[1108] Oh Yeah

I "extra" don't know what I want to say with this. After a week or so of writing nearly every day 3 weeks ago, I've found enough to do or stay engaged with to find that ever-elusive "peace" or "balance." But, I'm home, and the obligations are calling again. The questions are popping up, and I'm left waiting and negotiating how far down I wish to travel in familiar rabbit holes.

One of the hardest things I navigate constantly is people telling me one thing, and then proceeding to do nothing. That is, if they don't do exactly the opposite of what they said they would do. Much as I try to make a certain kind of peace with the ambivalence "the world" treats its words and intentions, it's genuinely hard to understand how I, let alone anything, "work" in what appears to be a wholly unshared reality or sense of obligation.

I'm very careful about promising anything or saying I'll do something I don't want or know how to do. I qualify things with, "It'd be nice if I could," or "If these conditions are met," kind of sentiments. I don't tell you I have open availability if I'm overflowing with clients and can't take yours. I don't understand if you tell me, "I have over 100 every month and we're constantly looking for availability," and my phone isn't ringing every day. I don't understand how many people swear and promise and "will definitely do that" who don't even try.

I like that I can go back and read my perspective from 5 or 10 years ago. I strike so many of the same notes. It's the same feeling when I catch an episode of something from perhaps 60 years ago. There's just one conversation happening at all times. There's accessing a certain awareness and truth, or operating otherwise. I don't know how to describe my circumstances. I speculate that the "one conversation" used to be more intuitive when there weren't engines for isolating ourselves psychologically. Life and death were more viscerally felt. Consequences happened quicker. Now? It's like the fundamental environment is a caricature. Nothing is real. Every chance you might take to do something meaningful or impactful is undermined by default.

I'm deliberately trying to avoid catastrophizing with this exploration. I don't feel "hopeless" right now, but I do feel incredibly confused and paralyzed by the thoughts on what to do next. There's always options to spend more money. There's always options to be a squeaky, until you're regarded as annoying, wheel. There's always options to spin and complain and write the same blog a dozen times. What's the "best" or "more wise" thing to do next? It constantly feels like "wait." That'd be good enough were bills not still incoming or the overt cultural psychological distress that's relayed to me was being basically dealt with or alleviated.

I don't think we understand that silence is as much or more "the lie" at the heart of our behavior than anything else. When you don't or can't respond to something you're allegedly responsible and credentialled for, you're living a kind of lie that poisons us at our core. I can't feel good about too much time sitting around or watching TV. It is a lie that that is my obligation or "free choice" to make. If I want to feel good or like I deserve to live, I need to be contributing what I can where I can. This doesn't mean I have to exhaust myself or forgo indulgences. It does mean i could be spending considerably more time helping someone with their mess than I currently am.

How many times do you knock on doors and remind people? How much more available could I make myself? It feels like setting up the land. What's a more appealing circumstance than, "I have the time, tools, back, and knowledge to help you live for almost free." That's still almost universally rejected as a thought to even entertain, but lemme tell you how many posts I catch of people waxing about wanting to escape their current living situation. Now I've got addiction counseling as ODs and fentanyl flood the news landscape. Ok, let's talk. Hey, overwhelmed probation and addiction programs! Send me some of your people. Crickets?

I read a story of someone who had some extremely high level technical degree going door-to-door looking for a job. For as many times as I've talked about doing the same, this person was met with silence and a, "Oh, how sad" story about them. It feels like there's such an extreme disconnect between those with the money and resources and their professed intentions and the actual work it takes to improve things. Whether an A.I. takes over, or your "hot" job only needed people 10 years ago to enrich its current shareholders, or the new monopolies are content with their insurance schemes, there doesn't feel like any genuinely reliable roads to "normal."

I can't "just work on helping people" for any appreciable wage. "Let's network and build something!" Is just this fantasy and fake smile. "We're so overwhelmed," doesn't mean anything? "I'll definitely!" "Good luck!" "Our mission!" "That's so cool!" "That's exciting!" "I'm so looking forward to!" "I'll be in touch!" "This is a great opportunity!" I hear this shit a dozen times a week and I get NOTHING I don't personally grab myself. What the fuck am I supposed to do or think about that? I struggle to think I'm just impatient if I wait a week or more before I even send a one sentence follow up email or text. I struggle to think I'm unreasonable when I quote what you say to justify my severely-checked enthusiasm. What am I fucking missing?

I don't know how to capture the "I always feel wrong" feeling when I'm reaching out or talking to someone. It's like they can smell there's going to be some level of work, questions, or sacrifice that precludes a naive "easy" thing they imagined they wanted. No matter how quickly I could fix something, pay for something, or learn from something, there's zero interest in playing along. No amount of certifications, clarifications, polite reminders, or demonstrated examples and testimony breaks through. It suggests you have to Kool-Aid Man yourself into anything you profess to want to be a part of.

I also know it takes one piece of good news to wholly change how I might talk about my circumstances. I need one decently-sized grant. I need one or two more rich-enough individual donors. I still have 3-6 months I can tread water and look. It's tough because even with my business partner, I'm alone. I don't think he's seeing clients. I don't think he has the mental capacity to see clients right now, but I don't think he's going to just say that. That's what bugs me more than anything. I need people to not be lying to me. I need people with a remote grasp of their bandwidth, competence, and expectations. The next-level absurdity is when you think about how I'm attempting to talk to and work with literal therapists or counselors, "professional" writers, and otherwise leaders or supervisors in their particular realms.

I know when a stranger reads me they walk away with this impression that I'm disingenuously like screaming at people every day and wondering why no one wants to work with me. I've developed what feels like a superhuman level of patience and ability to stomach the empty pleasantries or professional communication. I have no one to talk to and nowhere to go to get anyone that empathizes with the nature of my issue. Why? They're swimming in it. They don't recognize it, or even care if they do or could. We've normalized nothing meaning anything to such an extent there's literally no constant authority a large plurality of people takes its cues from in how they too shall navigate the world.

You might get large corporations brainwashing people to accept their particular "family" values. You might get overwhelmed at an educational institution by youthful ignorance dictating policy. You might be an ardent follower of some podcaster or personality's world-spanning legion. Mostly, you'll just carry on like what I'm speaking to doesn't exist, or if it does, it's not as bad as I'm saying. You'll site the perks of your box and window into the world. And you'll do all of this in a moment of dismissive silent ego as you half-read what you think I'm saying. That's how I get, somehow, a little more isolated and the problem remains ever insurmountable.

I'm not attempting to work within a landscape that existed 5 years ago. I'm talking 2 months ago. I'm talking caseloads I've already juggled. I'm talking problems that were getting worse as I left each environment that was not interested in rising to the challenges. At some level it's dumb to expect a place that's seemingly proud of it's failing posture to reach out and do better. They didn't recognize or utilize you when you were plugged into them. Why would they go outside? Hey, Kool-Aid Man! That wall right there.

Increasingly it's looking like simple flyers and hitting the streets. I can't rely on people anymore than my clients can. It's not about sitting around and waiting for anyone to fix your problems. They can't even articulate or recognize the problems let alone fix them. They think it's a problem that I would even suggest there is one! Gotta just meet people one on one and one at a time.

[970] Sticking Points

I think I want to talk about getting educated. I’m not sure, but that’s all I can come up with as an opener. I’ve had the last few days to kind of sit and do nothing. The rain has made it so I couldn’t work on building. I read or listened to dozens of my old blogs. Yesterday, the weather improved and I got a decent amount of work done outside. Today, the weather is also nice, and I’m hesitating to get back at it. There are a few things that have been informing how I feel the last week.

I cramp pretty easily. I suspect as a result of my less-than nutritious diet. When I’m out working, even if I’m not physically exhausted, the tension on certain muscles starts to make me woozy. I don’t think extended time in the sun contributed positively to that feeling either. While I greatly enjoy the cardio and feeling stronger in my capacity to move big and heavy objects around, it’s not without pain. How much I wish to continue pursuing the flow of working and accompanying pain is more informed by each day before that felt it.

That I want to pursue activities and investments like this is informed by things more intellectual than physical. I’ve liked building things since I was a child. My dad is an iron-worker, and there’s a certain appeal to be like your parent. I’m budget conscious, and after the $3000 it will likely take me to get my new shop in order, that’s $15,000 I didn’t spend on the same amount of prefabricated and delivered space. I want to be flexible in my capacity to create and be useful in tangibly physical ways.

My experience of engaging in things, my thoughts collected and impressed upon me over time, and then how I speak about and record the journey are in a constant dance. One of the things that strikes me about reading old blogs is how little I’ve moved away from what they’re saying. I’ve improved word choices or tempered some degree of fatalism or pessimism, but the fundamental point often remains the same. The desires remain the same. The things that are missing are often still missing.

It's a little depressing, but more informative, that I’ve been looking for “help” for almost as long as I’ve been writing. It obviously comes in spurts, but at the base of my being, I wish to be plugged into “something” or “someone” in which we’re headed in a similar direction. It might be understood as unconscious fixation. My first instinct in answering, “What’s your motivation?” might illicit, “I want to be independent, I want my time, money, etc.” But, under that, it seems like I want a kind of indefinite connection or reciprocity that I don’t feel as viscerally as cramps.

For as many times as I’ve felt “stuck,” you can skip a few blogs, then suddenly a new opportunity or show or project arrives. I’m not catching as many hiccups to my flow for any given activity. I spent the money, and just reach in and grab the tool. Or I fire up the resolve to drive into debt because, well, I’m always in debt, so what am I getting for it?­

I could borrow from the language and study of trauma and say that I have attachment issues. I could speculate on the opaque problems of “humanity” and its inability to organize behind anything that isn’t ironically self-destructive. I could make pains to convince myself any momentary preoccupation is as meaningful and purposeful as I need it to be. I could take it a step further and extract a self-righteous proclamation about the one person who I might reach to make it all worth it.

I’m also constantly on the attack. I’m always going after “you.” It’s rare that I name drop in a blog or have some explicit fight I want to parse out line by line. They happen enough, but I don’t really seek out drama for its own sake, and I definitely bore of the patterns insecure people play out at my feet. If I had to personify “you,” the two most defining characteristics would be dishonesty and silence. I might have to look up a fun way to combine the words or the roots of their origins so I can move the conversation forward in my head. My draw to Jordan Peterson was how often he said the exact same things I was feeling instinctively, or arriving at by writing, but tying them to his experience as a clinician and study of literature. Now, his brand is meme summations like, “If your life doesn’t look like you think it should, try honesty.”

Is he talking to me? Well, no, he’s talking to “you,” who has remained silent or dishonest in your silence. The featured comedian I saw yesterday spoke to getting to her 40s and realizing the secret to happiness was to stop pretending to like things. This, a point I feel I’ve diverged on since birth, as I can’t pretend to like things if I try, which I don’t.

The wild swings in my perspective find a mean regardless. I can’t stay feeling desperate and alone. I can’t work myself to death. I can’t spend all my time in someone’s presence I enjoy. I can’t find the drive or enthusiasm for any hobby to keep it up indefinitely. I can describe myself as a “whore” psychologically and not be prowling the bars or joining the sex websites in free moments or to assuage boredom. The harder you push, at all, in any direction, the insistence of balance makes itself known. When you overstep there’s a cue to pull back. Maybe this is why I’m not a regretful person in paying attention before I have to jog backwards as opposed to creep a few inches.

I don’t know where I would be without writing. I’m the opposite of silence, and if all I did was take to the page to spew bullshit, I couldn’t take anything useful away even reading 10 or pushing 20 years later. The only way I could envision my life being any better is by incorporating more people into forms of security and indulgence. I don’t know how to do this. Or, I don’t know if I’ve only been able to go about doing it in ways that are selfish and make sense to me. I think a major reason I don’t know is that people are dead silent about their perspective, at least to me.

I don’t find it confusing why. When you start speaking, you beget that underlying responsibility to do something about it. You can get challenged. You might discover you’re very wrong and dumb. You might unlock a lot of drama you’re not prepared to deal with. I talked myself into ticks and garden shed over years. It wasn’t manic epiphany. I’ve consciously plunged into debt for an envisioned future, not because I feel great “right now” with fleetingly low bills. I mean, that feels great, but my goal isn’t to pay bills lol, it’s to have a little enclave, then dozens, and then the world.

If you don’t keep that conversation going with yourself, you don’t have a reason. You don’t have a direction. You don’t know what’s missing, how to get it, or whether it’s worth it. It’s part of the reason I get very frustrated when some project stalls, especially if it does so for reasons, in theory, I can control. What more in life could we ask for than to follow the path laid out before us? Especially if we got to choose the path!? It’s like turning your life into a vacation. You picked the destination, wandered into whatever shops seemed intriguing, ate and drank to your satisfaction, then on day 5 of 7 just slept in the hotel all fucking day? Did you forget you were on vacation, have a shitty reason for going to begin with, or are you lying about the purpose it’s serving and whether you know how to enjoy yourself?

I enjoy building shit. I enjoy learning new things, reading and watching everything, playing music, discovering new artists and shows, and maintaining a preparedness to play at a moment’s notice. That’s my center, acknowledging, sanctifying, and protecting the “go” and “do” and “right now” capacity of any moment. That’s how writing allows me to get “unstuck.” That’s how I can keep enjoying the pain, obligation, and debt while I bowl or bemoan the weather. That’s why no business venture is “failed” when it’s done in that spirit of adventure and exploring the boundaries of what you know.

In a way, my collection of un-utilized dodgeballs exists as the standing analogy for my life in general. I bought the balls shortly after college. I had played with a group of guys on the dorm, and then some kids for a few weeks. I thought if I had my own, I’d be able to get my friends together and be able to play more often. Maybe even construct a mobile netted enclosure. In my naivete, my friends weren’t about that play life. I created events, brought it up in conversation over and over, and most often got something akin to, “I’ve always hated dodgeball” or, “I’m not very good.” So, they have sat, in a dodgeball bag, all-but deflated in and amongst my things for maybe 10 years. I tell the people I counsel if they can’t get the little things right, they don’t have a prayer for the big things.

I can’t get people to play. Before that, I couldn’t get people to speak up and be honest with me. I could get them to party, and then have that converted into resentment and accusations. I can seek out sports leagues and meet-up groups, but you quickly discover the nature of the game you’re playing and the one on the field isn’t the same. That is, at every adult softball game I’ve attended this year, I don’t know that I’ve witnessed someone not smoking or drinking during it save one or two people. There are large men trying to recapture younger glory years, out-of-shape and been warned by their doctor to make lifestyle changes types, former generally athletic and social ones, or loners who pick softball instead of the bar.

I don’t begrudge their reasons for coming, but “play” doesn’t capture it. Fear of dying young, insecurity about getting old, justifying an unhealthy puff with a healthy jog, or mitigating loneliness sounds like a more honest and complete picture to me. Surely playing happens, and it can be fun, and you can gain rewards for doing something beyond wallowing in whatever drove you there. I wish everyone was out playing sports in service to their demons before doing anything else. At what point does the play get to trump or incorporate the demons though? When are you ready to build the playing field?

Does it make sense why I would glom on to an Allie who has a whole fucking garden out there? I’ll subject myself to a year of mental turmoil under the impression I’ve found someone to play with! Lol. I will put in a floor and paint and pat myself on the back right through Christmas convincing myself the effort will mean I can play in the next house just around the corner and not have to keep taking jobs that mean nothing to me.

Why it’s so vital to know what something means to you is clear. You can’t really be happy, have fun, or play otherwise. The idea that you’re running from something becomes a too obvious and compelling story. The nature of how you’re being exploited stays felt and rarely spoken to. The lack of connection or empathy or drive for an actionable belief in changing your circumstances turns into fate. I knew what my friendships meant to me. I know what my work on my house tells me. I know why I show up to hang out or send the invitation in spite of the endless canceling, silence, or lack of enthusiasm. I know what I mean to me or what I can mean to those who play along. It’ll never be meaningful to you, because you don’t exist. You’re an abstract ironically disembodied construct representing dishonesty and silence. You’re busy, tired, sick, and broke. You’re bad at dodgeball. I’m ready to go right now.