I'm trying to weave?

I'm like a ghost. I feel like I just kind of haunt things or memories. You have to think, I'm drawing on my experience of the last decade. It's not just been a particularly lonely or disappointing week or something. This week was just the same record blasted about as loud as I can take. But also, I clearly don't know how to "fix" it. I don't really believe it's a thing I can fix because my efforts to do so only seem to teach me ever-nuanced ways in which the problem compounds and reinforces itself.

You can't afford it? I'll pay. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about being able to afford it. You don't have the time? I'll come to you, work around your schedule. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about not having time. It doesn't interest you? I'll do whatever you want to do, I'm open and amenable like that. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about their lack of interest. When you're feeling good and fun and free, I'm not the one on your mind to call or invite. You were desperately waiting for that window so you could "catch up" on the "fun" you're otherwise indefinitely denied. Every moment where you can feel remotely human or "free" is not one you're trying to interject a bunch of Nick P.-ness into.

There is no striking-up conversations with strangers and informal friends anymore. Maybe that's just a problem with me? Feels bigger, but I don't know. My "best friend" I gave my terms to and they still haven't been met, so I'm not lending myself to get back into his spin. My business partner, who I also see maybe once every 3 or so months, has been barreling towards a crash for probably over a year at this point, refuses to slow down or establish better boundaries or utilize me in any way but to - very maybe - decompress an inch when he bitches about something? I have to tell clients all the time there's a difference between indefinitely complaining and still being a ball of stress and actually coping and incorporating whatever it is that's getting at you and changing your behavior.

I have another friend I see maybe once every 2 or 3 months whose dad might be dying, and she has her own health issues, so it's like where would I get off thinking we should bowl more often? lol I don't know, it's this weird thing where you're invited to pit your desire to feel like you belong or have a friendship against their given tragedy or circumstances. It feels like it would be infinitely unwise and unfair to "blame" as though they're any less stuck within their contexts than you are, but you happen to be the loudest example of anyone you know on how to defy circumstances and work towards what you might actually want and need.

Blame language is overwhelmingly a move to adopt nonsense framing, but emotionally, you're like, am I just supposed to kinda glide through the air until I happen to crash into you? To be extra clear, this feels like an existential thing with everyone to some degree or another. I do not get the sense there's any remotely deliberate care and focus to cultivate and protect a mutually beneficial dynamic. It's like every hangout is getting away with murder or their mind is physically unable to be present because it's been captured by the superficially "chosen" drama.

I mean it in a more damming way than that, which implicates this litany of sick family members. I think we're also gluttonous. When you're not choosing the drama, you're feeding on the familiar sensibilities of your relationship to it. Aren't you needed? Doesn't that maybe scratch the itch that I'm taking 9,000 words to articulate? I'd like to feel useful and needed and like a "good boy" for doing what I'm supposed to by way of expressed care. I don't. No matter how much people tell me I help or what I say makes sense, it does nothing for me, and I don't think a single person has even tried to articulate to me they understand why.

It's pretty easy to disregard everything you're not doing to gain control or a sense of personal responsibility and agency by attending to everyone else. There's also the unyielding irony where I'm witness to what appears to be people who will go to the ends of the earth for especially the ones who don't deserve or can't truly receive what's being offered. Almost like each party knows what's on offer isn't made of what either of them needs, but this perverse Munchausien bargain is struck. What kind of massive deserves-to-be-alienated cunt would try to turn your lovingly devoted heart into the problem!? You're right, I see it now why no one wants to hang out lol.