[1202] Ring My Bell

I’m dancing around writing because I’ve gotten home particularly late and wish to be done with the day. No less, my brain is buzzing, and pretending I’m focusing on TV and my delicious New Belgium Trippel isn’t going to serve me as well as just getting in the weeds.

I’ve gone full steam ahead with my new job after functionally begging The Y to fire me. I’m now back to my regular casework and IOP counseling space. There’s approximately 70 people living in 8 or 9 houses owned by the company I work for. I do 4 groups a week, and have made it my mission to assess the needs of all 70 over the last few weeks in an effort to standardize how we carry out casework or “life skills.”

This program is only 4 months. What I noticed immediately is how many people were discharging without any idea where they were going next. This is IOP. Some have transferred from other similar programs, some straight out of prison, some from homelessness, or inpatient detox. All very early recovery circumstances. It appeared like the owners had a blind spot in the expectations they had of the people in their care, and it was leading to this being a messy pass-through spot more than a place to really practice the necessary skills.

As I’m inclined to do, I started asking about what the whole picture/process was, and started brainstorming how to do it better. People don’t know where they’re going? Do we have any information we provide them to get a place lined up? No? Okay, let me do that. I spent 10 hours building a resource packet so, day 1, if you’re so inclined, you can call about what the availability might be at 6 different locations. I’m going to presume innocent enough oversight as to why this wasn’t standard issue already, but in modeling what I’m counseling, I asked what I could contribute more than bitch about, and then did the thing.

This gets into what get so exhausting about these environments. You can be the living active embodiment of the values you’re talking about, how you arrived at those values, and have a direct causal impact on the people you need to affect, and the overwhelming majority will still look at you like you’re high and full of shit. They’ll cling that much harder to what they know and if you don’t relay “your” message in a way they care to hear it, be prepared for their emotional fallout.

I’m experienced and distanced enough to not take things personally. I don’t let verbal disagreements or awkward moments linger for some prolonged period of time. But when they happen, like they did today, it highlights the frustrating parts of work like this. I need to meet with 70 people a week, at least once, so I can get us all on the same page and hopefully empower some practical direct next steps. You’d think the relatively captive audience who are lucky enough to be in this program would be mostly receptive to what I have to give. Or, you’d be wiser to what it means to be an animal who is exhausted and learned to cope with addictive substances.

At least half of any house I visited is often asleep. Doesn’t matter if I’m there at 1, 3, or 6, or if I saw them awake earlier in the day for IOP. Almost none have a job, but say they want/need one. Almost none have resumes, but claim they can create one. Almost none know where they’re going to go, how to get their personal documentation, or find the nearest open food pantry. But, they’re asleep! Like there’s nothing to do, learn, or figure out. And to be sure, I’m not begrudging anyone their developmental capacity or if they struggle to read or write. I’m talking people who are perfectly capable who, somehow, find so much time to sleep, and fill their waking hours with criticisms about how the program isn’t working for them.

When I show up with a resource packet, I have people waking up just long enough to say “Okay, I’ll come in the kitchen” and go back to sleep. I have people taking “important phone calls” and “gonna smoke real quick” ducking sitting down for even 10 minutes. I have people who manifest migraines so they don’t have to leave their room, but they were healthy enough to engage in trafficking teenagers the night before. Or, you get people who, it’s as if they can’t really listen, so if you deliberately and explicitly say you’re in a rush, they’ll turn yes or no questions into 5-minute meanders. And, dare you choose to assert your boundary and respect for time and blow up your rapport, you can redirect them back to the task with a now checked-out child whose feelings you hurt.

In an environment where you’d think you’d want every possible means of not staying stuck in self-destructive cycles, you will get the most unironically judgmental attitudes you have to dodge instinctively or they’ll wear you down. In a place where people will loudly proclaim their goals and values and you’ll spend hours breaking down how to demonstrate and celebrate them step by step, literally in the next breath you’ll think you’ve entered a parallel universe because the automatic and familiar reaction dictates the scene. You don’t talk yourself into new behaviors. You literally have to practice the new thing you want, or you’ll only get what you’ve always done. This is one more time that I practiced patience, self-forgiveness (for hurting that client’s feelings), redirecting the anger/exhaustion of my perception of the entitlement and laziness.

I don’t judge people as some kind of specific good or bad thing. I’m not even feeling anything in particular about “them” as “individuals.” I’m exhausted by the human animal and it’s typical, predictable, boring as fuck cliche nature. I first reached that place with regard to myself and my own behavior, and now it allows me the distance and license to recognize and diagnose yours. It’s taken my 21 years and 1,201 blogs and counting to just barely pull my own head out of my ass. I don’t take you seriously when you defy the idea that you should fill out a worksheet or make a phone call. I don’t respect you as a serious and moral thinker when you tell me “I’m good at pretty much everything I do” and “I don’t have triggers” when we’re having this conversation in your structured rule-bound grant-funded sober-living environment.

You’re lying. I know it’s coming from feeling vulnerable. But what makes it worse is where I locate the truest and deepest lie. You think you’re more vulnerable than anyone else. You think your pain is unique. You think your anger, dread, fear, and sense of hopelessness is special. That feels downright insulting. That feels like a dare. This, of course, my personal silliness that needs to be accounted for and dealt with directly. Eventually, though, when you’re just lied to so profoundly and with such conviction thousands and thousands of times, it changes you. And it’s not always clear if that change is a certain kind of wisdom, or deadening.

Some people do get it. They contribute, and work, and write a ton down, and ask questions, and share what they’ve been reading about or watching. They help each other. They thank you for investing in them and taking the time and creating things like a resource packet that anticipated some of their worst fears. Each person is a universe unto themselves, and with that in mind, the adage I used to ridicule about “If I can only help one person, then it’ll be worth it!” rings differently. Those handful can often account for the worst behaving actors that day. They help me bother to keep playing this kind of game and maintain my perspective about the nature of “help.” I show up for singular people in my life all the time.

I do genuinely believe that the more of us who find the same kind of exhaustion and perspective about tired and cliche human shit, “things” get “better.” I don’t think it’s a “belief” that we’re all connected, and the less poisonous any given node is in that network, the better. I will almost certainly never know the extent to which it’s better, but it certainly isn’t worse, which is the second best way to confirm why you should bother with a course of action. (If I’m barely understanding a Mindscape podcast episode that was way over my head.)

Tomorrow I need to input some 40 notes and chase down 10-15 people. Over the weekend I need to create several weeks worth of curriculum packets. I’m still trying to nail down how my effort will land me somewhere close to the 100K/year mark. In context, I can deal with as many sleepy, defiant, and defensive clients as I must if the money’s right.

[1200] Quite The Day

Today has all the makings of “a day.”

First, I get an emailing denying a 4-hour punch-card request to make up for 4 hours I did not record last week. The reason it’s denied? It’s our responsibility to manage our punch-ins, and my supervisor has been reminding me several times all week to go in and do so. Superficially, fair enough. But it’s deeper than that.

 

One of the first things I relayed to my supervisor when I got hired was how I’m terrible at the punching in and out. It’s not at a box you have to pass physically, it’s just signing into your phone. Well, my phone, even when I set alerts, even when I program the calendar, likes to pause, silence, or ignore my settings. So, when my A.D.D. self is particularly tired or distracted or has literally anything trying for my attention, I’m gonna miss a punch, which happens a lot.

 

For months, this has been alleviated just fine, either by her in the old system, or by me in the new. Well, 6 months later, I finally miss a day to correct, and my paycheck is 4 hours short. I already get paid terribly, and when you’re missing a tank of gas or two when you commute an hour each way to work, it stings. It stings more when you accidentally miss a MANDATORY meeting because you’re at your second job, you know, because one isn’t enough, and instead of just not getting paid for the 1.5 hours they did things like hand out “employee appreciation” totes (in lieu of money or courtesy), she insists you use 1.5 of your personal time or vacation time hours because, again, that meeting was MANDATORY. A meeting so mandatory, one of the three supervisors that’s supposed to be there has blown off twice.

 

I’m surrounded by a lot of people pretending to be adults, pretending to care, pretending there’s any sense or order about the rules and expectations, and pretending they’re exercising their power with any tact or wisdom. My job bleeds staff every few months. My job gets sued regularly for negligent behavior at its different sites. My job worked aggressively to excuse the violent behavior of children in its care for as long as it could, pinning it on us and the idea that we weren’t being “inclusive” and “accommodating” enough to kids that would feature in an episode of interventionist TV. My high-school kid employee, religious para-professional otherwise housewife, and spouse of someone recently swept up by ICE are expected to dutifully handle getting hit or pulled on and demanded of every day. They’re supposed to 1-on-1 deal with “behaviors” for 3 hours, whilst presumably ignoring every other child in the program as they pretend to be educated or certified in that level of attention and care. Cool.

 

The YMCA is a global brand. They have money. They still raise more off the backs of their poorest families. They refuse to pay employees enough to retain them or train them to do things like keep the kids clean if they shit themselves. They refused to hire the kind of help it would take to monopolize a child’s attention so the room could otherwise function. The latest kid to cause a notable disruption I was castigated for including his teachers in attempting to redirect and calm him down because it was after school. God forbid I include the alleged professionals when our ridiculous unworkable YMCA “plan,” which includes a license to hit other participants, somehow, doesn’t appear to be working.

 

My supervisor, also underpaid and overworked, I feel defaults to this kind of robot or brick-wall just mouthing words she knows doesn’t make sense and doesn’t believe in. She’s younger, looks perpetually overwhelmed, and has shown herself unable to even just generally lead or communicate, let alone engage in an adult human level with her other adult, and often more experienced, leaders. Today is just one of dozens of emails I’ve gotten that tout, so disingenuously, some “letter of the law” kind of sentiment where some common sense and grace would do. I finally broke, and pulled into a parking lot to write her a digression about how much I struggle with what feels like being completely abandoned by her. How every time I need something from her, it’s the hard way or some stupid tit-for-tat fight or pedantic debate. I could quit tomorrow with what I anticipate her response will be.

 

Bear in mind, I have her behavior and responses I can compare directly against another sometimes supervisor, also young, also with her own frustrating blind-spots and peculiarities, who has been demonstrably better. I can also compare her to my newest supervisor who has shown a level of understanding and support I’ve almost never found save for one or two people at DCS, and then way back in the day at Showplace. So while I have her needling in the background, something else comes in.

 

A parent emails her and me about how she thinks I’m “annoyed” by her special needs child and have made it my goal to remove kids from the program who have elevated needs. She alleges we’re not following or enforcing the right plans for ensuring her son can continue to participate. This is a child who is weirdly strong, and been forceful with my tiny staff who relayed their fear in the past. This is a kid who has held up items about to swing on me with them. This is a kid who has left the room to run outside. This is a kid who, his mother has stated plainly, has a condition that severely impedes his ability to control impulses. I’ve ripped up a write-up he absolutely deserved at one point, months ago, in an effort to accommodate and be patient and incorporate information mom was then willing to share. Someone, that write-up rip up guy is also targeting her kid. Her kid was targeted by the last site director, so naturally I am too, and I waited until 3 weeks before school was out to turn the screws.

 

Do I have any faith my supervisor will back me up? Doubtful. I suspect from mom’s response to mine that she at least played it neutral, but this is a girl I had to fight for 3 months about a child who, every single day, would have total meltdowns, screaming for 20 to 30 minutes stints, kicking and hitting tables, tearing things off the walls, and throwing things at other kids in response to staff asking him to sit down or line up for the bathroom. When I explained my plight in front of her boss, a complete 180 and now it’s, “You know I supported you!” No, I articulated your negligence to someone who, ultimately, doesn’t even really care to be bothered.

 

There’s much I can assume my supervisor doesn’t give a shit about regarding my life or what contributes to my ability to meet their professed aims. During my interview, it was a running joke all of the second and third jobs the rest of the site director’s had because, “You know, the job doesn’t pay much. Seriously, you get that right? Ha ha! We all work so much! We just believe in these kids and the mission!” That’s all fun and games until the practical reality and small asks I make to be accommodated come to fruition. Then, “You’re expected to be X Y Z, as we discussed during your interview.” Yeah, bitch, along with 100 other things you conveniently forget when it suits you.

 

I’ve been actively making peace with the shit all adults have to eat about their broad cliche levels of negligence, laziness, incoherence, and waste of most work environments. I was finding my pace and routine and setting up to just kinda ride. But then I get these emails. Then I find myself needing to negotiate time or a space. And it’s like a triggering event that just spikes my sense of absurdity, angst, and exhaustion. I’m already eating shit, just like you, why are you making me dance? Why do I need to be punished on top of the struggle?

 

The answer, always, of course, is because I am an unyielding puncture through the artifice of their farce. When you learn how to behave, play along, and survive by unshakeable allegiance to The Party, any remote criticism or ask to be “human” is an invitation to the whole world behind it of taking larger chunks of responsibility. We don't have a basically functional culture that can pronounce words like “responsibility” or “accountability.” Why would some helpless 27-year old who’s had exactly one job, pretending to be a leader at the Y, find the inclination for a robust longstanding and reasonable human professional partnership? She got an even shittier education than you, was encultured by the shameless and insecure, and is now terrified of literally everything I say to her. That doesn’t feel “winnable” or like a real problem to be solved.

 

Therefore, I take it day by day. My power remains in my ability to explore the entire world of possibilities I’m otherwise ignoring by staying plugged into this system. I’ve got my head to barely above water when it comes to bill-paying. I have the 2nd job I can always up my hours with, or I can situate around some other pursuit. I can’t escape the thought that maybe life does, indeed, have to* be this way for some mysterious reason the further you pan out. Maybe each new little ridiculous or hellish scene is just driving me to an inevitable destiny. A destiny it’s impossible to see as I contemplate the guilt of a mother who wishes she’d aborted her special needs child. A fate I won’t find beating up on the lost skinny white girls with all of my questions and criticisms of their intransigence and naivety.

 

As I contemplate this, I learn my cousin is about to die. I’m considering telling my job it’s my brother and taking bereavement time. I’m sure they’ll ask for a death certificate.

[1198] Not My Job

If this turns into something I actually post, it’ll be the 3rd time today I’ve tried to write it in a way that is both comprehensive and yet doesn’t annoy the piss out of me.

I’m a “site director” for the YMCA. I refer to my job as glorified babysitting. On paper, including the extremely misleading job listing, I’m in charge of “programming” as well as a host of other administrative things related to ensuring compliance with trainings, overseeing “camp” activities, and theoretically remaining pliable enough to be utilized wherever I’m needed. It pays $17.25 an hour, I make $1,107 every 2 weeks. I drive a 2002 Ford F-150, with at least $1,000 in needed repairs, an hour or more each way to get to my first shift at 6:15 AM. The afternoon runs from 2:45 PM to 6:00 PM, unless a parent is late, like they were today.

At a glance, and by my own perspective, I don’t make a lot, but I also don’t do a lot. This is a statement relative to my history of jobs, often in social work, and one I can now compare to the 2nd job I got addiction counseling that I wedge between my Y shifts from 8:30 AM to 1:00 PM. It pays $21/hr during “training,” which…we’ll get to that, and $23/hr for me to conduct 3-hour IOP groups for people recently sober. A 10-minute conversation with a single person in that environment can be more loaded and complicated than 5 days of poorly-listening kids.

I don’t want either job, I want money. If my time is destined to be utilized in captured ways, I’m looking to maintain a basic sense of belonging or flow as I exercise what’s needed. I live alone, an hour dead into the center of the middle of nowhere, and yet I’m begrudgingly extroverted, creative, and don’t want to sit around all day. I don’t have a particular affinity for kids or the sick and intransigent egos of addiction, but I do have a knack for speaking my audience’s language.

I spoke my supervisor’s language, as well as 6 other site directors’, at the Y to get hired in the first place. I am overwhelmingly on time, communicative, and accountable to the expectations of my various roles. I used to be the type to never take days off. I’m not saying that as a point of pride, but to hint at the depth of my former pathological allegiance and sense of pretentious pride.

Today, I recognize more both about myself and the environments I work than I used to. I don’t believe the grass is greener elsewhere. I don’t believe most places are run particularly accountably or by people with any real competence for it. I don’t expect everyone at all times to rise up and be the hero that champions higher pay, proper protocols, and meaningful consequences for those who betray the “values” we’re allegedly in charge of protecting or instilling.

I still have values. I still hold expectations. I still aspire to more than merely talking my way into new ill-fitting environment after new ill-fitting environment after I’ve drifted too far into a personal financial crisis. These values get aggravated the moment I’m met with the practical reality of navigating someone, technically, in charge of me, but clearly barely in charge of themselves. They become even more aggrieved when I’m forced to “need something” from those people, and they lack both the capacity and willingness to entertain a real way of meeting that need.

One supervisor, for example, ChatGPT’d me an answer to my informing them of the hours I was hoping to finagle. She doubled down in her response. When someone has no interest or capacity in engaging with you they’ll do things like, “Per our discussion 6 months ago when you were hired…” or “The site director role requires…” They’ll cc HR on the email, because you’re clearly becoming disgruntled by the side-stepping and ambivalence. They’ll throw up their hands and shrug their shoulders about the necessary consequences of you attempting to weasel out of the strictest interpretation of your role that serves their purposes in any moment.

These, mind you, are the same people who said, literally no less than 5 times, how little the role paid and were quick to offer all of the 2nd jobs their other site director’s take. It’s something of a point of pride? They just all believe in the cause so much, it seems, that they’re willing to sacrifice adult wages and ever-fleeting time so they babysi…I mean, enrich children’s lives. Should I recall that part of our conversation too? Or, what about the part where you said, “I’ve been trying to get them to change that job description for months because you’re right, it doesn’t match at all what we need you to do.”

I have 6 people that work under me at the Y. 4 of them make $20/hr or more. One of them last week said, “That’s messed up. You’re in charge and run the program, but they’re paying me $20?” My direct supervisor has lamented this, but then always tags the conversation with how little she makes. Her boss has been roped into discussion and offers nothing. His boss avoids the issue and is noted for having shit on my friend who used to work directly under her after my friend attempted to fix that discrepancy. It was one of several reasons that contributed to my friend quitting as common sense was routinely rebuked, and often devolved into Mean Girl politics.

Anyway, I’m at a crossroads, and have until May 9th to figure out if I want to keep playing along. I’ve yet to email my counseling job the hours the Y says I need to work, and I’m not looking to add anymore messiness to their operation that I’ve somehow refrained from speaking more about yet. The Y is the current devil I know. When it’s smooth, it’s still annoying, but tolerable. When literally anything comes up that feels like an unnecessary fight, I’m daring the universe to push me over the edge.

The relationship is over, if it ever really began, and I’m not exactly clinging to it, but it’s hard to directly compare my hatred for job-searching and restarting against my hatred for these disingenuous and not-so-secretly mean-spirited exchanges. One of my supervisors still holds a grudge that I expect kids not to be covered in shit as they go to lunch. You think a person like that is working overtime to keep me around? She literally is like Y lore for not even doing the bare minimum of her job.

If I leave, I’m still driving, now an hour and twenty minutes, to work each day, but I’m able to sleep in until 6:30/7 instead of 4:30/5, and getting home before 3. I could devote my freed up time to learning and getting certified in insurance sales, and attempt to break into where my friend that left the Y started working. It’s also a space endorsed by another friend of a friend who has been doing it for a decade. I’ve a standing goal of finding a fully remote job, and this has presented itself as a reliable-enough road to that.

Then, I’m no longer playing frisbee and basketball every day. I’m not crafting or making volcanoes. I’m not really getting outside. I’m not accumulating the knock-on effects I’ve yet to even explore of having a role that isn’t the heightened drama of social work broadly. I get along with my coworkers. I’ve earned a place of trust with my school and respect from my kids. Those aren’t nothing. They aren’t paying the bills, but they are a far cry from the types of things I utilize in describing what I hate about work, poor authority, or society in general. I’m not particularly sentimental, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve definitely felt more human, and it’s made more sense why people fist-fuck themselves in service to others within systems that can’t be bothered to get their shit together.

It’s a different kind of role. Even in counseling, the onus was on the adults to follow-up with me and my free nonprofit service if they really wanted to keep in touch and weren’t just talking out of their ass about my impact on them, as “addiction services” teach you to do. I’m second-guessing the impact I might have on the kids. Or, at least the kids that like me, as if I believed any of them hold particularly reasoned, strong, or salient opinions. I’m also feeling “old,” and not like I accept negligent authority for its own sake, but that am able to tolerate certain manifestations of it better.  If I never had to write another email, I’d probably never again flirt with getting fired.

I’m also on the road to exhaustion. I’m already “behind” on my IOP notes, not because I haven’t written them, and not because they take even 10 minutes to get entered into the system. The “start-up energy” and “messiness” of that work environment is regularly impeding my ability to develop a flow and system. I’m extremely competent in building “loose” obligations into a machine, and right now, there’s a larger machine that’s crippling my capacity to do so. I’m told things last minute. Schedules aren’t kept. Rides show up late. Expectations vary wildly between other IOP counselors. Meetings appear to be held and cancelled at random. I came in an hour early today do notes? As soon as I unpack my computer and open the browser, they want me upstairs for a new-to-me team meeting, even though I’ve been in “training” for a week and a half.

Am I still in training, and getting the training pay rate? They don’t know, because also they forgot to get me enrolled in payroll, so I’ll need to fill out 8 missing punch forms they’ll send me…eventually. Is yoga every Wednesday? Yes, says the office manager. It happens to be in the middle of your 3-hour IOP session, but whatever. Also, it’s not on today, so that 25 minutes of going upstairs and waiting around, yeah just head back down and cross your fingers your group regroups in a timely way. Teaching material? It’s in a binder around here somewhere, let’s make sure we never quite show you where 7 minutes before each of your groups when you might need to print 100 or more pages. Do I work from 9 to 1? or 8:30 when you want me on the meeting as I’m driving there on raceway 465? Good question, let me check on that. You ever been attacked by 6 pissed-off women at once who cite their PTSD about men after you asked them to not talk over someone who was sharing?

I can do just about 4 hours of that once a day provided I have low-stakes routines and games to play a few hours later. I will not be attempting to increase my hours if I leave the Y.

I’m stifled. It’s different enough from stuck. My goals have transformed to include some measure of stability or desire to see different fruits of different investments. I don’t want to perpetuate treating work environments and the people in them as disposable as they insist on making me feel. That’s giving them too much credit as though it’s intentional or that anyone can truly * make you feel one way or another. Of course, superficially and colloquially they can and do, but what kind of counselor would I be if I wasn’t interested in the conscious clear-eyed choices there are the moment you recognize and distance yourself from the feeling? I don’t want to go out on a reactive email. I don’t want to get caught pleading with, literally, a chatbot employed by someone wholly nonplussed about the smell, or taste, of shit. I don’t want to find myself racing towards the next iteratively negligent space crafting new naive narratives about its potential.

At least I have 9 stays to stew.

[1192] Babble Babble Bitch Bitch

I need to try to identify another pattern. A few days ago I felt I had good examples at different scales of what I was looking for. Of course, I got busy or distracted, and now I need to try and claw away what I thought I had from my latest mental fog.

I’m often curious about “transformation” or “evolution” in people. Elon Musk is someone I felt immediately drawn to when I first saw him on like 60 minutes back in college matter-of-factly talking about what society needed to do to not kill itself. As someone who considers himself an adept reader of people’s bullshit, I didn’t sense that he was coming from anywhere insincere, and at the time, the proof was what had so far been accomplished at his companies.

Jordan Peterson also occupied a prominent spot in me being interested in what he had to say or how he arrived there. There’s hundreds of hours of him not being a Christian or fascist apologist, notably, before his star began to rise out of control and the peaks of his illness were reached.

In my life, I reflect on what brought me together with girlfriends, my best friends, work cohorts, or what I thought constitutes my family.

We’ve gone through, at least a rhetorical revolution, as it pertains to the fluidity of identity, the loci of power, and the nature of harm or what will save us.

Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve, overwhelmingly so, pretty much staid the same. That isn’t to say I haven’t “matured” or “tempered” or found ways to better emotionally regulate. It doesn’t mean I’ve continued to fight as vociferously for causes or actions I was particularly naive about. It just means my broadest lens has focused around the same things in spite of my environment.

There’s something that feels stable in me that I don’t recognize in the same way from other people.

The thing I do recognize in others is what we’re witness to from the likes of Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, or our exes, but specifically the ones that, on paper and emotionally, made the most sense. The nature of the transformation feels almost impossible to account for, and people seem to only try decades later or after all the major players have died.

The word that keeps creeping in is “honesty.” The nature of the change I believe has to do with how you understand that word. I think most people understand it as some extension of the phrase, “Your feelings are valid.” It’s a very complicated and disingenuous phrasing that hides its arbitrary redundancy. I would say instead, “You have feelings.” When I see people struggle with what to do with their feelings, it’s often they wish to automatically suppress and obscure them. Perhaps that first phrasing is trying to make a persuasive argument that ignites your capacity to feel them altogether. I don’t know that it’s working.

I honestly don’t believe Elon Or Jordan started evil. I think they believe they are “deathly” honest. I think I had the same complex when I was younger, thinking “harsh” or “real” expressions of my opinion were the same thing as being honest. I would apply one exacting mode of determining the “objective truth” of a situation, and let the consequences be what they may. I wasn’t feeling necessarily insecure or scared or much of anything at all. I just didn’t care, because I was “right.” I wasn't prepared to accept, let alone be interested in embodying, the depth of my existential ignorance.

I think each step on the path to evil is the avoidance or ignoring of your conscious. You avoid and ignore by leaning into emotional expressions that act as justification. Whether it’s John Oliver tearing up on air, Jordan Peterson’s snarl, or your car-ranting TikTok star wanna-be, it’s the same dance away from what a more honest and accountable expression would look like. I think Elon knows the math doesn’t add up in crippling federal institutions for anyone but himself. I think Jordan knows it’s an embarrassing fascist inversion of the X-Men to compare them to Trump acolytes. I think the daily devotional resigned sentiments offered to me about the nature of a work environment, the future, or our responsibility to fix or work differently are driven by the same mechanism.

I don’t get the impression people know what they can trust about themselves. Or, they only trust the worst things about themselves. Or, they only trust their woefully incomplete conception about how the worst things about them actually play out. They know their anxiety is going to win. They know if they try they’ll fail and it will all have been a waste. They know which thing after thing doesn’t matter. They know they’re going to get too tired, or distracted, or someone in their life is going to object and dissuade. I’ve had thousands of conversations about what isn’t possible or what someone isn’t really like or capable of for every one about limitless potential for anything besides chaos.

I feel they’re all fundamentally dishonest. I think we’ve achieved our current levels of decadence because critical masses of people dragged perhaps their own predilections to lie to themselves kicking and screaming into a future they otherwise believed could be worked and fought for. I don’t think that internal investigation or discussion even has to do with the future. I think it has to do with asking yourself, what else are you missing from “right now.” What isn’t making its way into your conversation that’s just as true as the details of your complacent or complicit rut?

I think for Elon there’s a discussion about compulsivity, the coldness autism can inspire, and the danger of ego. I think for Jordan it’s his desperate longing to fit into something greater than he’s achieved through being an intellectual or via accident in bonding with his wife as children. I think he knows his story isn’t remotely typical or realistic, but he sounds so sure of himself when he’s excoriating modern attitudes and practices, no? At home, it was fairly easy for me to see the differences in disposition and, let’s say moral core, as to why a relationship wasn’t going to work. With family, I can see the placating apologetics employed to keep the peace. The catch-phrases at DCS and now the YMCA are all to do with “care” and “safety” devoid of discussions about demonstrated betrayals.

Capital or attention-based “success” is a unique form of capture. We’ve never had the kind of chance to transcend the lanes we’re born into that we do today, and we’ve never been able to witness the transformation so closely. Mostly, we’ve just been captured by our family, region, or work culture. Now, with so many new avenues competing for our attention and our unwillingness or inability to articulate how they work, I think we default to angry ambivalent animalistic survival modes of expression. That’s “me and mine.” That’s apologetics for sin. That’s cliches and average days because nothing more could or should be expected.

You can go back to my first writing, deeply emotional and angst-ridden 15-year old me lusting and confused and still find the things about me I consider my stabilizing core. I tread in obscenity and trying to be light-hearted. The title is:

“If You’re A Girl You Better Fucking Read This”

I’m curious and constantly asking questions.

“Okay, so this is like a call-out for the inner workings of the womanly mind.”

I’m responding to what I see as a self-destructive pattern.

“Over and over, I talk to my friends who have been in relationships that do nothing but fuck them square in the ass, and despite my warnings and suggestions, they still fawn over the assholes that fucked them over.”

I’m offering concrete examples of the behavior I think is wrong.

“If your boyfriend makes you cry, orders you to do things, or makes your friends and family uncomfortable... leave his ass now. It's plain and simple.”

Today, I stop being so prescriptive, and have had hundreds more interactions with people about domestic violence or emotionally manipulative dynamics, but at bottom, it speaks to a core belief I don’t think is unreasonable. It’s not evidence of a healthy dynamic to me if that’s the nature of yours.

I continue to lay out my “answers” and “harsh truths” about 90% of guys being in it for the pussy, and attempting to anticipate the feedback that often comes in from questioning girls as to why they’re excusing something.

I didn’t know the word “limerence” back then. I wouldn’t have copped to the writing being a passive aggressive way to trigger some form of introspection in my targets or side-building as I looked for ways to air dirty laundry. I knew my feelings were intense, I didn’t know how to address them, and it was occupying my thoughts in an unsustainable and compulsive way. Something broke, so I started to search through writing. I didn’t find a way to talk her into dating me. I found the world of information that wasn’t yet informing how I could understand myself against or in service to that world.

The fervor and fascism of pop-cultists and apologists rides the kind of energy I was on at 15. It’s totalizing. It’s self-reinforcing. It’s an artificial motivation bred from untempered inarticulate ignorance. It’s probably where the wisdom of “hate the sin, not the sinner” comes from and why so many are compelled by the idea that they have to give up their pathological behavior to something external. What’s juicier than the idea that the absolutely necessary sacrifice to find salvation is His problem, not mine?

I had to give up being “convinced.” I had to stop pretending I knew the truth in any form that I wasn’t actively manifesting or participating in. As long as I work, then the “deepest” or “most practical” truth is that I will more likely get the consequences of that work. If I’m working on the wrong shit, I will compound my problems. If I “believe” that which I’m unwilling to fight for or achieve, I’m playing a rhetorical game with myself in order to avoid responsibility. If I’m unwilling to define the nature of that work, from writing, to advocating and speaking at all, then I’m at the mercy of the people or plans that can account for my chaotic drag on the future.

No one is coming to save you. I don’t think you could recognize who’s even trying. They also can’t hammer for you what you need nailed to a cross. It’s not immigrants or trans people. It’s not the concepts of diversity, equity, or inclusion. It’s whatever is keeping you from being consistently curious, concerned about those getting fucked with, or capable of building the case that doesn’t depend on how passionately you can scream or cry through it.