[1015] Don't Funk With My Heart

My head feels about to burst, so let’s ironically discover I’ll be out of things to say after 2 or 3 paragraphs. I had a meeting today. My normally scheduled supervision was superseded by a regional director, HR, and compliance person Zoom calling me to discuss how I might elevate concerns I have. This is the kind of thing that happens to me semi-regularly in “professional” environments. For some gosh-darn reason, it does not sink in that I’m supposed to, by default, defer to the people perpetrating whatever I think might be the issue. I stay vocal. I provide reasons, in writing, and until I’m psychologically at a happy place, and if you keep inviting me into the conversation I don’t wish to have a dozen times, you’re going to hear what I think is fucked up.

I call this being a responsible adult. I know, deeper than most things I might know, the consequences of staying silent. I know being too pliable and compliant or matter-of-fact in your cliches about how much you “care” or want to “help” can literally, and regularly does, get people killed or otherwise destroy their lives. I will challenge even the fucking hint of complacency or downplaying of concerns related to behavior that spells a recipe for catastrophe. I can wiggle if you can testify and assert the personal and developed data that says drinking alcohol plus taking Suboxone is better than not. I will fight tooth and nail if you tell me you “believe” it’s best and we should all shut up and keep pumping out the drugs as we admit more and more severe alcoholics into a program that looks like it might “oopsie!” your death, but feel pretty okay as long as the documentation was there.

Before I got on my call, I’m talking maybe 60 seconds after it officially started, the ladies were laughing and discussing their favorite vacation spots. It reminded me of when I first started at Lifeline and many of the people in the “leadership” did the same thing when brought in to discuss their various roles. It’s like a habit or class signifier they can’t help themselves from engaging in. Oh? We have literally any amount of dead air? The cold weather makes me long for Cozumel! I’m headed to [insert warm place] for my vacation [insert time period always somehow within the next 2 months.]

It’s another reminder of class. People of a certain income and preoccupation they pretend is their occupation aren’t operating at the level that has to be actually concerned with real lives as such. They have to be concerned with optics, whistle-blowing problem children, and keeping the capitalist ship running. By analogue, at the State, you’re looking to protect an infinite paycheck. When someone dies, they’re a tragedy, not a name and history and series of small decisions and circling-around-nonsense email chains. The party line, “We care! Some level of service is better than no service!” will do all the heavy lifting, just like “I care about children! I want them to be safe!” justifies lying on paperwork and aggressively threatening scared parents.

Literally every realm where something, besides the individuals involved, hell, even the idea that there are individuals involved, is the priority, you see the same dance. How many lies do you have to tell yourself to protect your fanciest notions of “family?” How many dicks do you swallow to assert the presumed pride behind your job title or paycheck? There’s no knot the route to the most money won’t tie itself in. And all along the way, you have people occupying entirely different worlds in their perception of what’s happening, their responsibility to it, or remotely grasping what the end game really is.

One of the office managers was apparently “uncomfortable” when my discussion with another office manager turned to the idea of collecting evidence of negligence and sending a letter to the, dogshit, attorney general. It was explained to me that, while it’s perfectly within my right to discuss who to talk to, they wanted to make sure I knew they were there. You see, there’s internal mechanisms for this kind of thing and a chain of command. Much better to rely on “leadership” and discuss whether or not I feel “supported” than to heedlessly escalate my problems to a realm that could threaten the whole machine.

Yeah. Go fuck yourselves lol.

In an extremely practical and small sense, I’m accountable to the entity signing my paychecks. In the larger scheme of things, I need to sleep at night and trust my perception of this posture inclined to downplay the reality it wreaks.

So I made one of my groups’ topics today about trust. I trust myself to talk out loud, often, always, about what I think is fucked up. I trust the vast majority of my clients to not take themselves or the work it takes to incorporate addictive behavior seriously. I trust that their ambivalence combined with corporate greed and chronic conditioning is a story of an ongoing unmitigated disaster. At any level in which I remain in human services at the behest of an outside entity, I will be nominally complicit, but especially if I don’t bother to say anything about it. And especially if I don’t bother to say anything about it to the people setting the shitty standard and pretending to give a fuck about rules of human decency when there’s so much money to be made.

This idea of occupying different worlds has been a compelling one for a while. Watching The Crown has given me an infusion of thoughts about it. The institution, the system, of monarchy subsumes any individual desire. The intransigence of their divinity is a noble distinguisher, not a mark of shame or antiquity. Do you want your god changing the rules every few thousand years? The language of that institution is of a “keep steady” realm. Youth and modernity want change, inclusion, and growth. The “conservative” has the argument that, “Well, we’re still here, so obviously something has worked or is working.” The enlightened ideal is that you will forever reach a happy middle ground through ongoing open and honest debate and reasonable concessions. Ha.

The monied bureaucrat does not speak the language of the working-class moron. The exhausted temporarily-embarrassed aspiring rich person pretends to speak the language of both. Rarely, if ever it seems, do you find someone that wants the same thing. Do I want to go on vacation every year? Not as much as I want to feel as though I’ve earned a vacation through meaningful work. Does my concept of “meaningful work” ever match your story of what feels and sounds meaningful? Hardly. I also have no interest in protecting any organization that sees me as lesser than anyone else in it. I wish I had a savings AND could enjoy indulging myself with fun self-care things AND have adequate health, car, and home insurance. Right now, I get to pick 1, pay down the debt it still throws me into, and refamiliarize myself with poor-people habits that include excess alone time with TV or books.

What can you make of “trust” in that environment? If you’re me, you default to the “trust people to be what they are” sentiment. I know what each class and style of person is likely to do, so I do what I want both in anticipation of and in response to. It’s not an accident I’m open, honest, and ongoing about shit that pisses me off. It’s deliberate practiced habit. You’re going to come at me sideways dancing around “the issue,” so I’m going to assert the issue in as many words and languages that it takes to teach you I’m not the one to play your stupid fucking game with.

I don’t identify with the characters in The Crown. I have no institution or tired parochial standard to defer to. I have myself and anyone else willing to continuously poke at the disingenuously and incidentally powerful. I have all of the capacity to carry the pretensions and expectations of someone who pretends there’s a “proper” way to exist independent of mutual acknowledgment, celebration, or solidarity. I’m not so blind as to genuinely believe any catchphrase or edict I conjure to desperately mask my intentions usurps common decency and sense. No, I don’t feel supported in this endeavor to maintain certain sovereign conceptions of dignity or accountability for their own sake. I do not trust the institutions I feed on like a baby suckling a drug-addled mother. It knows not its plight, but I do.

One of my office managers is struggling with her boyfriend being “almost” a cheater. In her words, “I don’t care if you want to fuck someone else, just tell me about it! We’re basically in an open relationship as it is.” He was on Bumble and I guess doing other sketchy things, generally hiding it from her. He’s reignited wounds from her traumatizing past related to infidelity. They’re 22 and been together for a year and a half. She regularly discusses her general hopelessness for the future and the difficulty of even conceiving of herself in a stable and healthy place financially. She’s lived in Bedford her entire life and is deeply burnt out by her social work responsibilities often very unfairly imposed on her. She can’t trust her country, the company she works for, her boyfriend, or even the woman sitting next to her. Where do you think she’s going to find someone that wants the same things in life anymore than you or I can?

Who’s speaking the language of the aggrieved with any real capacity to do something about it? Who has the emotional awareness and salient argument that compels deliberate open and honest exchange? Who is “managing the best interests of the company” with any remote clue how an individual is actually experiencing said company? Richard Wolff remarked that facebook is laying off 11,000 employees after a disastrous miscalculation about shits the world has for the Metaverse. 11,000 lives, plus families, plus the communities they’re plugged into, because a power avatar gets to gamble where none of us can.  Choosing to gamble, verses being forced to, are entirely different universes.

Our lives are not guaranteed in the same way that there will always be an eager demigod looking to preside over them. We adopt their language and set our expectations in ways they deem fit. We insulate ourselves from the precise ways we would otherwise criticize, as getting too exacting would betray why we find their influence necessary and regal. The illusion of stability and order is preferable to observing and owning our inherent chaos. Now, you don’t just occupy a realm of social strata, you deserve it and belong. You’re entitled to protect the money, your small cut-out caricature of a worthwhile existence, or anything else you like provided it doesn’t disturb the god from which you all draw power.

I will continue to cause calculated chaos.

[738] Empathy Hawks

It occurred to me that the extent of presumptions made under tribalistic tendencies is more pervasive than I care to generally accommodate in my daily approach to people.

When I reflect on the “poor” and addicted people I deal with daily, it becomes very real that most of the people who advocate on their behalf, or at least pretend to, in politics or perhaps online, aren't really dealing with these people. I'm as sympathetic to anyone who moves from one struggle to the next and can't seem to find a leg up. I describe singular moments or bad days as years of pain and waste more than occasionally. What isn't lost on me, and I fear what many advocates fail to understand, is that you can be poor and struggling and addicted, and still be a useless asshole.

The poster-children for the types that seem to care the most about how or whether we create and protect social safety nets, seem to be people who've managed to overcome their circumstances and want to give back, or people who are under the illusion their success had everything to do with them and them alone. The former run non-profits or local initiatives, in lieu or spite of larger organization or communication, the latter scream about entitlements and invent disparagements. The former plagued with an, in my estimation, over-active empathy system, the latter a simultaneously predatory and defensive actor.

I think about these people so much relative to myself and the kind of negative feedback I get with regard to my behavior or words. These “clients” are actively malicious. They'll beat the shit out of their girlfriends, routinely, and the entire family will look you in the eye and not blink when they describe what a sweetheart that person really is. They'll lie as though their lives depend on it. They'll fight about minor miscommunications. They'll pump so much sugar and cigarette smoke into their bodies their kids' teeth will fall out and they'll talk to each other like trash if they can't get a fix every 20 minutes.

Then The State comes in and says, “We'll give you therapy, we'll send you to addictions counseling, we'll transport your kids to several different locations all over the state and get them tested, we'll put them in tutoring, we'll help pay your bills, find you a job, and make ourselves available day and night if you need to talk.” Then they get entitled. Or perhaps, the malicious driver of the entitlement comes to the forefront, and lambastes any and all effort to try and make the situation better and hold people accountable.

It's a dramatic exaggerated circumstance, repeated in a dozen iterations, of my “difficult conversations” about friend group dynamics or behavior. In my job, if you're 10 minutes late to an appointment, it can mean getting you painted as an unreliable liar who's sabotaging time between mother and child and isn't sympathetic to the needs of someone in crisis. The person who referred you the case can turn on you or put a black mark on your company. It can be a grudge that pops up months later as a client screams at you over the phone. I can recall a handful of instances I ever raised my voice at an ex let alone got into any kind of notable fight with a friend, but examples will be used for years to bombard my character and as fuel to stoke the flames of my ignorance, intransigence, or malignancy.

Then I start to wonder, is it exaggerated? Or isn't it just the obvious and consistent impulse of the entitled empathy hawk? That is, how many times have you heard, “You're entitled to your feelings.” It imbues feeling, whatever it manifests, as tantamount to an inalienable right to be exercised with impunity. Unlike rights, you're born with as many convoluted and conflicting feelings as you can conjure, and there is barely the cultural insistence you have to fight or have part of you die in order to earn them. “You hurt me!” The charge rings unto eternity. Then comes time to employ “digging your own grave” the more you try to explore how or attempt to “make it better.”

That's part of the illusion we're operating under. From the lowliest client to our government writ-large. You can't make fluid blind pathology better. You can kill it, and it will act as a martyr for the dormant sense in us all that is tempted by its power. I keep asking myself why do the people I engage with all seem to have such small perspectives? How long do you have to live or lessons must you encounter before something clicks and change may come? How many drug tests that came back positive are you going to deny? How many plans are you going to make that you never intended to keep? How many times can you have the same fight before you try to make something better?

But those questions exist under the relative-delusion that things will, in fact, get better. That everyone, no matter their station or experience, has a concept of “better.” It's all relative to something. Relative to their basic grasp of language. Relative to the abuses they've experienced in the past. Relative to the pain you can't document during a visit. Relative to what they can see at all. And you certainly can't see what you're unwilling or unable to look for.

This speaks to my inability to fall too far down a rabbit hole condemning my behavior as damming as I've been portrayed. I'm pathologically proud of when I choose to be malicious. It means I felt you deserved it. It means I got a little high on the rage or self-righteousness. It means I got the rare opportunity to show you proof that I have lines and I was clear about what would happen when they were crossed. Politely attempting to engage in conversation and ask questions is literally never that.

When I'm met with open and ongoing hostility to the exercise, the problem is never me, in what I consider the most fundamental way. This isn't me calling myself perfect, nor is it denying that I can be excessively mean or rude. It means if you can't tell the difference between polite questions and ongoing conversation and FUCK YOU, I DIDN'T DO SHIT, I HATE YOU, I'VE NEVER DONE ANYTHING WRONG, I certainly can't address that, anymore than I can the addict who doesn't care I stayed later to ensure she got her full time, and ignores when she got high to blow off her previous visit.

This job forces you to be the “reasonable person” at all times. When you slip, it's like someone banged a gong for the ripple of consequences. You last by insulating yourself with people who engage the same kinds of people as often as you do, and know the kind of TLC, tact, and concessions to not damn the whole enterprise, and you, out of existence. Part of me feels like I shouldn't be seeing such a connection in the breakdown of my previous friendships with the behaviors of these people. A larger part of me says the “friends” who've fallen would think ill of me first and foremost before contemplating the abuses and addictions, if they acknowledged them at all. Does that seem right to you?

So then how do we, or do we even bother, assigning blame? I concede certain people can't be helped. An asshole is an asshole at any income level. I know the habits of patience and deference are things that need to be massaged and imprinted on me better, but my fuck ups are mildly mis-worded (for the workplace) emails, and disparagingly felt commentaries over social media. I don't blow smoke in your face and attack you for coughing about it. I didn't bring a child into the world who needs 6 root canals at 15 because of what I've been feeding it. I don't ever tell you things like, “A baby dropped a bottle on my face, so now I have 2 black eyes.” Wouldn't that be frustrating? If I gave you responses like that when you tried to talk about your feelings or how I hurt you?

On the spot, I can barely imagine what those kind of responses would even sound like. “You hurt me!” Well, every time I watched you cook, I knew you were waiting to plunge a knife in my side, so I just got out in front of it and squeezed your arm purple so you couldn't get me first! “You're not taking responsibility!” I've never even talked to the person you're referring to! How could I have slept with/insulted/made cry/pushed over a cliff someone I've never even met! “You don't even care!” I care about the environment and nuclear war, so of course I must care about you too!” Distracting, denial ridden, irrelevant, and paranoid. If I reacted or responded like that, I get it, monster in chief.

Is that how I'm read? Probably. When you take to a page to head-off your pathology, it's a fluid stream of potentially ridiculous impulses and sentiments. If someone needs a bad view of you, there's plenty. Take yourself into the real world and put on the “professional” face, even if you never fuck up, which is inevitable, but even if you never did, it's people imprinting their desires and insecurities and denials onto everything you do. There is no 10 or 100 second count. There are no other reasons.

Just like even when I call people unredeemable and an asshole an asshole, I can at least say “maybe.” There is no maybe generally allotted when we're making our harshest judgments and trying to make a conversation, or person, go away. There is no maybe when we fear the retribution of our in-group if we don't play along. Some people deserve a capital Maybe in a way others don't. We lose that distinction by entitling our feelings to placate being. You sow unreasonable doubt in the minds and hearts of who are otherwise your closest allies.

When I say things like, “I don't have hope,” or “I don’t believe in love,” it's underwritten by insights like these. I can literally do “nothing.” I'm not a “maybe” in the minds of people. And I'm not because I take responsibility for myself, and that's an easy and strong example to co-opt into something nefarious. “Haven't you heard!? He's already admitted the whole world is his fault! Get him!” It's the same self-destructive impulse, across mediums and examples, that attacks me and mistakenly thinks it's protecting you. I invert that relationship. Blogs pick me apart and with each one I feel less and less capable of fixing anything, let alone another person, or the world. But that's also the only way you can discover who you are and what you may do to in fact be of the right kind of consequences for yourself and others.

As I've also asked many times in the past, who really wants to empathize with me? I don't even want the shit I go through. I don't like seeing ten steps ahead, be it in some social game, or just the ways I'll breakdown if I don't begrudgingly continue to slog through life. I genuinely fantasize about when I'll finally get to close my eyes and not wake up anxious about how the day will shit on me. And yet, I'm still here. I'm still “even enough” spirited. I continue to hold a place of distinction at work and navigate new relationships and challenges every day. I can't count the number of times I've died. I don't know that this manifestation of my being is the 10 to a trillion trillionth iteration of multiple parallel universes. But I do know when I've lied. I do know when I've acted in bad faith. I do know when I've felt genuine affection or care and how that's tempered nihilism or fatalism and professions of hopelessness. And I know it is all bad, and all good, for an endless story of reasons. We throw it all away over merely feeling some sort of way about it.