[1243] Trust And Reconciliation

I don't think this is going to help. I think I've done about as good as I can do to mitigate my problem. I would love to not stay stuck in an anxiety spiral for the next several weeks. The immediacy of my feelings part of me is already bored and annoyed-enough with them, but I can't seem to dismiss them entirely. This still feels like the ambiguous beginning of what might be the meaningful steps that get me out of debt.

I hate debt. I hate it so much. Out of extreme luck I never had to take on school debt, and that's if you don't ask my dad who almost died and had to fight for years to get the settlement money that paid for college. My former best friend and I calculated to the penny what either of us owed in fast food buys. I didn't apply for a credit card until my 30s. The first time I borrowed around $2,000 to pay off my shed-now-house, I worked 18-20 hour days delivering food, donated plasma, and ate the cheapest ways I could to pay it back in 3 weeks.

I've only gone into debt because I've believed in myself, the people around me, and what I could accomplish. I've anchored to the fact that I've never gone in debt an amount higher than what's been stolen from me. Both my uncles, and my former friend, account for that. I've hired people who have stolen from me. Others who have, functionally, stolen from me in their unreliability and perhaps outright lies about what they could accomplish in grant-writing and fundraising. At a certain point while working two jobs, both stole wages from me.

This is the context. I didn't get myself in trouble because I don't know math or refuse to keep a budget. I love excel sheets and formulas showing me what is or isn't reasonable with theoretical conditions. I didn't blow money on hookers and cocaine. I don't owe for gambling. I don't drive a car I can't afford nor live in a house with obscene rent or mortgage payments that no psychology major delivery boy should ever expect to afford. I'm not behind or avoiding paying for children I don't have, or a divorce. I'm just an average poor-enough person who's managed to sneak in a few nice things over the years.

I'm up against, what I'm told, is a county trustee who likes to go out of her way to make Chapter 7 filings contentious. In a worst case scenario, I'm backed into a corner of filing Chapter 13 instead, which fundamentally protects my shit, but drags out the payment process over 3 to 5 years. I already thought I had a solid consistent payment with a debt consolidation company, and that proved to be untrue. It's why I'm in this bankruptcy exploration altogether. It's a doable, manageable, failsafe and fallback position. But it doesn't correct for the fundamental antagonizing psychological condition.

I deeply resent that I owe anyone for anything. I don't live in a catastrophically exuberant and excessive way. I've never tried to delude myself about what I can or can't afford. This isn't chickens coming home to roost. This isn't karmic justice for some Ponzi scheme. This is the latest step in a series of humiliating conversations I've had to engage in with the people closest to me that have supported me financially over the years. I have irons in the fire for paying them back, and in relatively short order, but I maintain that neither them, nor I, should have ever been put in this position in the first place.

And that indignity is at the core of what nags me even if I get a "solution" through the longer-form bankruptcy. I won't be "free" to "just be broke" and go back to navigating my few hundred to a thousand dollars a month at a time. I'll be on the hook every month for the next 3 to 5 years, and punished if I try to pay it sooner. I'll be at the mercy of the legacy of betrayal. I'll be there until I can find a soothing enough coping story about why it's small potatoes in the face of the world otherwise burning down or atrocity next door. I'll be there because a small-town trustee gets her rocks off adding insult to injury like so many that have been emboldened in our fascist era. It feels like I'm begging the universe to just let me get back to zero.

In a best case scenario, all of the information I've dug up for the filing, and the evaluation I got from a realtor, will just allow things to proceed without a fight or delay, and in 3 months, I'm still broke, but free. There's a small chance I don't psych myself out and get screened away from a drug study that's supposed to start the first week of February. In a magic land of hope and possibility, I get a clean filing, admitted to the study, and every couple weeks I'm getting $1,000 for each outpatient visit which I can use to pay back my dad and past investments from friends, as well as get back ahead on normal house bills. I might even get my water running again.

Then, months from now, I get to read this blog as just another piece of spot-panic that would have benefited immensely from hindsight it's impossible to manifest any sooner. Then, this is one more gripe in the infinite series of injustices I no-less navigate one way or another regardless of the anticipated pain or suffering. I want to be the kind of person that already knows this. I want to be at peace now, not when the questions get answered. The fundamental question remains. Why can't I just be cool, now? I already know everything. Didn't you see me type it all up without notes or study? Can't you pick a crisis from my previous 1,242 entries I survived or forgot about? Fucking learn your lesson already you neurotic dick head. You don't have real problems, and no one fucking cares. You don't have to either.

[880] Victim Eyes

Honestly, for what has felt like a building and building for months, my brain is on fire. I feel as though were I ever able to re-learn how to cry, maybe I could be persuaded to shut off the endless conversations with myself and inability to stop digging. Digging, that is, unaware if I’m trying to reach bottom, some treasure, or just to back fill a hole I’ve previously dug.

I get a lot of ideas about what I’m going to do when I’m on the road driving home. I get home, blow them all off, and then do things like start writing this, or eat when I’m not that hungry, or settle in for a sped up show I’m half-paying attention to. I have hours of my weekly work to record. I have a calendar to establish. I have details as it pertains to home maintenance to finish. I have to keep talking. The obsessive button is stuck on, and I can’t help myself.

I can’t help myself. I think this is the point of no return for people. You either reach that point and break down, or you humble yourself and look for the right kinds of help. I can’t help myself. I don’t have enough information. I don’t have the resources. I don’t have the language. I don’t have the time. I might not even have the best or most appreciable grasp of my own problem. No louder does the point of swallowing, “I can’t help myself” sound as it hits your stomach than when other people are helping you.

I panic when I need help. I don’t want to waste your time or money driving to help me only to discover I forgot it was Saturday and our plan is foiled because the shop my truck sits at is closed. I don’t want to think about you moving things around in your garage where you said I could put mine while we work on it. I don’t want to think about driving your friend-of-a-friend’s car in shitty weather or the potential accidents. I don’t want to feel this burden to pay you to bother with me at all.

The whole concept of “help” or “equal exchange” throws me. It nags the sense I’ve developed for getting taken advantage of or taken for granted. I can know full-well how eager I am to please and wish to contribute meaningfully to what someone else is doing, but I can barely cope with the idea that my neighbor would offer to let me use his tools or tow the truck for me. I have to fight to believe that anyone would just lend me their knowledge in helping get the truck repaired. It’s unfair to them and my best impulses. It’s an irrational fear that my worst most selfish instincts are getting something for nothing.

There’s very few people I think I have a grasp on what I mean to them. I’ve also invested in people who my presumed understanding in no way matched how little I in fact did. I get this wave of appreciative emotion if someone is willing to pick me up when my car dies. I expect to be left to shiver if it’s cold, pay a shit ton to be towed, and it’s probably going to be raining, so when good will or friendship enters into that disaster-construct I bring, I’m overwhelmed. I want to believe it’s not anymore of a “burden” or “problem” for someone to “deal with me” than I would if any of you genuinely needed something from me. Unfortunately, the vast majority of my relationships and experiences are based in lies.

It’s probably why I’m so moved to constantly write. I can’t trust my perspective, so I have to keep investigating it against the good and bad things that happen. I have to keep my decisions and expectations in some kind of check, or my mind is otherwise begging for an excuse to spiral. Nothing ever feels particularly balanced, which is why I lend myself to taking on too much or being hopelessly optimistic that with a banal but persistent focus and work ethic, it’ll all manifest eventually. I’m dodging people’s chance to help me as I view them as attempts to emotionally leverage or manipulate. I’m waiting for the problem to compound, and be left worse than if I just had to fix things alone. Like, imagine your friend’s tire popping in coming to pick you up.

I guess this also speaks to how little trust I have for anyone. I’m probably going to replace my tire, come pick you up, and go buy another tire. I feel at the butt of, “Well it popped while I was coming to get you!” kind of arguments all the time. Someone else not terribly well-off in a position to afford a new tire uses their dire and dramatic life to assign blame; repeat ad nauseum. Why run the risk of provoking that response? Why attack your already feeble understanding of the ways in which anybody might be allowed to help you? You can completely avoid a food fight if you never invite them to dinner.

Whether you wish to regard it as a kind of super power or extreme liability, I’m positive I’m shaped by some series of chemical flourishes and imbalances that send my spider senses into a frenzy. Most people tip me off the wrong way. The ones who haven’t then have to surmount my “intellectualizing” of their presumed living-failure state. If they’re either suffering the same kind of symptoms, dispositionally aberrant in their niceness, or prove themselves in some kind of fairytale fashion, then I might take a chance in asking for anything or “more.”

I’m tired of losing or failing for bad reasons. I make the distinction between my clients where there are those who are poor and trying, or poor and cunts blaming everything but themselves. If I broke my car joyriding or off-roading instead of side-hustling, I’d feel less inclined to argue my job should find the language or responsibility to collaborate and shoulder some of the burden. Not even my friend, my fucking job that profits 10-to-1 off the work I do for it. My job that doesn’t pay me enough to not find side-hustling necessary. People shouldn’t be made to suffer because of judgment or indignation unless it’s their own.

None of us ask for the myriad things that seek to shit on or influence us every day. We cope by detaching. We cope by downplaying and parroting. We drink or get way into our hobbies. We overburden sentimentality. We work ourselves until we’re too exhausted to think. We don’t feel helpful, and at least for me, therefore can’t trust help offered by others. We recognize the problems as bigger than our daily buckets of water against the forest fire. We know we haven’t run enough to even escape the boulder’s shadow, let alone had time or energy to ponder the size and origin of that boulder.

Knowing you need help and being able to find it are two different things. I know I need help. I know I can access certain kinds of help for certain kinds of things. I’m not entirely sure if some things related to my thoughts and compulsions can really be helped, medication aside. I don’t know that I want to be numb or hazy when calm or worked-up, the threats are real. Whether they constitute threats to your life or reduce to daily negotiated realities, they’re shaping what you can see out of yourself and other people. They’re living and breathing the ongoing reality to navigate.

I try to “think” away my panic. I try to write my feelings into a corner where they certainly consider what that good cry might feel like, indefinitely, until I’ve ground my teeth down and conjured a new headache. This contributes to my desire to compulsively act. STOP THINKING I plead with myself, GO DO. And what is there to do? March and yell? My homework? My detailed little fixes rounding out my selfish little space I’m only entitled to provided the wrong people aren’t paying attention?

I only feel “at home” in those imperfect expressions of the consistent ideals. It’s only when I’m working in service to ideas and people I believe in that the insecure doubt and panic are erased. Yard work becomes a joy, because a better future accompanies each shovel-full. You can feel genuine enthusiasm for other people’s junk as it now represents a learning opportunity or larger commercial presence. Misunderstandings or open questions feel like they deserve your attention and are capable of being brought to a resolution. The next disagreement is a chance to refine an exacting appreciation for where you’re headed together. You’re encouraged by and to figuring out what needs helped and where. The reciprocity is built in, not baselessly expected nor poised for abuse.

I feel abused. I feel like I’m made to continually explain how I could get less black eyes if you’d stop installing so many pointless doorknobs, and right at eye-level. We both refrain from saying the quiet part out loud about how many you’re regularly throwing at me. I’ve learned that when you tell people that’s what happened, they’ll let you borrow a screwdriver. Or they’ll accuse you of dragging good doorknob installers through the mud. Or they’ll tell you to crank your head back so you take the blow at a point that bruises less easily. The victim in me panics, distrusts, over-analyzes, and wants to instantly burn things down. The vast majority of the time, the victim doesn’t make the rules or dictate my response.

[822] Chronically There

Let's see if we can figure out what's going on.

Since about 9:30 this morning, I've been in a low-level panic. The last 2 days I've had a weird off and on sleep thing happening, either crashing as soon as I get home and waking up at midnight, or sleeping from like 11 to 3, and then trying to “nap” between 5 and 7. I'm fairly well caught up on work tasks, and even doing “extra” in reading this book they want me to summarize in less than 1500 words. I'm fed, gorging myself on a pack of cookies, entreating myself to both IKEA meatballs and Portillo's in the same evening. I've been healthy, organized, and had my builder complete some more lining of my room, helping the temperature even out in my bathroom. I've plans for the weekend and the weekend after.

As my deskmate pointed out, if I'm feeling panicked, there's something stirring in your subconscious. There's never just “no reason,” much as I tried to point out it's not a “disorder” because it needs a reason. If I'm unable to claim a disorder, it leaves me begging to speculate. I have suspicions I'll explore, and with any degree of luck or deliberate thought, I'll return to simply biding my time until better things happen verses fight the compulsion to restart clenching my jaw and coaxing headaches.

My job drowns you. Whether you want it to or not, you're dealing with people. People are uniquely tied to people. A dog can bark at you all day, it's not the same thing as someone cussing you out. We expect things out of our clients. We cross our fingers for a degree of civility when we're pursuing some bureaucratic, but seemingly ridiculous, course of action. I'm finding myself dreaming about scheduling and conversations I've had. This is the big “secret” as to “why I couldn't do your job” that rarely gets talked about out loud.

Paperwork isn't hard. Clicking the same buttons for the majority of families on our semi-crappy software isn't hard. Driving, generally, to locations 5 to 20 minutes away, and occasionally across the state isn't that hard. Embodying trauma, excuses, lies, and “don't take this personally” commentary as people just fail on top of failure gets hard. Doing it with no reprieve gets harder. Doing it and being needled over petty and small-minded “concerns” from laughable “leadership” is damn near impossible.

I, maybe, have 5 days a month. Every other day is spent anticipating work, or talking about work. The people I know? I work with them! So there is no getting drunk together without another few hours discussing all the “crazy.” I don't really “do” anything else. I spend my time trying to avoid, not trying to grow or learn. I spend it feeling older than anyone can actually guess I am. (Someone guessed 26 yesterday). I don't feel like I've the energy to do much when I get home but continue the conversation of whether or not to get a jump on tomorrow, so if and when the existential crisis hits, I won't exacerbate the panic by taking a 2 hour lunch.

I'm seeing so little of “me.” I can't talk like I want, not really. I can't explore the topics I want without feeling distracted and exhausted. You'd think, just start reading, no? Just pop your head into a fantasy, or pick up some new factoids. But it doesn't work like that. The information has no room to breathe. It's just words on a page I'm letting slip by.

I think it's worse than that though. It's the sinking feeling that things, broadly, are so much worse than I have words for, and they can't and won't get better. I've been repeating the line, “it's the little things” to myself a lot. Little shifts in how we operate can mean big stressors are alleviated. Little decisions to streamline the process don't get made. Lengthy appeals to leadership get smiled at and ignored. Little attempts to indulge or distract serve the opposite effect. Things don't connect or translate. I don't feel the causal well-intentioned sense or discussion ever working towards anything meaningful.

How the fuck do you fix that? I don't get my sense of identity from work, which subsumes a great portion of my life. I don't get support in trying to map my perspective on making work better. I don't get the impression that for all of the “adults” in the room they could hold a candle to the kind of leadership and example it would take. I run the risk of overburdening the friends or acquaintances I have in looking for something that's not their burden or theirs to offer. And every day I'm just supposed to show up, report, and carry on like there isn't a tear down the middle of my existence, my hand clenched with needle and thread so tight I'm bleeding.

I have an otherwise perfect life. I have too much stuff. I have a brain that works. I have toys. I have people who care about me (sociopath lists them 4th? Jesus) I'm still not too fat. I've managed to keep my car accidents at hitch and deer hitting. My friends are rich enough to let me chance spinning out of control in their sports car. But I can't make the little shifts? I can't prevent the panic from setting in as I stare at the blank depressing walls and recite the office mantras? If there's any word I overburden, it's absolutely irony. Perfect relative to what? To when I didn't have so much stuff? To when I naively believed in a “better” kind of future? To yours? I didn't use to panic all the time. I didn't use to walk around so fluidly as a mockery of what was going on in my bones. I feel I've taken my pragmatism too far, and am finding it incredibly hard to see where I exist.

[777] Full, Mental

It's not like I have to write every time I feel a little panicky, but when it seems to be coupled with a few other persistent thoughts and themes, might as well explore, right?

I keep thinking about what it means to “take something for granted.” The innocent understanding of it is just about not thinking about something. There's only so many things you can hold in your mind at once, so as long as your heart keeps beating and your feet keep moving, maybe your morning walk can just be about getting in the steps, and not an occasion to freak out about who's going to jump out of the bushes. Colloquially, it's the rendering of something or someone important to the functioning of your life as smaller or less than they're worth. It's someone feeling maliciously forgotten. It's someone abusing their position or resources.

As with most kinds of inescapable problems, I try to build it into my general behavioral framework. I don't know when you think I've taken you for granted, but I will know if I did or didn't pay you for your time or effort. I will know if I asked for a birthday gift, and had no intention of buying you one. To me, you can skip right over the grey of who you're hurting or who might hurt you by just being consistent and deliberate in whether or how you go about asking something from someone. You'll always need to, no matter how delusional any individual is about their personal sovereignty, and it can either be an honest exchange or gamble.

I'm hoping to exercise less and less the need to ask in the first place. It's a backwards thing to do for a co-mingled and aggregating species member. At the same time, the implicit survival lessons that got us to this point can no longer be taken for granted. It opens your mind, forces your mind, to consider things that you would otherwise never see coming. What happens if there's a flood and I can't escape the country for a week? What happens if the unknown unknown creeps in and threatens the presumed future? Whether you're at the day to day slog of the practical, or knee deep in your dream, there's always something coming.

I'm going to be relatively distracted and rehashing the arguments I plan to make when I contest my ticket from the other day. It was an unknown unknown. I didn't expect to get a ticket. I didn't forget there are cops or that you're supposed to stop for buses. My morning simply shifted a little, I left a little later, the traffic was a little heavier, and a variable I haven't been primed to think about in months if not years occupied fatal seconds. Grungy, dusty, beater-car me never got ticketed. Dressed down, new red with tinted windows and pea coat was matter-of-factly handed a ticket. Do we take for granted the sharp-dressed man sees the best side of everything?

I think a great source of panic comes from never forgetting that there's always those fateful seconds where things can go horribly wrong or amazingly right. People are starting to get their tax refunds. I always thought those were something of a myth, and now I might be able to actually be “evenly poor” like I had planned to be last week. That thought alone had me feeling generally mild-mannered and liberated earlier today. Then I started doing the math. I subtracted the credit card, the ticket if and when I lose contesting it, the pending labor that will almost certainly be 5 instead of 4 days, and the food I've yet to buy or things like floss and toothpaste I'm running out of. I started to theorize a little bit about which of the dozen projects I could put a little money towards, or maybe just go buy a few more pairs of work pants.

The poor person in me knows the money is being targeted. If it doesn't go to something that makes some kind of sense, I'll get pulled over again tomorrow and be out that much more. If I try to sit on it, I'll get a knock on the door from an uncover debt collector a dentist from 4 years ago decided to settle old scores with. Some new tax or problem or supplies will be absolutely required, and I better get used to the taste of recently thawed and dry chicken. The money is always leaving, as a poor person. The concept of “investing” is a nonstarter. The idea of “passive” income and ever having remotely enough time or the resources to create something new or build up enough credibility and skill to make bank off your brain will never happen.

This is the point I never want lost. I'm still fighting to be able to fall asleep and wake up when I want. The freedom to be noisy and decorate or build as I please are one thing, but being able to do them at all hours of the day and night are another. The “real” dream is still a ways away. I think that's a large component to the panic. When does it get better? Will it even? Will I get to be a silly little pipe-dreamer rambling on to the youth about how crazy it is out there, and to think twice about flying too high? The routine is how you eat up your time too. I have court dates weeks from now. I have 45 days to submit each individual report. I have a concert I'm headed to in a few months which I'm already at, because I know what my days basically look like, and I know I don't exactly want to be that present in every moment of them. I can know intellectually it's all a game, but what's at stake doesn't feel that way.

In some ways, I feel my time would be easier if I was actually kinda lost. If I “just wanted to explore” career options or, “gain experience” for the life I planned to live when I was 35, it wouldn't feel desperate and imperative things happen “now.” The “problem” is that I know what I want. I know what I want to see. I know what the environments I put together can breed. I know the dollar amounts required and time investment. I'm intimately familiar with what my mind and body is and isn't doing during times things are going wrong or right. The law of diminishing returns is playing a big role in the amount of words or information I could keep bringing to my circumstances. I need the next steps.

One thing that's certainly getting old is the bizarre nonsense realms my head wants to go when I've exhausted all material logic as to why things look the way they do. Questions like, “How shitty was I in a past life?” or, “Would a charity donation kick off a butterfly effect to help me next week?” If you ever want to plug the hole that would make you desperate and reactively empathetic, just consider the impact and lifestyle of psychopathic greed has allowed dozens of individuals to revel in spite of hundreds of millions. There is no cosmic justice as far as I can tell, as no even quasi-functioning rich person could amass the number of mental, physical, or social problems as what routinely plague the poor.

I can't lose sight of that “freedom” though. I promise, I'd rather be “bored” and reading or playing alone than feel chained to my job. If I didn't have a fair degree of leeway to pick my own adventure each day, I'd never last. And I'm only going to allow myself so much guilt in not completing all of the books and articles I want to before I just say fuck it and lock myself in some form of library for a month. I don't think I've had two years pass by both slower or faster than these last two, and neither of those options feels good when I consider why. Constant work, constant delays, constant dancing on the fence of meaningful consequences as I tumble between negotiated practical concerns. That may be what life is, but that's not what I'm going to allow mine to be for very long. I suppose it's reasonable to panic over whether or not I even have a choice.

[660] Panic Trip

Without warning, and for what is most assuredly “no reason,” and actually during or right after “things” feel “complete” or “perfect,” a mild to severe panic sets in. Thus I had to stop what I was doing and start writing.

I've said before that I can see the rest of my life. Reflexively, the urge is to laugh or scowl at the little kid who's pretending to have figured something out. But I don't mean in a specific sense like predicting I'll die at 90 in the south of France. I mean in the sense of a feeling. I've gone 29 years with a sense of comfort and stability no matter the degree of “problems” I introduce into my life. It isn't hard for me to imagine 29 more. I can live in a way that less than a week out of the month is required working. I'll always have food. I have about 4 years worth of movies and television personally downloaded that I haven't seen yet. Simply, it won't take much beyond exercising the habits and expectations drilled into me since birth to float along this path until I'm dead.

I do not find this reassuring.

The comfort of this moment, the only moment, then registers as a trap. I'm comfortably full. I've got exactly what I want to be entertained with in front of my eyes. I'm even the right temperature. The other side of the equation over the last 2 days has seen my car die twice, in the most convenient places I could have asked for, and my phone get cracked, solely on the back in no way affecting the functionality. My “bad” isn't even that bad. It's been the perfect analogy for basically my entire life. I'm perturbed at the prospect of buying a phone case, replacement solar lights, and a new car battery, which I can afford because I work my at-will job that allows me to watch TV all day, all day.

I think the panic registers as a form of guilt. I think it speaks to everything more I'd like to go more right than it currently is. I think it's the reality setting in that I'm just as “nothing” comfortable loner with his TV shows as I am quasi-impractical impulsive romantic dreamer. I can hear the dad-speech in my head about how “living the dream!” I am that you'll find on /r/redditforgrownups. The hours I work don't register as me “deserving” this, or any form of comfort, until I'm able to work on what I think really matters. I don't want to use all of my time for the resolved sigh of relief as I “comfortably” buy a replacement car battery.

There's a distinction here too I think between what I'm feeling and simply being ungrateful. My broken car is a replacement for my significantly more broken car, given to me, as all my cars have been, by my dad. If I didn't run them into the ground working with them, I'd feel I have more to atone for or make even. I was recently called a “mooch” because everything in life is currently in opposite land. A charge which might have some staying power if I didn't pay rent and a “mortgage” to occupy this couch guilt free and keep months ahead on my garage.

To go along with this sense of panic is a line that's been trapped in my head, “It isn't about you.” I think I may have written about it before, but it's taken on a new kind of significance as I feel myself sliding into my remorseless brazen ego. I think I remember why I was persuaded by the idea. I wanted to help. I wanted to help the “ignorant masses” back when I was learning about religious stuff. Stuff I only bothered to learn because I was head over heals for a girl I wanted to be all about in high school. I've taken the examples of my dad and grandma who showered everything they could on the offspring so they could be happy or comfortable. And yet, I'm constantly watching TV.

That is, I'm battered with “stars.” I'm watching thousands of examples screaming every week, “No no, it IS about me!” It's the celebrity endorsement that gets money sent to a cause. It's the “new comedic voice” that gets greenlit. Sexual assault gets to trend and be of consequence after the rich white ladies have had enough. If it isn't about me, then it can't be about you either, which would contradict the whole exercise of picking friends or family. No matter how many giants' shoulders you're standing on, it's a select few that get the prizes and recognition. For all of the talk of sheep and shepards in biblical tales, they still dignify a soul! Even if the followers are predictably ignorant in the ways they choose to acknowledge and apply it. We relish hero tales, while the background regular people barely make it through a season.

For all of the faux-humility coming from...fuck, where is it even coming from? One-off misquotes from the bible about rich people having a hard time getting into heaven? The meek inheriting the Earth? The wave of, “Look at me!” has been going on for quite some time now and every modest civil servant is being roasted over the coals of the savages who take charge.

The task then seems to separate “celebrity” from “egomania.” I could stand to be something worth celebrating. I wouldn't mind recognition for my creativity. I still actually like getting likes even if people still only feel comfortable telling me they read and agree with something months or years later and mostly after they've been drinking. I've gone on enough digressions about the different kinds of “selfish.” The dread I feel is from finding the wrong kind of selfish too compelling. I need to keep the engine primed to work in service to a new direction at a moment's notice. The snug and comfortable blanket will get too hot and make me sweat.