[1207] Extra Ordinary

The last 2 days it’s been incredibly hard to focus. I’m entirely sure if anything happened. I feel like I’ve lost a beat, or like something that was previously animating dropped away. The days prior I was having fun, or trying, in spite of some aggressive feelings I was having towards no one in particular. When the weekend ended and I started back to work, I found it, and frankly still find it, hard to lock in and give a shit.

Yesterday evening I emailed my boss indicating a desire to maybe pull back on some of my work responsibilities and focus. My job, while not proving to be the often immoral and ridiculous environments most show themselves to be very quickly, is pretty messy in some foundational ways. I work for a sober-living/IOP operation. I conduct groups and carry out casework tasks. I’m currently obligated to carry out new person orientation and have been creating material for life-skills and case management that didn’t seem exist…at a company that’s been around for at least 5 years.

At first, this job was supplementing the paltry salary I was getting working for the Y. I got there in the morning after my first Y shift, left before the beginning of my 2nd Y shift. It’s messiness barely touched me. I decided to get myself fired from the Y, then I could neatly become “full time.” The messiness grew. I took steps to try to make it less messy like asking for the materials I’d be teaching in advance so I could make copies. I insisted we get a white board that showed the daily schedule so everyone could be right or wrong in the same way. There’s many, very simple, fixes like that which the place still needs, that I think can be accomplished in relatively short order.

At the same time, it hit me how often I seem to experience the same pattern in my relationship to work. I show up, experienced, energetic, consistent, and with a good and genuine nature at the prospect of demonstrating the work or a fix. A slow-creep of things that undermine the effort come in, and if I notice and speak to it, I also have to ensure I don’t do so in a hyperbolic or sounding-too-aggrieved type of way. There’s all this excess labor that forms “shouldn’t have to be this way” kind of sentiments in my head and gut.

If I don’t want to be rushed to make copies right before class, and to their credit, they give me the lesson plans in advance for 2 weeks, but forget the 3rd, I’m pulled right back into the anxiety and frustration over something “dumb” and “simple” that I’ve tried to fix several times in asking for the whole curriculum so I can spend one afternoon getting prepared for months in advance. Surely, it’s just a series of .pdfs somewhere. The rush in the morning bleeds into my attitude or sense of preparedness for group. The notes and tasks due after group maybe take a hit. Now I’m angling to “reset” the next day, trust violated, and my grasp of the spirit to make things work better loosened ever so.

On balance, I don’t know if I get 3 out of 5 days a week that I’ve worked there (it’s only been 2 months) that I’ve been able to anticipate, technically, scheduled and easily anticipated things. It’s incredibly disorienting and feels compounded when we’re trying to model behavior we hope our clients will adopt in service to maintaining sobriety. Do as I say, not as I do?

In 2 months, I’ve been witness to improvements. I’ve contributed heavily to them. I’m feeling protective or maybe defensive of my perspective that, for reasons I’ll never understand, needed to be the one to show up and make the changes. I’m worried the changes won’t stick. Or that the people who I’m trying to shape up and do better are stuck in a place that’s going to continually undermine the attempts to create better beats and downstream effects. I, never, just “trust” that my effort will be recognized or rewarded, nor do I think as a rule most people are concerned with quickly and materially altering the consequences of their blind spots.

It seems out of nowhere, but it’s also relevant that I just got some outside work done around my property. It was a reminder that I like shaping up my property and working to build/organize things. It’s something that takes a lot of time and I usually only ever have the time when I don’t have the money or the weather. It’s been incredibly hot lately, I have a little more time, and I’d rather be doing mostly anything here than somewhere else.

It feels key to point out I’m not impatient. I know change takes time. I know I’m not prepared to ride that empty broad sentiment indefinitely. I know I still retain the power to say I don’t want to nor can work as much as I previously thought if the instability feeling persists. I’m not shooting for some vague notion of stability either. I’ve worked for enough companies at all layers of social work and interpersonal drama to know what works or doesn’t independent of the players involved. Paperwork can be a savior. A shared calendar can cut through a lot of noise.

I want to believe really bad, in something beyond my friends, indulgences, and self. I don’t have a magic sky daddy or in-crowd I practice apologetics for. I don't have bad solipsistic philosophy or the personality disorder to uncritically tout my brand and content. I want to show the principles I’ve applied to my life in order to achieve what I have so far in a context explicitly suited to doing so. It feels like such an opportunity for a Shakespearean play-level tragedy to embody the fucking up when you’re proof positive, individually, the fuck ups need not be.

I don’t know if my focus fucking off is me trying to protect myself from what might be yet another catastrophic failure. I don’t know if I’m looking for license to distance myself in a more deliberate and polite way so that I might maintain a reference that won’t throw me under the bus. I don’t know if the heat is just making the ambient space we’re all operating within wonky in a way that can’t be accurately accounted for. I do know that I’ve been pretty locked in and inspired and motivated, and then it aggressively drifted away. It’s not gone. It’s not hopeless. It’s not even got a decently long list of issues that can’t be fixed. No one has shut down attempts to try or deny they are problems altogether like they did at the Y.

My coworkers are overwhelmingly fun and funny people as well. It’s as close to DCS coworkers as I’ve found, and even more raw in places. We’re dealing with about 80 people, on rotation, in early recovery and regularly getting shit on for things both in and out of our control. We got jokes. The elements that were impeding structure and growth were removed from the work landscape, the ones recently hired (basically 85% of the staff is less than 4 months) read as capable and reliable.

I want my focus back. There might be more begging for my attention, but this is my best first guess.

[1120] You Gotta Work

As someone who has earned the privilege of an excess of time, if there is such a thing, it can be hard to make peace with how much of that time I feel is doing "nothing." It's the worst possible phrasing and first pass at the idea, but I think it's what we collectively feel instinctively when we're not "busy." Whether that busyness is accomplishing anything meaningful, fulfilling, worthwhile, or helpful is another gigantic question after we succumb to the compulsion to be "doing something" regardless.

If you try to analyze the tea leaves of memes, there's a bigger sense of pushback regarding "grinding" and "hustling" and "enriching shareholders." Whether that's translating effectively through "quiet quitting" or exercising some muscle of infantilizing nostalgia is anyone's guess. The pull of chasing the next dollar, or title, at bottom, feels absolute. If you're not trying to "provide for your family," or "prepare for the future," or "capitalize on the trend so you don't get left behind," there's something wrong with, or at least missing, about you.

We've heard our entire lives about "productivity" and having more resources than we know what to do with. You can read about how much food gets wasted and the next industry to do away with people as A.I. gets better (or doesn't, and no one knows how to argue otherwise.) Proposals for a universal basic income are getting their experimental time in the sun for different small pockets of people. We've absorbed the nature of the wealth-siphoning to the rich, paying more in taxes each year, getting price-gouged and scapegoating "inflation," and swallowing Ticketmaster fees because we never know when our favorite artists are going to die so why argue with the greed machine?

It's one of the most counter-intuitive things to do to attempt to pull out. Almost no one is doing it. You need gains! You need growth! You need norms of doing business and modern human, so low, expectations to anchor yourself to. In all of my time to plot, sleep, watch, or otherwise, it can be easy to forget just how long I've played the "normal" game. Was I ever paid "enough?" Hell no. Was my effort ever recognized in a way that didn't get me exploited? Not once. Did the vast majority of my bosses or supervisors care, in any real tangible way, about behaving in sensible and decent ways? Were they going to fight for the right things? Their whole working model to sustain their lives incentivizes otherwise.

This isn't abstract. Recall, I'm currently a counselor. I get word from clients or colleagues about how other counselors conduct themselves in group. I hear of their mental health issues getting laid at the feet of their clients. I hear of their laziness. I hear from the counselors themselves how little they're willing to take responsibility for what they bring, or don't, into a group. A new mom supervisor will hire the deeply unwell counselor to fill a gap if that counselor can perform the dance of saying the right things. Being long-term accountable to what they say? That's not the job or obligation. Unfortunately, that's precisely the the work you have to do if you want to maintain sober thinking. Good luck.

Sober thinking. It's not about refraining from substance use. It's about building, maintaining, and exercising an informed perspective. Once you get out of your own world and recognize the extent of your potential or impact, you find a way to maintain a standard of behavior and pursue goals that show yourself and the world you know what you're talking about. You need to build trust in yourself as much as you might wish to be able to trust anything else. If you can't figure out how to trust yourself, you can't maintain the right expectations that protect a sober thinking environment.

Most people are not thinking from a self-reflective and sober place. They are addicted to the pursuit and ridiculously unfair and captured expectations of modernity. They are addicted to levels of immature emotional drama because there's little else that feels equally as accessible and personal. They're addicted to some version of the same conversation every single day about what they "have to" do because they're baked into the cake of their insisted upon obligations. Little "escapes" here and there are pre-prescribed as well. Your few-days vacation fits neatly into the begrudgingly-allowed request off allotment. Your indulgent bling matches business casual.

It's not your fault until you know better, so there's an endless loop of narratives and distractions to justify pretending not to know better. You could watch a 20-hour set of interviews from old people insisting you shouldn't be so laser focused on sacrificing your life for xyz. That's too long, no one's gonna watch that! I can't tell you how many times a colleague has complained about the absurdities they've witnessed only to default to something like switching roles, giving advice to just ignore or avoid - it is what it is! - or finding some cliche about things evening out over time. Of course, they don't even out. They compound and embolden and normalize iterative ways of self-destruction.

I'm seriously perpetually struck by just how much time there really is. If you feel like you never or don't have the time, here's your sign that you're spending an inordinate amount of it doing or on your way to doing something that isn't serving you like you think it is. I struggle to figure out what I "should" be doing in any moment, often as the residual fallout of otherwise guilt-tripping myself if I don't feel "busy." What's the adult functional equivalent of always being in a classroom? My instincts seek that out. Is the teacher good? Am I learning anything? Am I actually getting prepared for what I'll need later in life? Shut up, sit down, and listen.

I get frustrated by influencers who say things like, "You really can change your life. You just gotta"…fill in the blank with their vague and empty prescription. We've just as egregiously been tricked by ideas of virality and interconnectedness as we have by the velvet bars of normalcy. You exist in a constant state of change, influenced by a literally infinite amount of forces. The "change" needs to come in how you observe those forces, not pretend you can become master and commander of them all. The person so enthusiastic about making a personal brand out of fortune cookies is overwhelmingly hot, already kind of rich, or otherwise plugged into the kinds of infrastructure that would see them having some measure of success had they chosen a different path. They're also almost perfectly corruptible and content with doing or saying whatever it takes to maintain your attention.

To them, and most people, every aspect of their life is a story of their decision-making, not their luck or capture. I do believe we need to be responsible for our decisions. I do not believe we have any grasp on the nature of how we arrive at decisions. I do not believe we have any grasp because I spend inordinate amounts of time looking for the myriad things going on in my head that speak to why I live in a shed, pursue entrepreneurial frustrations, or find myself interested in the music or TV shows that I do. How often do I like a given piece of art more than my sense of novelty in my experience of it? I'm constantly seeking novelty. It speaks to my attitude towards relationships, why I have dozens of half-completed projects, and why no job, ever, will be "enough" for me to feel at home or like I fit if it doesn't change and challenge me.

There are a lot of familiar beats being a DCS assessor. Every household is different. Every kid or tangentially relevant adult a new variable. I don't know who is about to call. I don't know what horror is about to be unmasked. Whether I do or don't have a "passion" for social work (I don't), you don't get a more novel environment than trying to plug into the minds of other people. My pursuits in the social work realm are the evolved drift of my novelty-seeking and trapped circumstances. Some of my goals are to protect the time I have to wake up when I please, sit down and write, hold a counseling session, and then decide on what to do with an absolutely beautiful day. If I can do that in perpetuity, in this field or otherwise, that's going to express my values and demonstrate my sober thinking about how to act on my priorities.