[1089] Tell Me That You're All Right

I'm hit with an idea, so let's see if there's anything there.

The thought was "Already Home Syndrome." When you engage people's pathological communication online, when you dive into particular social or political contexts, or if you just consider your individual family dynamics, the context has the same "form." It's a form manifested of feelings and expectations. You're "already home" and it's not clear how often you're able or willing to leave.

I flit about reddit. Recently, I attempted to contribute more responses to the /r/self page where 20-something lonely fat women and 20-something poor suicidal men talk about how hopeless their lives are in reddit-appropriate speak. This means "tl/dr" and infinite qualifiers so they don't sound "too whatever" that might elicit a wave of backlash. I discovered very quickly it's, like everything else, incredibly insincere.

I'm as sympathetic to the need or desire to bitch and moan as you can be. What I'm not, and never have been, is looking for sympathy and validation in spite of my shitty perspective and behavior. I've always wanted to try and better understand what felt like incomprehensible thing or behavior example after example. What "people" do is use their words to assert justifications and side-step the conversation about how they can be more accountable.

You can go to reddit and find immediately a paragraph describing "how fucked up my life is," and with almost no effort, each line will testify to glaring gaps in perspective, show a lack of appreciation, or build who is to blame into the conclusion. The more I've observed this, the easier it's become to detach and try to study it. It's incredibly human. Scaled up you get these flame wars politically. We make it noble and build it into religions. There's always always always a scapegoat. And you're mean or rude if you even suggest the problem is you.

We habitually fail to entertain the idea of context and history. When you're caught in a reddit dogpile of people's internal "yikes" sentiments regarding your replies or posture, it takes the opposite of effort to criticize a caricature of you, feel great doing it, and get validation from the errant barking. Say someone comes on to complain about their relationship. They aren't there looking for strategies to healthily navigate their dynamic. They're soliciting hundreds of votes in service to a new, more comprehensive, placating narrative to explain and excuse away the behavior.

Do you have any idea how many people are comfortable claiming their husband or boyfriend is "addicted to porn" before they'll entertain the simpler notion that guys will continue to find other women attractive, or even more attracted to others than them? They don't want to talk about other cracks or flags in their dynamic that would suggest a bad or dwindling relationship. They want the problem located in something seemingly external or slightly foreign to their experience like some kind of invader to an otherwise perfect picture.

I never thought I'd come to understand people who've learned just to not talk or share anything with anyone ever. I complain and excoriate how silent most people are on many issues I care about, but that comes from high, perhaps unreasonable, expectations of people I like to believe I've been witness to their better capacities. I don't want to hear from everyone all the time on everything. What I've learned, again the hard way, as that even when you come in patient, deliberate, informed and you got the lived experience and honed instinct, you're just asking to have it thrown back in your face. I've never raised a teenager, but I suspect it's close to the same thing.

With my ex, it didn't matter how patient I was, how long the conversation went on, what words I chose, what project I agreed to help with or pay for, how much time went by, what rules I asked her to follow so we could stay friendly and communicating…at the end of the day something was driving her emotionality, reactivity, and judgment that had nothing to do with me. It didn't, and I'm inclined to believe, still doesn't, see me or my perspective at all. By context-specific default, I have nothing to offer her or I have to be extremely cautious and conscious of what I am or am no longer willing to contribute to the dynamic.

So it goes for all of us in all of the contexts we share. Is it even worth making the same kind of appeals you have to the people in your life who've proven themselves intransigent? They're already home, and you're telling them to make renovations they think are ugly, move to a state they don't like, or keep the best (only slightly abusive) dick they've ever gotten out of their spare bedroom? You're crazy.

Reddit is a specific context. You're expected to conform to the horrible way people communicate on that platform. Spits and stutters and presumptive assumptions that validate feelings. It's longform Twitter with micro megalomaniacs policing speech more fervently than any authoritarian. And it teaches you to conform or not exist within its context at all. Then these people step out into the world and try to make it conform to the same online rules. I consider it literal fuel for fascist thinking.

Your "porn addicted husband" never gets a say. No book or researcher or statistic exists in these environments. The concept of "personal responsibility" doesn't take shape at all, and if it's remotely alluded to, baked into the newspeak connotation is an accusation and enemy you'll be shamed for not reflexively condemning! That is, you're only personally responsible, in crazy town Twitter world, if you adopt my catphrase, deplatform "violent" words, and encourage I emote in whatever direction and to whatever degree I see fit. Anything less, you're kicked out of the house.

This gets so complex because it gets conflated with "setting appropriate boundaries" or "communicating healthy needs and expectations." The key to these discussions being coherent and productive is respect for evidence and shared conceptions of reality. Otherwise it's a competition between gaslighting and ignorant narratives.

When my ex and I were arguing, if I bled her funds dry, withheld my tools and time, verbally berated her and picked at her self esteem, beat her up, threatened her stuff or cat, sabotaged her effort in the garden, spoke ill of her to friends, or did any of the shit I hear people do in their "normal" relationships, you'd have evidence to rightfully assert I'm the problem. If you don't have that attitude about your own behavior with regard to any topic, especially ones that piss you off or scare you, you're probably not doing what you're doing in a healthy or appropriate way. If you're looking for validation from strangers on reddit, you're definitely not doing what you need to be doing lol.

That we're so dispositionally biased to believe whatever it is we currently do is why so much is shit. There's an incredible amount of heinous shit built into our normative behavior and presumptive "value systems." You don't get millions for Trump, or Palin, or Putin, or Hamas in a world that fundamentally "makes sense." You don't suffer indefinitely under completely avoidable poverty without some powerful persuasive compulsions to protect greedy impulses. It's not abstract. Your husband isn't addicted to porn. You're not in a fanciful romantic love story where everyone is happy in the end after an hour and a half of animated wish-fulfillment and expectations built into you from childhood. Without irony, they scream, "Fuck your feelings!"

We're not humble. We're not curious. We don't volunteer for the necessary pain that draws out our best conceptions and potential realities we long for. We're just whiners. We're feeling more and more entitled to whine. We think, "Well that's how all the rich white privileged people won, so now it's our turn!" No. There have always been people willing to exploit and capitalize on their proximity to power or access. It's a historical fluke and your deliberate framing of the oppressor and oppressed to service your version of victimhood. It really is the same mechanism at different scales and contexts.

Don't you know men are x, y, and z therefore…

Can't you see how woke or privilege has…

He thinks…! Bitch, you don't know what he thinks, he barely knows what he thinks, and worse, you're both probably not even interested in finding the truth together. If you can get him to agree that you've remotely captured what he thinks, I'll start listening to you.

It feels like someone screaming, "I didn't ask to be born!" Sure. That's absolutely true. What do you think you're saying with that statement? How many concurrent ways can you imply you'd rather be dead before we move on and recognize you're saying it to justify behaving in a shitty way? A child who does that we might think of as "just following orders" from their developing lacking-in-control systems. A culture that builds on that propensity and protects and refines it we might think of as fucked up, sick, and doomed.

My brain's been echoing the "You make people feel small" accusation from my ex-coworker. I had a session with a new client a couple days ago in which I started in talking about "fight or flight." She didn't know what I was referring to. When I explained it, she said she understood and thanked me. I'm already home in my go-to proven sentiments that have helped people in the past or helped me better conceptualize myself. I struggle to think of a more ubiquitous and common piece of knowledge than "fight or flight," but here we had someone who didn't know it. I don't consider her dumb, ignorant, or "small" nor had an impulse to criticise. It shouldn't be controversial or read as some kind of unfair judgment or priviledge if we recognize the disparity in what information we have and how we're using it to address our relative issues.

It's just factually correct that we barely know anything about anything. That's as quick a test as you can offer someone to determine whether or not they're really worth spending your time on. Do they recognize their own ignorance? Can they entertain gaps in their knowledge? If that answer is no, ever, for yourself or about others, you might as well just make squawking noises back and forth. You're ideologically possessed. You're contributing to our seemingly inevitable collective cultural downfall. Your house is on fire, and you need to move.

[1082] Dead Kids

We're post-Thanksgiving where many are reminded of the family members they wish had died in the womb or gotten mercifully aborted. If you haven't heard the "joke" about fighting with the "conservative uncle" 4 to 10 thousand times by now, you're probably lost in the woods and better off.

I was listening to a boring article on who artists thank in their Grammy acceptance speeches. At the end, the author links to a Nail Horan music video called "Heaven." It's a good song.

The first comment says, "my son passed away 2 weeks ago and we came out of the funeral home and heard it in the car. . . .I cried my eyes out and thought it was my son telling me hes in Heaven ."

Of course they did.

This isn't the first dead child scenario in the last couple weeks I've been a party to. In one of my latest facebook pissing matches, a guy referenced his daughter dying of cancer and him getting an "undeniable" sign that she had manifested for him shortly after. On my ride home from the movie theater, I was listening to "If Books Could Kill," which was excoriating Mark Manson for speaking to the personal responsibility for your feelings you might have to take in the face of, you guessed it, your child dying.

The hosts were clumsily trying to side-step hearing any explicit advice from Mark's (lazy) reiteration of different philosophical or religious schools of thought. To be sure, it's unclear if Manson even knows what schools he was pulling from, but that's not the point. They ridicule him for "relitigating a comment on his blog" and proceed to assert a definition for trauma. Then they claim they don't believe you can take your pain and segway it into something else or change what you're feeling. The other host chimes in, "It's actually much better advice to give yourself permission to feel the way you feel." This is a separate concurrent idea on how you heal and "move on," not a competing one.

I can forgive two sides completely un and ill-informed about trauma-informed care with competing agendas and audiences. I can't help but notice how stark of an example this feels. It's these misalignments that get baked into the air-headed zombie-jokes about holiday fights. It's the pithy attitude we adopt alongside catastrophized language. The real opportunity is lost. Namely, when you're discussing dead kids, the chance to access how much you don't really give a fuck about them.

The most harrowing example of the dead kid theme has been watching "20 Days in Mariupol." How do you get the haunting sound of parents grieving over their dead children out of your brain? How do you wash the images of the blood and missing body parts? Well, there's a few ways, and they start with the idea Manson spoke to and the podcast hosts belittled. You accept responsibility for your feelings on what you're hearing and seeing.

What does that look like? What is the practical first step you take? Here, I've stood in active fascination and wonder about every parent. When you have your children, are you, somehow, under the impression they can't die? I ask this question in all sincerity, because it's the most "boring" fact I can land on when discussing the reasons for having children. Depending on how or whether you bother to ask and accept the litany of questions regarding the morality, responsibility, or fallout of your children says considerably more about you than you may have intended.

Do you want to "accidentally" find yourself in league with the most ardently irrational and proud conservative Christians touting the sanctity of life as they let mothers die and children suffer neglected indefinitely? They aren't taking responsibility for the death and destruction they cause because they aren't owning how little they give a fuck about anyone besides themselves and their narrative.

We treat dead kids as political footballs. We're ambivalent to how many of them die for preventable reasons. We don't care how many are in foster care. We don't care, after we've assumed the worst about a given family, what we do to their bonds or how we approach "helping" them. I'm lucky enough to have seen this first hand at DCS and then get to compare it to our cultural narratives and responses from different media and entertainment outlets.

Why did The Sound of Freedom get so much press? Because it was true? Certainly wasn't lol. Because anyone knows the statistics or cares about abducted kids? Definitely not that. I had to literally do the math in one of my addiction groups to explain that if what the movie and media outlets were reporting was true, it would be like 1 in 4 kids that would be going missing every year. I then asked the group members if they knew even one person who had a missing kid or could recall the last story about one. Crickets.

I can watch the horrors of war and remain "unphased" because it's not lost on me how fucked everything is. It's not and never a surprise. I can kick around baby heads in my brain and recognize those as "just thoughts" I don't need the veneer of horror films or speculative nonsense "news" to depict for me. We exist on that line of remotely cordial progressive evidence-based inching into the future and utter annihilation every single moment. You have to take responsibility for how that plays out in your own mind, or not. You can suffer under the illusion your children can't die and let it turn you into someone who feels noble for attacking those who speak otherwise.

If you cared about dead kids, or suffering kids, or kids under greater threats than you've ever experienced you know what you do? You get honest about what they need, and then you pay for those needs. You track and report on progress, and you punish people who undermine your effort. You accept what role you may have played, even just in your ignorance, in why some of them died. Your household probably employed the "There's starving kids in Africa…" idea for generations having never donated as you practiced waste and gluttony.

These mythical narratives regarding our own nobility and perspective keep things the way they are. If you believe, at any level, a bird landing on your shoulder or Nail Horan's latest belief-adjacent track is evidence of the afterlife, you're just doing denial work. You're justifying how little of fucks you give verses accepting it. You're not actually comfortable with yourself and the choices you'd have to make to do better. You're an addict for the bullshit. You're running.

I want one dead relative to unambiguously write something that has nothing to do with nature, religious imagery, or a song to indicate they are "somewhere." Give me any piece of evidence I can't find in a cliche Hallmark movie. It's like everyone's "haunted house" stories where no ghost can be bothered to indicate how scary or unresolved they are except in ways that suspiciously sound like drafty basements, attics, and house's settling or breaking down.

You are a monster, and that's okay, because you have agency. If you deny your agency, we all suffer the monstrous consequences of your behavior. You don't care about damn near anything but yourself. You don't work on things you "intellectually" know you need to, but don't feel particularly inclined to even see, let alone act on. You could watch Donald Trump shoot a child in the face in the middle of the road, and your brain would scroll past that as quick as the next meme. We'd keep on scrolling and scrolling until we're into Putin levels of fascism and Hamas levels of pride and certitude.