This week I talk about one of my pet peeve turns of phrase. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I won’t reiterate my take on it here, because I already discussed it in the vlog (which you should totally go watch, plug plug). Instead, let me turn my attention to a very different one that is still related. “The fix is in.”
This is a sports term. It has to do with the outcome of a contest being ‘fixed’ or rigged. And in the context of those contests, and any betting associated with it, it’s a bad thing. But let’s think about it in terms of storytelling. A fictional tale always has a fixed ending. While characters grow and change, their arcs are also fixed, at least in terms of their anchors throughout the tale. Authors set their characters up for either success or failure, pretty much from the beginning.
I think, as individuals, we owe it to ourselves to set ourselves up, too.
Setting yourself up for success takes a conscious effort. It’s an idea I’ve heard more and more about as I’ve worked as a barista. Beans, pitchers of milk, sleeves for cups – these are all things that can be stocked or prepared to make future work easy for co-workers. As individuals, we can, and probably should, sort our thoughts, emotions, and internal processes into helpful patterns. This takes time, and often external help, but it’s setting ourselves up for success. It’s putting in the fix. It’s giving you a sure thing on which to bet – yourself.
The alternative is setting yourself up for failure.
I don’t necessarily mean failure in an immediate, dramatic sense. Failing yourself doesn’t always take a catastrophic form. In some cases, failure is a state of being. It’s not a failure in acting, it’s a failure to act. If we do not challenge ourselves to change, to look at ourselves as complex beings and seek improvement as well as the correction of mistakes, we fail ourselves. It requires honesty. It requires being proactive. It requires deep breaths, introspection, and more than a couple hard conversations. Where did I go wrong? What mistakes did I make? How did my failures come across to others? Can I make amends? Will I be able to learn from my downfalls, rather than repeating them?
Are you up for it? Are you willing to take an active role in your own progress towards a better version of yourself?
Can you make yourself a sure thing for yourself and others to bet on?
We hear all sorts of voices every day. None are more pervasive and frightening than those that come from within. They can amplify what we hear from others, or contradict the good things we’re told, or even drown out support and reinforcement from people we care about. There are two very important skills that I feel one needs to learn in order to overcome these distractions and potential downfalls: learn to listen to the right voices, and have the agency to listen to our own, true voice.
As I maintain in this week’s vlog, our feelings, and the voices that emerge from them, are not invalid. They do come from honest places, even if they are places we do not recognize or want to acknowledge within us. The Shadow contains all sorts of things – fears, ambitions, instincts, hatreds, doubts, etc – and it is up to our conscious mind to evaluate those things and parse the useful and constructive from the antiquated, the superfluous, or the ridiculous. You see, ‘valid’ and ‘useful’ are not the same thing. It’s a valid want to plop oneself down on the couch and flip on a glowing screen for hours, but how useful is that when there is work to be done? Granted, some time lost in mindless entertainment can be useful for self-care, but so can a minor chore like washing dishes or sorting out laundry, and those have the advantage of organizing our lives and allowing more space for focused self-care.
The point is, the voices we struggle to live with and understand are valid, necessary parts of our psyches. I use the visceral imagery of “Josh-that-was” to place my previous, short-sighted, self-deceptive, and ultimately ruinous behavior in a category of useless, old, and broken thoughts. While I myself may not be “broken” or “crazy”, the fact is that things did break in the course of Josh-that-was doing what it did. My heart, the hearts of others, the trust of others, and so many other things that haunt me and pain me to this day, and may do so for the rest of my life. I may never make it right. I may never get closure. And I have to accept that as a possibility. The price of the actions of Josh-that-was. The punishment for those acts. The scars left behind on my soul.
Ugh. This is getting maudlin. Back to my point.
If we can manage to look forward, towards a better version of ourselves that is worth working towards, we can better determine which of the voices we hear every day support and build upon that goal, and which ones hold us back. This is not to say that such voices do not have their uses. Self-correction is an essential part of the growth process. Without it, we can slip into the stream of our own bullshit without realizing it, and start bathing in it before we know what’s going on. We have to be aware of our potential downfalls and incoming hazards. We have to grasp our emotional and mental demons and wrestle them to the ground. We have to imagine ourselves as complexly as we do others, see our flaws for what they are, and figure out how best to overcome, integrate, or work around them.
We must, indeed, check ourselves before we wreck ourselves.
And that means, knowing which of our voices are worth listening to.
For example, I could listen to the voices telling me to delve into the Internet at the dark hours of the night, when other, more insidious ones drag me towards a past I am working so hard to move away from. They encourage me to look into the lives of those with whom I’ve lost contact. I know, in my rational mind, that this sort of thing always leaves me feeling depressed, lonely, and thoroughly angry at the supidity of the actions of Josh-that-was. I still feel the impulse to click, to read, to scroll. It’s very difficult to shout down that voice. But it isn’t useful. It isn’t constructive. It teaches me nothing new, it lends me no strength or courage, and I ultimately have better things to do with my time and energy.
This sort of thing is tiring. Have you ever shouted or sang or cried until your throat hurt? Imagine that process within your own mind. Sometimes you have to shout to let your voice be heard. You have to sing at the top of your metaphorical lungs even if nobody is listening – some would say, especially if nobody is listening. It’s the best way, sometimes the only way, to keep ourselves in check and on a path to positive, constructive growth. Over the last few months I’ve metaphorically shouted myself raw at times to make sure I am taking steps away from what I was. It’s the only way I know to keep myself on this path. By myself. For myself.
Even when it hurts, much like exercise or growth, we have to listen to the right voice. We have to focus on the ones from within us that want us to succeed. It can take effort, and time, and leave you exhausted and worn out. But it’s something we all have to learn. If we want to grow into the people we’ve seen ourselves as being, the people we deserve to be, and the people around us deserve to be with, we have to learn to listen for those right voices.
Not because they are strange things, or because I don’t understand them. I do. I know consent is a vital, essential thing, and you cannot and should not cross into someone else’s comfort zone without that consent. When you do, apologize and back out. At least, if the offended party tells you directly. They may take other action if they feel deeply uncomfortable or threatened. Or simply slam the metaphorical door in your face. And that’s fine. At the end of the day, we must take care of ourselves on an individual, internal level. And that can mean avoiding the external to whatever degree we must to maintain or reinforce our comfort zones.
All of that is comprehensive and understandable to me. It doesn’t make me uncomfortable.
My relationship with me, my own comfort zone, and how it’s interacted with others… those things do.
Josh has been one of those people who’s stumbled headlong into someone else’s comfort zone, crashing through a wall Kool-Aid man style if the Kool-Aid man was a well-meaning but ultimately destructive doofus. That’s probably the kindest I’ve been to Josh when regarding his mistakes. I do feel that, for the most part, his heart was in the right place, at least most of the time. While it doesn’t change the fact that Josh made bad decisions regarding getting along with other people, trying to imagine him complexly helps me not want to dig up his corpse and shoot him again.
The othering of my past self is something I’ve been working on. The more I change, the more I examine myself, the more I become acquainted with everything inside of me from my Shadow to my action matching intention to (I’m getting to it) my comfort zone, the more I feel the distance between who I am now, and what I was before. And because of my actions, because of the influence and insight of those I love, because of my stubborn refusal to swim in my own fucking bullshit for one second longer, that past self, that Josh, is a thing. A corpse. A creature, an individual, that I kicked to its knees, shot twice in the head, and buried in an unmarked grave out back. Josh-that-was. He is no more.
I am very uncomfortable referring to who I was and what I did before in the first person. It fucks with my comfort zone.
When I catch myself doing it, some of the emotional creatures – the “head weasels” that appeared regularly in Innercom Chatter (which I really need to get back to doing) – start crying out more loudly. Anxiety, contrition, depression, and anger all claw and squeal for my attention, to buy into whatever it is they’re selling. The idea that I have not changed. The idea that I still need to be punished further for what Josh-that-was did. The idea that sustainable happiness, sustainable Relationships, sustainable peace, are things I will never truly know. The idea that I should just get out of the sight of everyone I know before I do something else fucking stupid.
These feelings, not invalid, come from honest places, deep and dark ones. I do my utmost to not act on them, as those actions would have consequences, while the feelings themselves do not. I keep telling myself that.
I worry that’s more of my own bullshit talking.
Then I remember that just admitting that I have these fears, these worries, in a broadcast as loud as I can make it to anyone willing to listen places me apart from a lot of people. I’m focused on the path in front of me, the one I walk by myself. I have people in my corner, as well as their own corners, shouting support as loud as they can to make sure I can hear. And I shout it to myself. Sometimes in a whisper, sometimes at the top of my voice. Whatever I need, when I need it, however I need it.
Sure, I’ll have moments of discomfort. I’ll have bad moments where I lose sight of my goal. I’ll stumble and pinwheel my arms to keep myself from falling into that threatening but inviting stream of flowing self-deceptive antiquated childish bullshit that still runs beneath all I’ve worked to build within myself.
But this is within my comfort zone. This is something I can and will control. I will continue to be honest, clearly and immediately and consistently honest, growing and nurturing the things that matter to me, reaching out to those I love, and making damn sure my footing on my path is certain and that, at the end of the day, I love myself like my life depends on it.
For someone who no longer has the impulse to commit suicide, I think about it quite a bit.
It’s a feeling. I talked about feelings earlier this week. I know that my suicidal thoughts, and the attached feelings, are not invalid. I have no intention of acting upon them, so there are no real consequences to me having them in and of themselves. But I am going to write about them, and try to unpack this tangled mess in my head when I ask myself questions like:
“Why is it worth the pain and struggle to get up every morning?”
“What, if anything, do I really bring to the world around me?”
“Who in their right mind would want to give me their time, let alone trust or affection, when they see me as I am, now, and know all I was and all I’ve done?”
Especially in light of losing so much that was so important to me, through my own ignorance, impulsiveness, self-deception, and lack of cognitive wherewithal, I have a hard time considering myself a worthwhile human being. I fight every day to hold on to some semblance of self-worth, some notion that later today or maybe tomorrow will be better, and some days are easier than others. I try to focus on good moments, rather than bad ones.
And, as I have so many times before, I fail miserably and spectacularly.
I don’t even fail in half-measures. I either prevail or crash and burn in absolutely breathtaking fashion.
I’ve never attempted suicide. I’ve put myself in the care of medical professionals when I reach that brink. I rarely call a crisis hotline. 9-1-1 is my go-to “I need real help, no really, right the fuck now” number. Because I would rather face my demons head-on even if their horns are going to gouge out my idiot brain, than just give up. And if I ever did give up, I’d do the job right. I’d go somewhere nobody has to clean up after my mess and just disappear from your lives. And some people out there, my badbrain tells me, would be glad for it. Sighs of relief would be breathed.
“Good riddance,” they would say. “That guy made me so uncomfortable/angry/sad. I’m glad he’s dead.”
I don’t think the people I know are actually like that. But my brain won’t shut up about such sentiments.
If there is a God, and I was made this way for some esoteric and inscrutable “higher purpose”, I want to speak to someone in charge about this defective product. It’s really irritating.
Rather than the above maudlin badbrain idiocy, I think a lot of people would just exhale and shake their heads.
“His heart was in the right place.”
At least, I’d like to think it is. It has not ever been, nor will it ever be, my intention to just grab whatever it is I want, and to the hells what other people need. I tend to go in the opposite direction. The more I’m pushed, the more I go out of my way to satisfy other people’s needs. To the hells with my needs, self-care, or any of that stuff. Other people first. Their safety, their comfort, their desires come first. That is the way I’ve been wired since I was young.
So the thought of someone feeling unsafe or uncomfortable or having their needs unmet because of something I’ve done really fucking burns me up inside.
The feelings of the offended are not invalid. They had the right to take action. Those actions had consequences. I felt the full brunt of them. I will go on feeling them for a long time. Nevertheless, I have no desire to demonize the offended, or blame what has happened to me on them. Again – their feelings are not invalid.
Neither are mine.
All I’m doing with them is screaming into the void. It doesn’t really matter who, if anyone, is listening.
The head weasels, of course, want to know if there’s more I can do to punish myself.
Because it isn’t enough that I am left physically intact by this. They say more is required. Justice is still undone, they say. My freedom is unearned, they say. I should not have the freedom to do whatever I want, to grow in the ways I need to grow, to see another beautiful sight when I’ve done so many ugly things.
“You do not deserve your life,” they say. “You’ve wasted it. And there is no point denying that or letting it go one more day.”
At the very least, they inspire me to think: I should harm myself in some way. Castrate myself. Flagellate myself nightly. Form a celice out of wire and nails. Scar myself.
I want tattoos but cannot afford them.
I guess that will be the ultimate expression of all of this frustration and anger and pain and grief in my lifetime. Willingly allowing my flesh to get marked in a permanent way that, from what I understand, hurts in various ways depending on where it happens.
As I said, I doubt I’ll stop feeling these things any time soon. And as much as I may feel like dying in a given moment or on a given day, I think I trust my mind enough to not push me into doing something awfully stupid with dire and irrevocable consequences for my family and friends. I try to remind myself that I’m allowed to have feelings. Even if I feel like dying. I will not act on that particular feeling.
I will, instead, pack another few pinches of pipe tobacco into my pipe’s bowl.
I’ll pour myself another drink.
Maybe find something edible to enjoy.
I will wait.
And when Death finally arrives, I will toast their entry, greet them as an old friend, and wonder what the hells took them so long.
Spoiler
I’m gonna need someone to help me
I’m gonna need somebody’s hand
I’m gonna need someone to hold me down
I’m gonna need someone to care
I’m gonna writhe and shake my body
I’ll start pulling out my hair I’m going to cover myself with the ashes of you and nobody’s gonna give a damn.
Son of a bitch
Give me a drink
One more night
This can’t be me
Son of a bitch
If I can’t get clean
I’m gonna drink my life away
Now for seventeen years I’ve been throwing them back
Seventeen more will bury me Can somebody please just tie me down
Or somebody give me a goddamn drink
Son of a bitch
Give me a drink
One more night
This can’t be me
Son of a bitch
If I can’t get clean
I’m gonna drink my life away
My heart was breaking, hands are shaking, bugs are crawling all over me
My heart was breaking, hands are shaking, bugs are crawling all over me
My heart was breaking, hands are shaking, bugs are crawling all over me My heart is breaking, hands are shaking, bugs are crawling all over me
Son of a bitch
Give me a drink
One more night
This can’t be me
Son of a bitch
If I can’t get clean
I’m gonna drink my life away
Son of a bitch
Give me a drink
Son of a bitch
This can’t be me
Son of a bitch
If I can’t get clean
I’m gonna drink my life away
For the purposes of this piece, the ‘shadow’ I refer to is not the Jungian concept of the ‘Shadow’ unconscious self, but rather the way others perceive us when we are not directly interacting with them. Just to be clear.
As inherently social beings, we meet other people on a regular basis. And like it or not, the more time we spend around those people, the more we influence them. It could be helping them see our point of view, pushing their boundaries, or introducing new things to their lives. Whatever it is, it leaves a part of us behind, like our shadow falling across the land we traverse with the light behind us.
Those shadows can be longer than we imagine.
It makes it all the more important to be careful of what we say and how we present ourselves. While there is no doubt in my mind that we accomplish far more with honesty than we do with deception, we must also do our utmost to be kind. Being polite and choosing one’s words is not the same as engaging in a lie. And while some situations do warrant direct, blunt, or even harsh language, it cannot be denied that such moments can change the shade and shape of one’s shadow. It can grow longer, falling over those we’ve encountered, lingering over those we leave behind, coloring their view of us and perhaps the world forever.
And, of course, shadows themselves make no sound. Shadows are silent.
The more we communicate, with individuals and with the world around us, the more our shadows take shape. That shape is what remains behind when that communication stops. And even if our intentions were good, or came from a place within us that craves peace and safety and affection, the shadow’s shape can be or become something entirely different the longer the silence lasts. This is why the dearly departed are often seen through rose-colored glasses, or even placed on pedestals: they no longer can show us who they really are, or who they were trying to be. All we have left is how we saw them, how we heard them, how we loved (or hated) them.
The idea that people don’t change come from those shadows, and from that silence.
It is easy to imagine that someone who has hurt us or crossed a line cannot or will not change, because when we part ways with them, we only take their shadows. They, as individuals, live on and (hopefully) grow and change. Some, yes, will wallow in whatever mire caused us to break with them in the first place, but others struggle, strive, and attempt to make themselves and the world around them better. The only way we can know for sure, either way, is to have some form of communication with them. To allow their words and actions to change the shape of the shadow they have cast upon us.
If the person in question was unashamedly toxic or deliberately abusive or worse, then yes, the silence is best. I am not saying to engage in communication that is unhealthy for you.
What I am trying to say is this: we cannot remain silent out of fear and pretend the shadows upon us do not exist.
This is the power of communication, community, and therapy. It can change those shadows. We can see the other in different light, attempt to understand them, and overcome a number of negative emotions or obstacles to our own growth. This can be a frightening prospect. Making the effort to change oneself, and imagining the other complexly, challenges our view of the world and forces us to admit to our imperfections, as well as seeing others, potentially those who have hurt us or done us wrong, not as monsters of shadow, but human beings. Flawed human beings, to be certain, but no less beautiful or worthwhile for their imperfections than we are.
That fear of change can be powerful. It can actually encourage our silence. I discussed this in this week’s vlog. And here, as there, I heartily encourage you to break that silence. Talk. Discuss with someone you trust or a group that supports you the shape and shade of a shadow that falls across your life. You might see the light shifting to change that shadow. That change, that discovery, is a vector for growth, and while we yet live, we owe it to ourselves to seek that growth.
Stagnation is slow death. The dead do not change. Within our silence, there is a void, an emptiness that indicates a lack of growth. It is quiet in its comfort but insidious in its true nature.
It really is like a cancer.
And either it will grow, or you will.
The choice is yours.
Spoiler
Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left it’s seeds while I was sleeping And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains within the sound of silence
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed
By the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs
That voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
“Fools” said I, “you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon God they made
And the sign flashed out it’s warning
And the words that it was forming
And the sign said “The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls”
And whispered in the sound of silence
