[961] Inadequate

I’m obligated to speak to an incident I encountered on the dorm. One of my clients, steaming, comes up to me with a writing assignment in hand. He tells me that he’s not trying to be all aggressive, but that he wants a new counselor, and it’s all explained in the writing. I probe for more. According to him, when I asked a question during class and began soliciting answers, he was under the impression I was laughing at him with whatever he said. This had him fuming for the better part of at least a day, venting to others on the dorm, until he could finally confront me. We talked, things mellowed, he left with about the same tension-ridden suspicious glance as he has had since joining programming.

Now, of course I’m not laughing at my guys for any reason than when they are doing or saying something meant to be funny. I’m not ridiculing steps you’re taking to stay sober or improve your life. This is just a kind of “duh” thing. I didn’t even recall the moment in the group conversation he was talking about. As counselor, I didn’t even tell him, “You know, I wasn’t laughing at you.” I did the political thing and apologized if I came across some kind of way I absolutely didn’t intend. As he explained several times over, it became clearer that he did not like being challenged on whatever his answer to my question was.

 

We talk a lot about emotional regulation and awareness. My guys aren’t habitual “think it through” types. This isn’t because they are incapable or don’t want to, but it’s not what they’ve practiced. They have entire worlds of language and behaviors that don’t comport with ways we definitely take for granted. This gentleman, without irony, said, “Some of us just are able to let things go, just because you don’t operate that way doesn’t give you license to just laugh at our answers.” I did not find his capacity for letting things go convincing. I spoke to the difficulty many people in programming, let alone prison in general, have in identifying and resolving hurt feelings.

 

Whether or not they are willing to speak to it, prisoners, no matter the life they’ve led before becoming incarcerated, tend to feel very small, very dumb, and like the world does not give a fuck about them. Often enough, many are pretty goddamn dumb and they hold incredibly immature or underdeveloped brains in their skulls. I don’t think I’d have to spend too much time trying to persuade you how little you or anyone you know thinks about the welfare of the incarcerated unless you’re black. What do I feel my responsibility is to people in that position who say something like, “I just let it go?” I challenge them to get more specific.

 

I don’t really let things go. I don’t honestly know what that means. If all I had was my own impression of “let it go,” I’d still be curious what you were talking about. I have the added insight of hearing dozens of non-answers to important questions on the regular. I know when you’re trying to run and hide. I know that you’re feeling dumb and ashamed. I know that part of the reason you get in trouble is an unwillingness or inability to simply accept all that you, in fact, have in no way let go by any measurable assessment. To the extent any given topic shows up less often in my writing is how you might figure I’ve “let something go.” Does that mean I’ve stopped ruminating on the nature of friendships, communication, “love,” my mom, family, work, land goals, or any seemingly lost to time conversation or thought? Let’s call in another, “Duh, no.”

 

I suppose given that this is the second time in less than a month that someone has telegraphed their “I feel small around you” insecurity, combined with my recent observations of crowds at concerts, the word “inadequacy” really started to shine in my consciousness. I rarely see anyone go out to eat or go to a concert alone. As I look at the people or if I happen to overhear a conversation, my prevailing thought is how I’d rather be alone than with whomever I’m looking at or listening to. I…never? I don’t think I ever have the thought that goes, “Oh, they look like they could be a friend” or “I want to talk to that person.”

 

I should clarify too, this is entirely different from “reading people” and getting drunk and navigating body language and facial expressions in order to make a friendly interjection into their night. I can certainly identify people who are going to be more or less amenable to that kind of behavior, drunk or sober, but the inclination to do so goes to zero sober.

 

Perhaps I give off an incredibly strong, “You’re not my type” vibe. And, frankly, you probably aren’t. I’ve been talking to myself more lately about how…by myself…I often am. I have friends. I go do things with them, but there’s a disconnect. It might be better understood as there’s particular lanes my friendships seem to fit. I’m either working with you, I’m your “novelty,” or I’m something you’re oddly trying to mollify, particularly if the thing that’s wrong with our dynamic is a lack of honesty and communication.

 

Working backwards, the idea that I need to be appeased or pacified I think speaks to the fallibility of people pleasers more than it testifies to my general irritability. I’m not looking for people to make my problems go away or care for me, but I am looking for people with a certain kind of attitude and insistence when it comes to addressing their own. If you don’t have that, when I do complain about something, your worst instinct kicks in, anxiety rises, and I turn into something to resent. If you’re not the people pleaser type and just don’t really care to address things, you start turning into the thing I resent.

 

Me being a novelty is so routine I’m curious why I haven’t spoken particularly in depth about it before. Somehow, every time, in every work environment or when I meet the most obnoxious or “out-there” person, I habitually manage to out “What the fuck did you say?” them. I take the joke several steps too far. I bring in a left-field example. I use a word that gives pause. I say something I find innocuous about my life that seems wholly incongruous to your truly poor read of me or what I’m about. I can say just consistently enough fun and flirty things via text or chat for ages. I’m constantly making myself laugh with goofy shit that comes to mind, and when I can pair it or interject it into our dynamic, a lot of times you’re laughing too.

 

I’ve considered my strongest friendships the ones in which we’ve worked or are working on something. It doesn’t even necessarily have to succeed, but that we’re both there discussing the details and moving in some kind of shared direction is what I was after. It would help explain why I managed to romanticize the college group. We did a lot of shit together, at least, for me compared to anyone else I did things with. I found it immensely gratifying to find myself on the same page, even if it proved superficial, when it came to parties or games or trips.

 

I suppose when I think of my relationships like this, it really highlights the idea that people aren’t generally cool or close with me because of “me” or “who I am.” They don’t really care what I have to say more than how what I said makes them feel. Or if what I said gives them license to condemn or gossip or otherwise fantasize about what I “really” meant. I don’t think this habit of how we might interact really has anything to do with me either. I think we land socially about where we are psychologically or what we think we deserve.

 

The closest kind of person I think that matches me psychologically is either older women or the quasi-pathological when it comes to their work. While there are plenty of those types around, it doesn’t mean you’re destined to be friends or occupying similar circles of interest. Hussain is a workhorse. Hatsam matched every minute of energy I put towards the coffee shop. Allie built the garden. I just had an exhausting conversation with an older woman workhorse who’s grasp of the various fields and sub-fields as it pertained to social work and connections therein might actually help us break through into some vein of self-operating.

 

Are we otherwise “inadequate” to each other? I think of my less-involved connections. I had people from work who would go bowling. I’m almost certain if I don’t send the invitation text, they’re not going to be the ones reaching out to start back up. Did we enjoy each other’s company? There were plenty of laughs, but I suspect my novelty wears thin. Maybe I consider the number of girls I’ve disappointed by not being husband material. Why, if I’m not good for a long-term commitment (read: pageantry of marriage) or a baby and willingness to endure any job that keeps up with the Jones’s, what good am I?

 

I can’t tell you how frustrating it has seemed to make exes when I tell them I just want them to be them and around. Oof, what a fucking asshole I am! What does that even mean!? Where do I get off pretending that I have no expectations for them or am not directing my critical ire onto their being? They’re looking to be defined, be dependent variables. Their boyfriend needs to reflect upon them something they aren’t otherwise feeling about themselves. You can’t just be cool with me! I’m a piece of shit!

 

I don’t know that I feel inadequate about nearly anything anymore. I have the power to eat better and get in shape if I think I’m getting too fat or find myself embarrassed I’m breathing too hard. I know it’s disinterest or mental fatigue that keeps me from diving right back into being a nerd reciting details about whatever topic. I wish I could find someone doing counseling that had a trick or skill I could steal or learn from, but the constant feedback I get is that I’m the one doing it better or the best; and I’m perfectly willing to consider the sources of each of those assessments. I don’t feel great about not having a master’s degree or license, but it’s not inadequacy, more like a frustration with the injustice and absurdity for the cost and indifference to the practical reality upon obtaining them.

 

I think most people know what they’re suffering or running from. If I’ve been in a thousand conversations about living off-grid or sustainability, I’m the only one I’m aware of who went for it, finding speckles of help here and there. If I tell you about some business idea I have, I start it, even if it’s always messy and confusing and if for no other reason than I sit primed with the cocked weapon to employ once the fog of what I don’t know is lifted. I ask the talented and knowledgeable inmates in guitar class to teach me what I don’t know.

 

I’ve been curious why “radical acceptance” has been such a reverberating catchphrase in my head, and now I might know why. It’s, somehow, radical to acknowledge reality. Because we’re constitutive of our environments, psychological, social, and biological, to hold an endless list of contradictory information or competing notions in a deadlocked war with any of those levels appears nearly impossible. Pretend you’re an addict whose whole family is as well. They love you. They’ve supported you. They are your ticket back to prison and a whole host of other horrible consequences for other people in your life. It’s pretty radical to accept their love and all the steps you have to take to perhaps rarely if ever engage with them while they are in active addiction and your true goal is to stay sober.

 

I “radically” embraced the hundred things I didn’t know about converting sheds into living spaces, ticks, driving, learning about country folk, huge projects with scant budgets and tools it would take years to save up for. I accept my “alone” or “outsider” status while fluidly joining you for dinner or pursuing new friendships where I might serve as fun or interesting in proportion to them as they do me. Writing, examining, and keeping open questions about how to think about myself or my life circumstances isn’t “that was the best concert ever!” when I do something entertaining or Insta-worthy. It was probably a good show, and the musicians were talented, and by the end I was just as happy to not have to stand any longer as I was when they played the one song I knew. And that’s okay.

 

I also understand that where I am is always falling short of the idyllic picture I had in my head. I literally only measured success as a child by my acquisition of a big TV, so that concept had to be retired. I still dream about a big house and sustainable experiments in different locations. And I can say at least I have the tools, land, and time spent getting a grasp on how to go about doing so. I’m still living in the dream. Whether I’ll ever find people who feel adequate enough with themselves to play with me, I don’t know. I also don’t have to find them to keep being radical in accepting my desires and obligations.

[960] Function Over Form

I just built a little thing. It’s not pretty. I barely measured it. I didn’t take my time, snugly align the pieces, nor pretty it up in any way. On top of it now sits one of my, incredibly heavy, TVs. It doesn’t wobble, bend, or creak. It’s serving its purposes, which included giving me something “productive” to do, lifting my TV high enough to see better and allow for the space below to be freer, showing me just how bad I am likely to be at cutting angles I want slotted together, saving my overworked computer monitor stands, and giving me a chance to test the saw I wish to sell, but hadn’t put through any amount of wood-cutting. In the clean-up, I as well went after kitty litter and hair. It’s now serving as the inspiration for kicking off whatever comes of this writing.

I analogize often. The physical reality of my living environment really hammers it home. Function over form. I want the thing to work. I want it to serve its purpose even if it’s “weird,” or “wrong,” or “why did you do it like that?” When I can get something to work, the vague-enough “problem” I have snaps into focus in its resolution. Perhaps 12 things at once are now better, and I was only consciously able to list 6 of the most obvious.

I got sucked into looking through old friends’ pictures earlier. These social media sites won’t let anything die. When I consider those relationships in the context of function over form, they make a lot more sense. How many “close” bonds was I trying to form? Given that it’s many years later that it dawns on me to ask the question, probably not many. What did the group function as? Entertainment, companionship, laughs, fooling around, and help. I was just remarking about how I envisioned my space of the future being occupied by more than me and the cats, but do I want to fill it with people like the ones I rolled with in college?

Over time, I’ve insisted I make the extra mistake of being the one to reach out first. I’ve done this with dozens of friends. If I get a response at all, and it’s not openly hostile, it’s much later than in any timeframe that we could have organized a time to meet up, or it’s a kind of piddling, “Per the rumors and group disposition you weren’t informed of, I don’t know that I can really fuck with you,” kind of thing. I’m not complaining, this is the observation. Especially with time, that “thing” that you’re supposed to have in common with people you’re allegedly close to, becomes incredibly hard to define or recognize. It has me severely second-guessing the nature of comradery or connection altogether pretty habitually.

It’s not like it should be a surprise either. People fall out of deep and passionate love for partners who gave them children. You get old and sick or whatever mental health issue that’s gone unaddressed since childhood starts to take over. A lot of us only recently found out how Nazi Germany could really be a thing. Outside of the pathological unifiers in physiology, with each person being a world unto themselves, it really does seem like there is considerably more that divides us than unites us. I find myself struggling to connect some of my highest aspirations and ideals to the people who’ve supported me the most. What kind of hubris or naivety would make me believe an acquaintance, perhaps colloquially referred to as “friend,” is sharing in…me?

This is kind of coming to a head after some conversations with my buddy’s sister. On paper, her ex-husband literally checked boxes she had created for the type of guy she wanted. Well, he lied. He’s got some deep issues he’s not demonstrating a great capacity for proactively engaging or sounding remotely accountable towards. She’s divorced, he rarely sees the kid, and now my buddy and I’s experience at DCS is hopefully funneling through into a brilliant custody agreement. What was she supposed to do? She actually did the work and sought out who could fill in the blanks. It wasn’t gut. It wasn’t overwhelming limerence. But fooled by the lie, here we are, me, her, and her brother taking the child to the children’s museum this past weekend.

She was asking me what I wanted in a girl. Taking my initial answer as too vague, I described for her the things I wished I had in the relationships that weren’t there. Open and honest communication would be stellar. Someone who felt remotely secure and self-confident in who they were. Someone who could express gratitude for some of the million little things that go right each day. It’s not that my relationships were devoid of these, but they weren’t front and center. They were hinted at or thrown out like a desperate defensive shield when challenged.

That’s a lot of my friendships too. Hints, pictures, superficialities, but shit was always bubbling. There was always something left unsaid or that kind of befuddled condescending look Jake George would give like I didn’t understand the irony of something I said or have the lived experience to contribute. There was the on-paper story of number of parties attended, hours spent, outings enjoyed, shots toasted, and jokes told. But there was a lie at the center, and now I’m a single cat dad lol.

And that’s okay, but probably at least a little sad, no? Each person using the dynamic for their own function, be it the companionship, distraction, or stroking of their incensed ego boner. Some of the people still show up in each other’s pictures of course, years apart, all presumably living their best Insta-lives, gaining higher-order roles or taking further and more expensive trips. There are more than a few babies starting to float around. But is there a lie somewhere in the heart of it all? Or did it just reside in me and I managed just fine in cutting myself out and isolating my cancerous influence?

The operative, “If you meet an asshole once, they were probably an asshole. If everyone you meet is an asshole, you’re the asshole,” comes to mind. But I didn’t consider any of them assholes lol. I still don’t, incredibly shit rumors and posture towards me notwithstanding. That’s the thing. If anything, I got all romantic and very dream-like in what I envisioned the future would be. My first indication that I don’t need drugs to be fucking irrationally high. My strategy for combating irrational guilt kicks in. Whatever happened, is that what I wanted or intended? No. Fuck no. And the complicated ongoing self-discussion and examination or feelings associated maybe kinda sorta suggests that I actually gave a shit.

A lot of my clients have done incredibly shitty things, from killing people to…well killing people is pretty high up there, even if it was accidental. The seas of guilt and shame they swim in are crippling. Most often, they did whatever they did while high or drunk, or really really high and/or drunk. The locus of their betrayal and irrational disregard of consequences in service to their hijacked survival mechanisms can readily be blamed on their addiction, conveniently or otherwise believed. What’s any one of our excuses for being a bad friend or betraying a budding notion of family? Are we just heedlessly trudging along with our general conditioning and abuses ever ambivalent?

What do you want in a friend? Them just to be there regardless of the tangible impact on your life? What do you want in a partner? Someone pretty enough to not fuck up your child’s looks and irrationally committed enough to their job to ensure you’ll garner child support no matter what? My buddy’s sister suggested that in my initial vague answers that I hadn’t thought hard enough about what my standards were. My standard is at once so incredibly low, but seemingly impossible to locate. I want someone that functions lol. I’ve relaxed my ideas about looks somewhat. I don’t require someone to know me inside and out and go Dutch on every meal. I don’t need you to be “passionate” about anything, from politics to the environment. I just want to trust that you’re going to function as a decent trying-to-be-better you. But like, who the fuck are you? Are you building little things to testify to an approximation of you like me? Are you working on something that means anything to you?

That’s how I tricked myself with Allie. She’s an incredibly hard worker. That passes an instinctual vibe check well before icing on a cake regularly glazed. (That was subtle, right?) Open and honest communication? Well, maybe, here and there, but when I pull the emails, the thing that blew up a year later was a thing that wasn’t worked on or fixed in month, if not week, one. I can trust that there’s a 100’ x 100’ garden outside. I can’t trust she has a handle on when she tells me she’s going to work on something emotionally or practically helpful conversationally. Oops.

What about with Kristen? Talk about my rose-colored glasses there. I don’t blame her for the things she struggled with, and I certainly had less of the tools or language than I do now to perhaps better approach those things, but the number of things left unsaid over the course of 5 years was vast. The nature of her “experiment” with me was not introduced into the conversation until years after we split lol. Steev before her had similar mental health struggles and we were so cavalier or evolved as to have literally planned our break-up date. I can’t say I have a strong sense of what was going on with that dynamic.

Again, what do I want? I want someone more interested in the work that functions more than the form their story takes. I don’t need a wedding let alone the photos. I don’t need a deep bench of pretty-enough posturing about the sacredness of the pageantry. I don’t need to be told constantly how good I look or special I am or resented when I have more on my mind than desperately searching for when I can work in those affirmations for you. I just want to be recognized. I’d like for the incredible amount of time I’ve spent and work I’ve done and reflection I’ve engaged in to register as something worth sticking to. I don’t want to feel like I’m perpetually failing to live up to the arbitrary dictates of ill-considered lies.

I just want a friend.

[959] By Way Of Analogy

If my last blog I was looking for a problem, I think maybe now it’s sinking in what I might’ve been looking for.

It’s hard not to be in a kind of perpetual reflection when you’re working in a prison. Everything you say is being scrutinized for a measure of authenticity or weakness. There’s nothing else to do but be sucked into the immediacy of the collectively present and overbearing circumstance. You’re caged, told what to do, unequal, and there’s rules that don’t just catch up to you, but can come crashing down in riot gear and bullets if you’re having a particularly bad day.

My role is absolutely fascinating. I’m new dad. I’m older brother. I’m non-judgmental uncle. I’m the closest thing to a therapist or encouraging voice some of these dudes have ever had. And I’m in another system almost perfectly designed to snuff out the memory, let alone responsibility, of that role. Like every single social work job I find, the people running it don’t actually give a shit. They have money to make. They have bills to pay. They rose to the middle of fill-in-your-bureaucracy and don’t intend to learn your name anymore than they believe you should concern yourself much with your once-a-week out-patient clients.

Worse than the harm from simple negligence and selfishness is the stupidity. You couldn’t ask for the worst people to be put in charge of “training.” You couldn’t design a more perfectly convoluted series of questions and non-answers to get even the smallest things done. I don’t know if stupid is large enough of a concept for it to bear the cross of what is so routine and ubiquitous. I don’t know how many long-term employees you have to lose each month before the clue finds its way to changing how you operate.

I’m attempting to model behavior. I don’t struggle with goal-setting. I don’t wake up every day with an excuse for not getting to work on time. I don’t need to drill in a habit of making my bed because my ability to focus and achieve is not predicated on building my esteem with small wins and new-daddy over my shoulder making sure I don’t get too impulsive. I haven’t cancelled a single class. I haven’t missed a day of work. I haven’t been late with notes or treatment plans or just threw up my arms and said I was too “out of it” to do stand-to on my dorm day.

Who’s borrowing from my example? Not various-levels-of-burnt coworkers. There’s always going to be a group of people, no matter the setting, that are going to “get it” in a way others won’t. Is that anything to do with me? Or do I get to pawn off my larger responsibility to the statistics? I can tell you a thousand times I can see the focus, determination, read the testimony, bask in the class engagement, but what if the snobby pork rind C/O is right and it’s all a song and dance?

It puts a searchlight on what my larger targets and goals have been all along. I’m not about fixing a shitty subcontracted company’s posture towards its employees. I want to take on Indiana. I want to fundamentally shift your concept of the State, and what its alleged powers and presumptions are. I have a considerably better shot at that by making a lot of money than I do writing a brilliant letter of discontent with coworker signatures.

But we’re getting too big and broad. My day-to-day issue isn’t that I’m not a heavy political animal. My issue is that things don’t work and the ones who could fix them won’t. I’m exceptionally good at many things I do in work settings. You take 5 days? I take 20 minutes. You write 2 lines? I submit a paragraph of analysis. You cancel class? I add 1 more, put together discussion topics for one you abandoned, and start eyeballing a complete overhaul to how we employ this whole group system to begin with. But, like everywhere else I’ve worked, that doesn’t matter. It’s not recognized and respected and enabled.

So I do what? Repeat what I hear a dozen times a day from coworkers, “It is what it is?” Pretend like I’m not gutted when I make continual outsized efforts to actually “meet expectations” that are ever-shifting and I was never really taught in the first place? Act polite when I’m told I have to attend a “mandatory” interruption of my day for some pageantry or meeting that has absolutely nothing to do with me?

I know why life sucks. I know why every single one of my guys drinks, shoots up, inhales, or otherwise tries to ignore and shove down the waterfall of shit that I feel I bathe in when I subject myself to these environments. Of course, you should fuck off and get high when literally nothing you do matters. Now, I’m lucky, I get plenty of smoke blown up my ass about the impact I’m having, so I can easily dismiss the catastrophizing notion. Them, though? Who cares about them? Not Indiana. Not The D.O.C. Not people I talk to when I bring up what I do in conversation. How would they be able to recognize it even if you do care? How can I expect them to recognize something I can’t from those mouthing words allegedly concerned about my well-being?

So what do we have to “radically accept?” Seems like such a cop out. “You’re fucked! Deal with it! Ha!” Like it’s “radical” the idea people are pussies and overwhelmed. I practically live to deny shit you might tell me to accept. I could quit and try to do a drug study and be out of debt in two weeks. I’m every day massaging the idea of lasting right up to the end of the highlighted calendar pages. I have to accept that if I believe the world to be genuinely small, and if I’ve done as much work as I have to recognize the things I think we all need to survive and live well, then I’m actually able to squeeze a fair amount of good out of otherwise abject shit, even if it does basically nothing for me at the deepest levels.

Am I broken? I can get a little misty reading these guys’ stories. I can get very enthused when someone writes down what feels like a great phrase or breakthrough, but I don’t ride those kinds of highs. Those are their wins. Nietzsche didn’t clap for me. Helping people is not my drug. I want to destroy. I want to attack. I want to flaunt and celebrate the power that overcomes what feels insurmountable for its lack of definition. I think the same reason helping people does nothing for me is why I haven’t been interested in having kids. I’m a cheerleader, sure, but I want to recognize the same fire in you that I have, not spend my life trying to persuade you not to be a fuck up.

I got guitars donated. Whether they’ll be approved or handled in time for class tomorrow, I don’t know. It took me 2 months, but I accomplished, somewhat, a goal to improve one of the classes that was on the verge of being abandoned. Go me. If I have nothing else, I get to listen to this absolute beast of a guitar player and singer in the advanced class. I get to worm my way into the heads of the people who’ve been watching me to see if I was full of shit about getting more guitars. Fuck the doubters, of course I got more guitars. That’s the whole fucking point of everything.

[958] Itsy Bitsy Spider

Hello darkness, my old friend.

Starting is the easy part. Keeping it going is an entirely different beast.

I saw, live, an embodiment of greatness, not for the first time, but definitely on a level that one should process several times over. Combine the magic of music, the talent or intelligence, and extravagant settings and history, and you can connote the sacredness of a moment in space. Is a world-class violinist Christ-like in his excellence? Or in his modesty? Can the music be so perfect as to lull you to sleep?

The word on my mind for months as been “goal.” I’m constantly asking my guys about their goals. I’m not feeling anxious, precisely, about my ability to pursue or achieve mine, but they feel…waffly. Oddly enough, one of my standing goals, to watch ALL TV, has struggled to serve its space-filler goal posture, and I’ve been approximately 20 hours behind for weeks. It’s almost like the stories are heavier in their predictability or cliché when they’ve certainly been just as predictable and cliché as they’ve always been.

I’ve been talking so much about the weeks or months I need to keep my job. It’s practice to not let burnout creep in. It’s constantly trying to remind myself I’m doing easy work, more efficiently than I could be otherwise, getting paid more than I ever have, and I’m aggressively building in points of joy to occupy my mind so the prison walls don’t close in. Now, after a major “indulgence,” which I genuinely conceive as a form of healthcare, I need to work my job for another 3 months. That statement doesn’t fill me with dread, which is a start, but my real goals have nothing to do with maintaining normal employment.

We’re begging the question of what strides I have or haven’t made in service to the out-patient clinic. Well, dear reader, I feel like I’m doing nothing. I run right up against the problem of not wanting to work after work. I fill my long-weekends with activities. A lot of the out-of-my-control practical realities still exist when it comes to business hours and response times. I’m not convinced I won’t still be going door-to-door soon, but I can’t shake the sketchy baggage I feel that would carry. I probably need to just take a few hours, join some online advertising/counseling practices, and engage in text/telehealth, but for some damn reason, it does not feel like a drive to get it done.

Why? At the end, what do I get? More money sounds nice, but at the rate I’m making negotiations with my billables, there’s little reason to believe it’ll be more than I’m making now for quite some time without referrals or dedicated cases. Freedom? I kind of have a fair amount of freedom as it is, and if I get more, it’ll take considerably more money than I have now to optimize it. I would likely be investing a lot of time in the effort to make an income stream “passive.” As well the people and places I’ve reached out to for help kind of showed a test-run for how involved and otherwise busy their lives are as well. Are we prepared to go it alone quasi-indefinitely? It’s not getting us very far in this moment.

I have achieved so much of what I’ve wanted. I’m now drifting into spaces like expensive cologne buying and making a, relatively, small investment in my overall health. I’m so comfortable save my manufactured debt crisis and pithy externalities of bureaucracy and weather. I’m warm. I’m full. I have so much stuff. I have dozens of plans and projects. I have friends. Is that all well and good enough?

I miss thinking of myself as a partner or like I was helping and supporting someone else. It’s not “I want a girlfriend.” It’s that I know the difference between what it feels like to do things for myself and do them for others, especially if I care about them. It’s not that I don’t like helping my guys, but they’re not really my guys, are they? They’re my responsibility, my obligation, but just like every single person who blew smoke up my ass about my efficacy at the methadone clinic, ain’t no one reaching out.

This friend who I only ever very sporadically speak to, and it’s not always clear to me what we’re talking about, said it seemed like it would be a “chore” for me to download shows for her. Like, no, I’m hungry for something like that. I want to help. It’s literally one of my largest preoccupations. You’d be doing me a favor if you needed to see a movie or show. Let me spend a few hours showing you ways to torrent that won’t get your internet cutoff or you catching fines. On my dating profile it says I’m perpetually wanting to please and working on that.

It’s not that my goals are too easy. I don’t have a version of what I need to accomplish that amounts to, “brush teeth, show up, don’t punch supervisor.” So much of my orientation, even projects on the land, were situated around trying to make Allie more comfortable. I’ll shit in a bag and compost or burn it. You want a whole septic system and water upgrades? Okay, let’s hunt for IBC tanks, budget for pumps, spend hours researching, and then…break up shortly after. One more in-progress thing for the board.

Maybe I mean something different now when I talk of “taking over the world” than I have in the past. There was more of a Billions character in my initial utterances. Rich guy doing whatever a rich guy does. Now, I’d like to conceive of myself as a constitutive part to many movements. What if there really is some direct correlation to the amount of good I can squeeze out of a prison environment and my long-term stability or happiness? I do, genuinely, think everything is connected. I don’t dare say I have an appreciation or knowledge of precisely how. If my guys, on average, don’t come back to prison at the same rate under other counselors, we’re still going to be a species of flirty fascists and hate crimes.

There seems to be this disconnect between my power and what it gives me. I want, I’m pretty sure, all the time in the world to fuck off and do my own thing. I want to take a dozen music lessons a week. I want to marathon a show, and then all the shows. I want to travel because I can afford it or more likely because you like to and I want to enable you. I want to have a business that takes the values I’m teaching in class and counseling, and puts them into firehose mode. And yet, still, now 33, all I can do is kind of limp along at either job, new business endeavor that never quite catches, or sketchy-adjacent land project that the wind literally blows over?

A goal is to find better questions. I don’t even know that I expect anything of myself beyond continuing to show up to work. In a different era, in a different person, that would be fair-enough, no? Keep the bills paid, drink a beer, shut up. Find you one of them low self-esteem women who won’t leave you, and cherish your TV time.

I’m just gonna bide my time, keep being a good counselor, get these guitars donated, and keep tracking whether or not I’m on some kind of brink that pretends I have really any fucks for whether or not I keep this or any job for longer than I can stand. I figure shit out, tend to get what I want, and maybe I just don’t want much beyond this level of indulgence, narrative, and effort. I’m just looking for a problem to push against and not finding it. I’d kill to be a fleeing Ukrainian right now.

[957] Hammer Meets Nail

I don’t so much feel like I have a “problem,” per se, as much as I don’t know how to think about the situation. I made a friend. It’s with the, former, coworker I’ve spoken about before who right after we met almost immediately launched into a discussion about her unhealthy and controlling relationship with a married coworker in another department. The conversation kept going, she ended things with the guy, we’ve pretty consistently texted and hung out a few times. She struggles with boundaries, allowing herself time to sit with and process her emotions, and flirts with self-destructive behavior. She’s in recovery for alcohol. We use the term “red flags” a lot, and the kinds she has recognized about her former relationships that she’s committed to no longer ignoring.

We’re both flirts. We’re both funny. You know, it’s a pretty natural like recognizing like kind of connection. Me, though, very cognizant of my ability to attract people with a certain kind of damage, doesn’t want to threaten what could be a long-term friendship with whatever you want to call how my more intimate patterns play out. The ongoing “joke” of our dynamic is that I’m her “not-therapist,” and I’m perfectly willing to maintain a kind of boundary that keeps things at a distance, friendly, and conversational. She’s conveyed her enthusiasm for making out and cuddling. We’ve done neither, but don’t you know, kissing isn’t technically making out. And if I happen to stay too late and feel drowsy, she’s offered I can crash on the couch.

I tend to lean into things that make me happy. I like to share my enthusiasm and tell people if they make me laugh or smile. I have a pretty strong sense of where I am “emotionally,” meaning, when she said, “You can’t fall in love with me,” I struggle not to laugh. Anyone who’s willing to dive into my history knows the thousand hours I’ve abstracted out my concept of “love,” and it’s not going to be some quick and easy elevation or running away of my emotions in movie or novel fashion. I do feel comfortable being “in like” though. I can be bubbly and want to talk and spend as much time just in the presence of those I enjoy as I can get. I’ll never forget Judd Apatow talking about just going to people’s houses he liked, interviewing them, and just staying there well past whatever his subject might have believed about common decorum in how long people hang out.

I could take a “realist” or “pessimistic” or “matter-of-fact” analysis of the situation. What are you doing fucking around with another addict? Why bother developing any kind of relationship, fun-enough or preoccupying as it may be, with someone you know fairly intimately has not had a history of healthy relationships? You’re not even trying to say something bad about her, you’re just relaying what she’s explicitly told you. If you do like her and care about her well-being, are you willing to deal with how you might feel if she hurts herself? You’ve slapped an ex for doing as much. You’ve experienced the slow degradation of your previous relationship where coping with feelings or effectively communicating boundaries never found solid ground. Why do anything but pursue a kind of here-and-there play and mild distraction?

First, writing that just makes me feel very cold, dishonest, and empty. Not dishonest in that any of it isn’t true or is missing something vital, but dishonest for how I wish to view people, myself, or my relationships. I don’t think people are whatever they struggle with anymore than I’m just the shittiest things about me. I want more and new friends. I want their histories and perspectives and I want to broaden my ability to incorporate different dynamics so I’m not so overtly concerned with the minutia of any given one. It’s so easy for me to get in my head and overcomplicate things. I can either desperately search for more people willing to ignore that about me, or I can practice not overthinking and making that their problem.

I struggle with shutting up. I want to know. I want to talk. I want to express. I could allow myself the peace of mind, but it’s gonna start with shutting up. I need to embody that as an active practice more than me feeling like I’m not doing “something” from that vague compulsive place to “do.”

Okay, simple enough. What about my role as “not-therapist” or “friend” with good “boundaries?” Would I not enjoy the simplicity of that distance and being of a certain utility? Sure. Would I like to have an eventual make-out or cuddle buddy? Duh. I’m pretty touchy and affectionate. I enjoy companionship or fooling around. It’s not the driving force. But I think I need to pick a primary hat, and just kinda be happy if anything else accompanies it. My persistent stated goal and desire has been to be a friend. That’s easier to define and feel confident in being when someone is reaching out or sharing with you. In the meantime, little enthusiastic flirt over here just needs to slow down.

I can freely share if she comes to mind for some reason. I can say hi or ask about her day. I can decide I’ve been thinking too much about whether or not to text and just not text. Like I tell my guys, I know that’s probably the best course of action because it’s hard to do. I’m only feeding my anxiety about connection or friendship maintenance otherwise.

It's like, automatically, my body experiences a kind of loss or mourning with that “professional distance” and designated behavior. I’m thinking about how many former friends I just don’t talk to or who stopped responding. It’s pretty clear why I would maintain a strong desire to talk or share my appreciation for their existence and how it makes me feel. Hell, in that it makes me feel *anything* at all is a feat, and always has been. What’s a rephrasing of the same idea? In that I allow myself any emotion beyond guarded skepticism or default mild-dissatisfaction, to me, says something about you at least as much as it does about me.

That’s not to say most people aren’t “good” or “acceptable” or “decent” etc. But it does mean while there are plenty of agreeable, likeable, funny, hard-working, or otherwise friendly people I’ve encountered through work or counseling, there’s almost never an inclination to make that interaction any deeper than the obscene jokes or cordial sharing of stories or moods. I’ve never felt a genuine desire to threaten my job by reaching out to a client outside of work. I’m rarely anticipating my weekend plans well enough to invite or incorporate what is often someone at a considerably different place or stage in their life. Bowling together can be fun, or grabbing wings can prompt some enjoyable conversation, but it only goes so far.

I tell my guys to prepare for what happens when whatever they’re earnestly feeling doesn’t work out or get respected nor reciprocated. A lot of them have done considerably worse things to people over many years than turn those people into blogs or invite discussions on difficult topics. Ironically, I bet those people still want to believe in their addicted loved one in a way that I’m lucky my life isn’t completely devoid of, but has not been the rule. I think I’ve built a physical environment suggesting strongly my preparedness for many proverbial notions of isolation, but I did always envision whatever space I occupied to be kind of like my party house with people in and out all the time. I’m clearly still missing something.

[956] Get Back To Where You Once Belonged

It was a small shift, but it happened and it didn’t feel good. For most of the day, I’ve been pretty content to shift things about in my house, clean up a bit, and think about how I will go about my work day tomorrow. My shows have been running for the last few hours. I’m full. I’m not precisely sleepy. It’s not terribly late. As the next show, Atlanta, began, I immediately did not want to go to work tomorrow. My heart of hearts sprang its “ugly” head.

I’ve also been thinking about my new friend/ex-coworker who I got to hang out with last night. She’s been in the process of unpacking her previous relationships and how they mirror things about her current (seemingly former as of today) situation. He’s about as cliché an insecure controlling hypocrite as any entitled 15-year-old who happens to be 45 and married. She has spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out why he has had the impact on her life and feelings as he had. The logic for having nothing to do with him was in perpetual conflict with how she felt, and how she felt was a complicated series of layers developed over years.

According to her, I’ve been instrumental in helping coax along the decision to finally break things off with him. She said she owed me, to which I assured her all I need is for her to keep being her and stay safe, as she was echoing so many sentiments I’ve heard from the battered-wives-club even if he kept the battering to the emotional type thus far. She’s a great example of someone who has every capacity to do the harrowing work of digging through their mind and building that complicated puzzle, but can astutely also testify to the difficulty and sometimes unwillingness or lack of desire to do so.

I think about my role in the conversations. Unconditional positive regard comes to mind. I don’t talk shit about nor feel negatively towards her for making what might seem like incredibly short-sided or exacerbating moves. I just kept asking questions and for her to define down the rationale behind those moves. I show up when asked to hang out and respond to texts. I played out vocally what my process would be were I writing the blog given the information at hand if it was my life. I apparently frequently echoed her therapist or other people she’s chosen to share with.

I do want to think I’m good at helping coax that process along, but I overwhelmingly believe in people doing their own work. Part of my willingness to buy-in to her process is that I recognized it. I trusted she had one, and I wouldn’t just be spinning my wheels with someone motivated to waste time and self-destruct wish as many people as she could bring down with her. What about people not like that? Is there a way to turn people out who discover a process in spite of themselves? What if the whole notion of “fixing” something about how you speak or think is as foreign to you as another language and cultural norms?

What does this have to do with not wanting to go to work? I’m running a constant informal experiment where I’m seeking a qualitative answer to the questions above while under extreme duress or limitations. I tell my guys all the time, if they learn a coping skill or get into a reflective meditative or writing habit in prison, they learned that shit on “hard mode,” so getting out things should be much easier. If you can meditate in prison, you can do it in a shed or in your car. If you can contend with the cultural norms and keep yourself out of conduct-threatening situations, you can walk away from a fight or difficult person on the street.

But, just like for them, prison is not necessarily the environment to thrive. You can do good things. You can be a genuine help and example. You’re still a cog in several complicated layers of entrenched systematic injustice and norms that, I don’t care how common the cliché is, you don’t fix from the inside. I practice the pieces of what I wish to be in my culture-shaping or culture-attacking system while I’m embedded in them, but I’m not naïve to the extent that they get knee-capped by business as usual and norms I’m financially obligated to uphold.

So with the weight of the world questions about what kind of challenges I need to be taking on swirling in my subconscious, praise for (the acknowledgement alone feels good) a capacity for helping organize the fog of disordered relationship thoughts, and fresh memories of the kind of “freedom” and fun I like to engage in as though they are removed from otherwise responsibilities and contexts, boom, a “fuck work” pang of doubt about the purpose and utility of my being there.

I’m almost certain I’m about to start going door-to-door advertising “consulting” and counseling for $20/hour. It’s less than I make at the prison, but if I just took this - ICK - “gift,” so-named by the neighbor who’s dog we helped retrieve and went on the road like the unlicensed Dr. Phil, Tony Robbins, or these “facilitators” constantly advertised to me on Instagram, maybe I cut out my own little "influencer" space. I have no desire to pretend to be a therapist, but I do want to reach as many people as possible with the tools that have helped me. I’m like a fucking infomercial for the scatter-brained notion of compiling philosophy and lectures into writing with a sprinkle of addiction counseling and hard-won life experience at some of the highest levels of power. Cops can shoot you, but DCS can destroy your family for generations.

I have a kind of psychological habit, I like think it’s wisdom, of downplaying what I might have. If I don’t respect the test to get the certification, why should I be proud of the certification? I consider both my degree and my CADAC II kind-of jokes. I’m not good at talking to people because I know how to answer test questions or memorize a series of facts. I share a title with a messy bitch who thinks I need to write an essay to tell her, “Fuck you.” And the higher up the ladder you go with the letters after your name, you find people in ever-increasing silos of pretension and strange relationships to power and control.

What do I really want? I want to stay up late and binge the 30-odd hours of TV I’ve stockpiled over the last couple weeks. I want considerably more money for doing what I keep seeming to discover I’m good at, but can’t capitalize on in “official” or “respectable” ways to the extent I would like. Do I need a contract or partnership with someone “established” to talk to people? No. I need to nut up and introduce myself to my clientele who don’t yet know I exist. I need to personalize a practice of behavior that I can scale and partner with those who are willing to do the work.

This feels like classic overthinking arresting my otherwise usual gung-ho to jump into the roundabout means by which I get what I want. At the same time, I do worry, given the nature of the industry and task, that I’ll end up running afoul of some of the same powers that have locked me out of certain spaces already. There’s a bit of an awkward conversation in walking the “traveling counselor” line who ensures he reminds you he is not a therapist. The easiest out I have for that discomfort I don’t even want to use. I have my degree, I am state certified, I am an official counselor. I have more than enough “regular” status or power indicators to move in considerably more directions than I feel like I am currently.

I guess I kind of want both. I don’t respect Dr. Phil, I got bored with Tony Robbins in my teens, and whatever you want to say about these Instagram people, I’ve never felt a desire to watch their whole commercial. I like school and knowing shit. I wouldn’t be against getting more licenses and degrees, I just won’t do so if it means debt. I don’t want to come off as someone lazy or cheap providing the back-alley abortion version of a private practice or poor-man’s Tony Robbins. But I really, really want more money and I do seem to help people.

I don’t things to get out of hand. Maybe I find enough vulnerable, but paying, people, and the floor starts to shift on me. I technically have independent accountability at the prison, but in practical terms, you have to maintain your own standards. Maybe that’s where the conflict arises. I’ve psychologically rooted in a “standard” above my current “official” station. I respect doctors and therapists for as many as I can’t stand and absolutely don’t trust. I didn’t start typing in my credentials on my reports until the CADAC II was official. It matters to people reading it. I worry about all of the other things they’ll be reading in me going about my business differently.

I think a lot of it boils down to me not wanting to look or feel foolish and desperate. I’ll talk to a friend indefinitely until they reach a better place, but you’re high if you don’t think I’d love to be paid for it by people I’m not friendly with. I spent a lot of time getting good at DCS. That shit is valuable information that no one is sharing. Is it “dirty” to capitalize on people who are otherwise desperate to understand how to navigate that system? I want to do it for free, but, I don’t. I want the whole system to be under my attack, and I need money and the information I have getting out there in order for that to happen.

Can I say I’m living my values if I’m not experimenting more and iterating upon reaching sudden doubts and pauses when I think about how I’m occupying my time? I’m a “Do everything, do it now, do it anyway” kind of mother fucker. Who am I waiting for? Who’s going to give me permission? Am I just going to all of a sudden start giving too much a fuck what people think? Now? ::tongue deeply entrenched in cheek:: On the precipice of greatness!?

I’m not trying hard enough. The stakes are considerably higher in people’s lives than my vague and remote embarrassment about the lack of letters after my name. A socially-imposed embarrassment that no less conflicts with my very real respect for smart and motivated people who manage to achieve them. I think you can do both. I think you can be useful in the realms generally set aside for egg-heads pretending their capacity for doing homework is tantamount to competence in people engagement. I think I can stay in my lane, and will be talking about what that lane looks like well before some dramatic clash or decline.

I need to stop waiting for something to happen. I start the party, mingle, put the pieces together, build and refine. I create and do shit. That’s all my pitch needs to be for people struggling to do the same.

[955] Choose Your Character

I’m positive there’s something to explore about my experience thus far in the prison. It’s mildly unfortunate I must do so at 10:25 PM before I need to be up at 5.

I appear to be helping people.

Prison is its own kind of culture. It’s like a small town if all of the people from every small town that you were supposed to stay away from got together. It’s not that they are a hoard of violent unrepentant maniacs just waiting for you to drop your guard. It’s that it’s a lot of people who have missed out on what might be considered an entire world of information, support, encouragement, or patience.

Well, I’m almost pathologically disposed to a desire to genuinely help. Not the kind of help that adopts the catchphrases and proceeds to mindlessly follow policy or read from a script. I show up when you call, cover a meal, keep an open door, and listen indefinitely. I seek to genuinely help my thoughts and influence my behavior, and it has provoked habits of speech and reflection I think serve me fairly well.

I reminisce about the absolute pain in the ass of what it has meant to create my living arrangement over the last few years. Even if my goals struggle through merciless circumstance to come to fruition, they serve as living anchors. I know what I want, but only after repeating it a thousand times in blunt and nuanced ways. I know what kind of example I can set, should set, and how it makes me feel if I’m not doing so. I like being the guy who jumps from beater vehicle after beater to the one with a winch to pull his own ass out of the ditch.

Prison, like any small town, is filled with gossip. The word, consistently, from people I don’t even know, is that my guys like me. They think I care. They seem to connect with my form of deliberate challenges to unpack their thinking, refine their goals, and suggest ideas for peeling away the layers of trauma or ignorance that speaks to why they started using. I can dig that.

I don’t know that it’s ironic more than incredibly sad, but the precise means by which I connect with my guys and theoretically imbue this new found investment and intrigue about themselves is how I perceive myself to have been alienated by most people I’ve ever cared about. They didn’t want the challenge or obligation of the work I was offering. They struggled to even spend time hanging out. They stopped commenting, stopped talking, and went wildly in the direction of judgment and caricature to solidify my “out” status.

Several things at once could be happening here, so for the sake of argument, let’s say I’m just a really bad study of my nature and the points to which I’ve drawn meticulous contention over that pissed off a former friend. Perhaps I’m especially bad at reading the words and body language of my clients which any sane or normal person could immediately recognize as dripping with bullshit. Maybe every time I thought I was inviting a conversation, I went blind to all of the “Fuck you, idiot” comments I was making, and it really is on me to not be confused why no one wanted to be around that…

It is one of the most tear-jerking things to read some of what my guys are writing about their lives or their perspective on a class and what they’re hoping for. It’s hard not to be disgusted by the nature of the problems and piety on offer from people I’ve known. It’s hard to think about the opportunities squandered because something vague and distasteful like “discomfort” could placate an otherwise obligation or notional self-respect. How many of your children have died on you? How often were you drinking at 9? How guilty do you still feel about stealing to feed yourself at 12? Can hardly imagine? This shit is routine with my guys.

I think what makes my guys different is that they’re living within visceral consequence. There’s a familiarity, consistency, and camaraderie in prison, but I promise you, no one wants to be there. No one wants to shit in public, be strip searched, fed “passable” food, nor be tucked in a bunk with 150 strangers who may or may not be mentally unwell, violent, or at their breaking point. What that will do is compel your mind to look for anything else to think about or work on. The suffering is right up against your nose. I don’t care how proud or cool you think you are, prison will humble you.

You, though? You’re educated. You’re still cute enough or found your partner and only-quasi-miserable job. Your conversations are about options and indulgences. Whatever existential brink you may be teetering on, it’s as abstract and improbable as a considerably worse plague or asteroid impact. You don’t need to rewire your brain so that triggering moments won’t derail even the memory of stability. You don’t have more painful and regretful memories than positive ones to sort through, drunk parent or medical turmoil notwithstanding. You’re “just you,” with only so much to say. Where would I possibly get off talking to and impressing upon you my so-called ideals?

I was told before I got the job that I would see death. It took 6 weeks and I watched nurses, unsuccessfully, attempt to resuscitate a 37-year-old who died playing basketball. I don’t know how to distinguish my behavior from someone who isn’t constantly thinking about death. The death of those friendships. The death of certain ideals. The death of opportunities and every day that dies for nothing more than what might be desperately extracted from it in trying to deny death. A great many notions of yourself and standing will die after you find yourself incarcerated.

I was willing to attack the worst parts, or at least the most nagging and seemingly pathological and painful parts, of me. That began to fuel my insistence for a certain awareness of “now” and my responsibility to it. I wasn’t going to feel better pining or mourning or sitting and staring and bitching. I was going to build or I wasn’t really going to exist. I was going to invite or I couldn’t expect people to be open. I was going to parse or I wasn’t going to pretend I was so sure of where I was coming from. It’s been a lot of work, physically and mentally. I had a field, now I have a house. I had “friends” and “girlfriends,” now I have clients as primed as they’ll ever be, who are hungry to not end up like me if I’d found solace in substance use instead of writing.

The idea of profoundly influencing someone’s life because I happened to pass on the ideas and habits instilled in me feels empty. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just don’t feel like I own the ideas I’ve read or were raised on anymore than I’m responsible for an offender getting their life together or a former friend distancing themselves. I’m a conduit for what I think is worth building. I guess you can add a brick or go fuck yourself. I don’t believe most people I’ve encountered are really trying their best or wrestling with death in spite of its inevitability. I don’t sense the urgency or obligation. The entitled took their lives for granted before turning ones they envied into something to resent.

The hollow feeling comes from thinking about the people who can’t be bothered to think about how or why people become literal prisoners. You, too, are in a cage. The type of shit you’re taking is on a world stage. Because your charges amount to cultural norms and the collective secretive shame, you’re let off with an indefinite warning. The consequences get to play out in the lives of the most vulnerable. My job isn’t to “plant seeds” and fight the statistical odds for maintaining sobriety. My job is to attack you, larger, uglier, perpetual existential threat that would toss me away as soon as any other inmate. You pre-contemplative gods of ambivalence and laziness hold the heads for my wall.

This is why no “job” or “individual” will ever be enough. I want everyone to feel like they have a shot and to take it seriously. My lifelong experience has been being carried along a fascist wave of sentiments distilled into doomsday clock minutes. We’re a disgusting embarrassment, but not hopeless, and that’s the problem. You hope you’re not as bad as you are. Prison makes it nearly impossible to deny. So, who do you think is really capable of the necessary change?

I see more enthusiasm and attention from these guys every day than I’ve seen from meme-lords over years. You not proud of what you’re doing? You’re not still eager to share? Do you even believe in yourself? I certainly did.

[954] What's That Sound?

I want this to be quick, because it’s incredibly old news. This morning, I was told, “You come off as arrogant and make people feel small.” This was a reactionary comment when I informed my coworker that I had gotten my CADAC II and was relatively displeased with my score. I poo-pooed the idea of getting what I considered a C+ (it’s not even scored that way), and how relatively “easy” and “useless” the study materials were. I conveyed that I would have been beaten for that grade as a kid.

My coworker is an addict, has 10 felonies, openly admits to functionally destroying the foundation of her child’s life, and “worked really hard” for her 500-something score. When she hears me talk, generally, about anything I consider important about my personality, capability, style, or work ethic, she’s annoyed. She questioned my ability to function in a team. She maintains this posture that she’ll tell you “straight up” what she thinks in case no one else can be bothered. She’s also the one who whispered to management about how I smelled.

 

I know she’s vulnerable. I know she feels like she’s walking a precarious line too. What fucks me up is that, again, we’re COUNSELORS. We’re supposed to be good at open and honest communication and practicing what we preach. I wrote a 1-page mini digression hoping to explain to her some of the reasons I have the personality I do. Her response was to tell me, “That was a whole lot of words to tell me ‘fuck you.'"

 

While not exactly an invitation, boy did it feel like one. You could know nothing else about me but my proclivity to say “fuck you.” But, I’m so much worse than that. I’m downright mean. I’m a genuine threat to your continued sobriety if I bury my comments deep in your broken brain. That’s what fucks me up about this. If you genuinely value your place in the world and what you’ve achieved in spite of setbacks, why, on your life, would you provoke someone with the capacity to *accidentally* make you feel small?

 

If you are going to assist me in becoming exceptionally angry, prompt the bodily recall of the trauma of my childhood living environment. Make me feel like I’m walking on eggshells because I can’t trust how you’re going to respond to something. Guilt trip me or accuse me of not thinking about things in the exact manner you think I should be thinking them. Take my earnest effort to relate and make a condescending summary judgment of my being meant to shuffle me away and dismiss the different points or questions I raised. Fluidly contradict yourself while taking a wanton high-minded heavy-handed swipe at your conception of me. Ping, ground floor, let’s ask you if this is exactly the way you convinced your child to become an addict too.

 

Of course, I didn’t ask her that. But, were I less concerned with money or practicing what I preach as a literal counselor, I can, will, and want to. I want to say it with that tone that tells you I don’t care if you live or die, because I’ll mean it that way. I want you to experience those consequences you harp on about, but don’t sincerely attempt to translate to your clients.

 

I get immensely positive feedback from people open and willing to receive what I’m offering. My clients tell me things like, “It seems like you actually care,” “I think it’s amazing you actually get people to engage,” “You talk like us so it’s easier to relate to,”I’ve never had this kind of one-on-one with any of my previous counselors.” Is there always going to be some level of blowing smoke up my ass and flattery with this population? Duh. Can I tell the difference? I’d be an embarrassingly shitty counselor/assessor/teacher if I couldn’t.

 

Thankfully, I’m so aware of my process, that I can experience the elevated blood pressure, the cold dead thousand yard stare, the litany of horrible things I wish to say, and the rush of the idea of burning things down professionally and interpersonally, and feel myself getting bored talking about it, wishing to catch up on my truly stellar lineup of TV shows. The weather is brilliant. I’m hungry. And, yet again, I prove that I occupy rarefied and privileged air in my capacity to not just make you feel small, but reduce you to the unquestionably unstable projection that lies at the heart of your being. That makes me feel pretty big and powerful. When you feel small, consider, you just might be, and not simply because I’m selectively psychopathic or mean. I suspect when I draw your awareness onto that it stings exceedingly more than a pithy “fuck you.”

[953] Last Stop To Nowhereville

Maybe it sounds kind of ridiculous or a weird ask, but I want to work somewhere that I never hear the term “big words.”

In prison, you’re not finding the most educated individuals. I don’t feel a particular way over the obligation to adjust conversation or teaching styles to match the audience. In the event a “big word” gets used around inmates, they’re probably not going to acknowledge that they don’t know what it means and move right along. More often, I hear “big words” from colleagues, who seem perfectly unwilling or unable to open a dictionary or use Google.

 

It's the kind of pet peeve that speaks to my larger existential angst. Why, the fuck, would you not want to know or learn!? Especially when you are in a role that requires a lot of writing, why would you not be interested in constantly building your arsenal in how you convey yourself? When you start to answer the question, the picture is exceptionally bleak. The bar is incredibly low. The “standard” of most work environments is to “do the job” as loosely as you can define or get away with doing it. People have this chip on their shoulder about sounding “too smart” or “book smart.” Somewhere, I know they begrudge the effort it would take to look the word up, let alone take steps to reinforce their memory.

 

I see the “it’s not worth it” attitude everywhere. Why pay attention and proactively engage a problem? Why try when no one expects you to? Why believe, think, read, watch, whatever if there isn’t an ice cream reward or you’re not getting paid enough? I’m learning to appreciate more each day how being the little engine that could with its own locomotive power is practically divine. I don’t have significant and crippling questions as to “why” I do anything, even if I don’t have the most articulated answer. I know how terrible it feels to look or sound like the people around me.

 

Do they feel as miserable as they sound? Did I miss where I would be able to load my mind up with so much hopeless dread and laziness and just carry on like things were great?

 

I’m not even in that deep of a writing mood. But it just keeps hitting me, over and over and over again, that if I’m not occupying my mind in an active way, I’m falling apart. I started feeling unwell after lunch. I’ve ran through study questions for this test I need to take soon. I’ve inched along my spreadsheet and created a group for guitar class. I’m very thankful that the other people in the “office” we share leave early. I get two hours to do literally anything. Yesterday, I cleaned up and rearranged furniture. It was glorious. The day before, I napped for an hour.

 

I’m less tempted to blow up this easy money than I am generally. The temptation is there, and it is real, but I’m not plotting my escape for the short term. I’m in too much debt. Of course, the truck needs help. Of course, there’s a catch in getting reimbursed for these test fees. Of course, there’s hiccups in the amount and timing of my tax refund. Of course, when I start to feel remotely comfortable, hopeful, like I’ve sped something up or finally put in enough time, the universe conspires, and I’m left writing, waiting, and singing the same tune.

 

I’ve got 4 events scheduled for this month. I should have a new, new bowling ball over the weekend. The weather has been more than tolerable. I feel great about the new shirts I bought and my over-spraying cologne and lotion regimen. My Pokemon cards are probably worth a lot of money. I know I’m going to blink and it’s going to be June or July, and with any luck no disasters will strike, and I’ll have a few thousand banked and feeling comfortable about. Who’s to say that we haven’t worked out how to get in with disability or gotten into a new house for renovating by then?

 

I don’t think complaining is a demonstration of a lack of appreciation or accountability. I’m realizing when I might engage in a “bitch fest” there’s a temptation to apologize for it and create one of my little lists of the things going right or to be thankful for. Surely, this is a decent exercise to get into regardless, but it feels a little off to employ it like that. Like when someone says, “It could always be worse!” Sure, but fuck you, this is still bad for bad reasons or could theoretically be addressed if we weren’t hapless pieces of shit. Just because I can use several work hours to play on one of the guitars doesn’t mean that I feel great about some “efficient” personal brownie points laboring under what is otherwise kind of a joke or insult.

 

I haven’t just continued to meander for a while, so let’s begin there. I thought I might be done writing, and then looked around at the next 2 hours of my life I need to spend either doing this, reading more of my Wait But Why article, or pretending to have the dopamine levels that would memorize some flash cards.

 

I’ve thought for a minute that I need a shroom or acid trip. I have shrooms, but I’m worried that the same thing will happen the last time I took them, and I’ll get bored an hour in and be waiting for the trip to end. Something feels like it needs dislodged in my head. I feel like I can easily depict my circumstances in incredibly positive terms with an extremely great outlook. I can then think about that story as it maps against practically anyone who has ever existed, and I’m comfortably in the top 1% of existence.

 

So, why, ever, feel low or down about that? It’s obviously not just about material wealth. I don’t have a deep and intimate bench of people I associate with or friends. I know that a lot of my disappointment comes from the idea relayed at the top. One way or another, most environments aren’t really for me, sentiments regarding my privilege notwithstanding. I’m not polite. I’m not ever content to “just do my job.” I’m not even the kind of person who gives a shit if you tell the boss you think I smell. But I’m forced to care and over-correct because I’ve got a foot in both worlds. I have a reputation to protect regarding things I have little to no emotional investment in for people I can’t begin to respect.

 

That gets exhausting. It’s also exhausting to want really anything out of people. There’s this tension between wanting to have a standard and an expectation, and then needing the wisdom of remaining detached or at a distance. 50% of whether someone does well in recovery is tied to their attachment with a therapist or counselor. People aren’t doing drugs just because addiction is a disease they triggered or caught. People are doing drugs because there’s so few safe and healthy environments from which to get the right kind of signals to survive and live well. If there’s only so many people with the disposition or willingness to get into the field at all, let alone be any good at it, and those numbers are subject to the same statistics relative to the population at large, it’s not a secret why we don’t appear to be making a dent in the ongoing consequences of substance abuse.

 

Like, I work in a prison. I still can’t wrap my head around why. It’s prison. It’s people who’ve done not-so-great to abjectly ridiculous and horrible things just kinda meandering and saying hi. One client got a crazy look in his eye and relayed how he connected with descriptions of psychopaths in a book he was reading yesterday. I’ve connected with those descriptions too yet managed to stay out of prison. There’s a level where of course I’m a person who’s working in a prison. I’m the guy who shows up at strangers’ homes and maybe takes their kids. Prison? Prison, who?

 

So much of my life reduces to my ability to justify or pursue the dollar amount. I think I take lengthy reprieves in between roles so that kind of statement doesn’t become the prevailing narrative I allow myself to adopt. I certainly continued to pursue money between July and January, I just did it in more affordable and creative ways. It’s all trade-offs all the time, right? You can only ever have 2 out of 3 with time, money, or tools. The closest I’ve come to attacking this idea is when I get to working with salvaged material, or spending other people’s money. You know what still costs money? Nails and screws and the tools to shape-up the wood for more than incredibly rough projects.

 

I hate that so much. I hate it sooooo much. Even if I make Costco wages, it’s still more than minimum wage and I don’t have to smell like food. It’s enough money for me to do some things with, and to a greater degree than if I had a rent or mortgage payment. What I’ve learned, is that even if I functionally had double the amount of money a “normal” person would have, I’d still be at least as hindered as I am now. Where should my hope for “the masses” go with that perspective? When I can’t do something, it’s a paycheck or 3 away. So, for you it’s 2 or 6? Plus, you’re carrying more liability, have more social ties, and are probably less of a dramatic cunt prone to acting out.

 

That’s a pretty binary and matter-of-fact reduction, but I think there’s an easily graspable practical truth contained in it. It’s hard even with the leeway and license I’ve given myself. I’d be “nowhere” with children. I’d have swallowed more than a mountain of hopes and dreams if I had to keep a kid alive. Did I mention, I still have not managed to capture some overt health concern or major catastrophe that’s just embedded in my existence? Seriously, where do people find it in them to carry on even as well as they do, let alone what I would foist upon them.

 

Now, tell me how that thought isn’t condescending and the kind of hopeless I can’t stand from other people. Can you do it, or not? Can you try regardless, or not? Are you literally just the basic series of movements and words to keep yourself alive as the sack your genes are carried around in, or are you human, punking those bitch-ass genes no matter how many millennia they think they’ve passed through?

 

I suppose I’m rather adept at responding to feeling bad. I’m still writing, after all. I still eat food I like. I still watch my shows. I still speak to things right up to and before the line that gets me fired. I don’t even know if I “don’t” want to “feel bad.” I want to stay salty and aware of the things that threaten me or my best conception of my identity. And even if it’s not the best, a decent, or “more better” version of someone than I care to bother with generally. Like, I’d fuck with me in life. I’m chill. I’m funny. I do shit. I genuinely invest myself in things people proclaim to need and am self-aware enough to know both where that impulse comes from and how to not let it get the best of me.

 

That surely adds another layer to my plight. That eagerness to please. I really do want to do good and well. I want the living breathing examples set and raging forward. I want the momentum and thing to point to. I want to viciously attack excuses and bring my wildest imagination into the present. I want that so much I think I sometimes make myself sick over it when I approach how to think about it incorrectly. People tell me they get sick at the thought of what people do to their children. I get sick thinking about how I’ve watched the people tasked with responding to what people do to their children.

 

Maybe I’m just greedy. It feels like “my” existence. I’m extremely selfish in wanting an environment that is “generally safe” by treating it with the deference and respect it deserves. You know how to not get stabbed in prison? Make friends. What if all your friends are shit and help create the conditions that you might get stabbed? Look, do you want the paycheck or not? Corrections officers antagonize. One counselor is particularly incredibly rude and yelling at people on the day she goes to the dorm. If a fight breaks out, you know who has the pepper spray and radios and is rushing to help? The same people who get the job deliberately to fuck with inmates. You know who you’re sitting down to lunch with every day? The “counselor” who meant to fill out the C/O application.

 

I don’t think it’s naïve to keep the idea close that each day can come with a new opportunity or surprise. I didn’t know when I started in January that I’d have the opportunity to feel bad about a new work friend transferring. Perhaps, if I came to this environment for nothing else, when I leave, I’ll have someone I can reach out to who will actually play a sport with me. Would you trade 30 days of your life for about $4500 and potential longer-term friend? I got a few friends from DCS, and that took 2 years.

 

Maybe I don’t have the phrasing, but I think it’s dumb to not expect things from people. I think people expect literally my entire life, at some perverse level, under capitalism and subservient role-playing in professionally ambivalent domains. You expect me to smell good, look a certain way, and follow an endlessly shifting set of rules implemented imprecisely if not arbitrarily. I need to get up, continually assess and orient, stay out of prison, stay sober, up on my notes, keep the taxes paid and on the right side of the yellow line. It’s not out-and-out unreasonable to have expectations, and I’m okay with constantly navigating the grey areas of what constitutes harm.

 

I don’t think those who should be expecting more from themselves bother to, and that is what translates into the low expectations “generally.” You find the happy little line you think matches the effort you’re capable of or the world deserves, full stop. After that, whatever will be will be. You can’t be bothered to take the risk. You aren’t obligated to look up the goddamn word in the dictionary because you’ve made a clear and conscious choice to not associate with people who use such contemptible big words. Why does my anger and anxiety always tie back to the examples I’m watching get set? I don’t have unreasonable expectations for drug-addled and ignorant convicts. I HAVE FUCKING EXPECTATIONS FOR THE ASSHOLES IN CHARGE OF COMMUNICATING TO THEM.

 

Is that okay for me to do? Is that my fundamental misstep I should make peace with never happening in the way I’d like? Should I be working to “give up” thinking you should be prepared for class, personalize treatment plans, answer direct questions with direct answers, follow-up in a timely way, explain poor antagonistic policy and reasoning, implement a training plan, or just generally shut the fuck up about things you’re unwilling or unable to enforce? That’s a lot at once and maybe not answerable as a whole, but what would I be asserting, what example would I be accepting, if I just rolled with that?

 

A line from a lecture series I’m half-rewatching sticks out. Piaget was a great scientist because he asked if there was a pattern in the data that was previously thrown out regarding childhood development. I see patterns in the excuses people make for not doing “more” or their “best.” The same shit that can’t be bothered to keep an appointment with me is the same shit that pushes my “training” indefinitely. The shitty lashing out responses I get to my questions or proactive approach is the same insecurity that functionally begs me to be “patient” and “forgiving” for persistent disrespect. What we’re willing to reflexively and colloquially throw away as someone’s bad day or quirk I suspect is much darker. I think it’s an in-built unacknowledged and unaddressed (often) self-destructive capacity. I think my existence triggers people to pay attention to it.

 

When I do something well, it shines a light on what they don’t. I don’t even have to speak to it. If I pop up and rush to the dorms to meet my new people, you, who hasn’t been to the dorm in a week, “hates me.” You think about how stressful your life is at home and how unfair it is what has been asked of you this week. You don’t grant me the license and humanity to think the exact same things as you, and then I go to the dorm.

 

When I behave my values, it shines a light on how you maybe don’t stand as upright in service to yours as you think. I speak my mind, in increasingly respectful and tactful ways as I get older. You’re the “honest” one in your group or family? Cool. I bet you’ll whisper to the boss before you bring your grievance to whom it’s with. (Holy fuck did I call this one.)

 

I don’t even have to particularly excel at what I’m doing, and it garners the same attitude and responses. The bar is incredibly low, remember. Basic competence, answering the phone, taking the half hour to input notes, take attendance, respond to the email, will make you look like you’re something new, worthwhile, and different. And, you are.

 

In lieu of doing those things, you can talk a lot. You can make a lot of promises. You can elevate every level of drama in your life to occupy every waking moment of your thought process because you don’t have a cogent value or goal to cut through the noise and orient your obligations. You can make an in/formal enemy of people like me. You can get passive aggressive and snippy where I might otherwise be attempting to exist as politely as the circumstances will allow.

 

I’m caught in this cycle of bullshit and drama. This must speak to why I’ve felt an increase in tension and been mildly clench-y the last few days. I’ve lost before I’ve begun because my existence is the problem. The way I engage with the world evokes predictable responses. I’m not addicted to the abuse, but in my life still costing money, I’m thrust into these unhealthy cycles and interactions seemingly indefinitely. My default environment is as sick as if everyone in my life was using drugs, and I wished, irrepressibly genuinely, to stay sober. My biology wants to be bonded and feel safe and accept people “where they are” so I might otherwise focus on the things trying to kill me; but I feel like the people I am around are constantly trying to kill me. And in ever-ubiquitous irony, they feel like I’m trying to kill them too.

 

They’re right.

 

If they’re balls of shitty excuses, laziness, and deliberately employed helplessness, I want that dead. If they’re ambivalent to the consequences of their behavior, kill that mother fucker too. If they’re in denial of how deeply they resent that I’ve managed to scrape together a semblance of the life and behaviors I think lend themselves to the best kind of existence, send that shit to hell, bring it back to piss on it, then send it on down again.

 

A prisoner, let’s call him Mr. Helper, relayed a story about how much he’s “called to help.” Another inmate was stumbling around, likely intoxicated. This inmate said he went up to him and asked if there was something he could do. Mr. Helper, citing his deference to God and his good nature then relayed he wasn’t sure if this other inmate would lash out, but if he did, he’d respond by incapacitating him. He won’t let himself be attacked or violated, you know, as a man merely defending himself. The story was a long meander avoiding an explicit discussion about both gentlemen’s relative gang affiliations and sticking noses in where they don’t belong. Jesus isn’t telling you to invite potentially physical altercations into your life.

 

Which God are you relying on to justify your desire kill and call it self-defense? What gang dances you around like a puppet? Plenty of people have hit me who I have not hit back, and I’m not as big as Mr. Helper. I don’t need to hide from how good it has felt to be invigorated by rage. I own what I’m capable of. When you don’t, I’m a threat. I don’t need to interject myself into your life and look for a reason for swinging. I appear fated to be trapped in your respective mental prisons as you wait for a sign on how to take me down. I see this shit EVERYWHERE. I’m told your God is everywhere. Good fucking luck, God. 

 

I’m coming for you.