Saving words for making sense

Oh man, what a five months.  Defended and delivered a completed dissertation (that's Dr. Topher now, for whatever that's worth), moved to yet another state (third state I've moved to in nine years), and started a new job.  Phew.  Did you know I wrote a book this year?  Honest to goodness.  Me.  I can do words.  

I've known stress in my life, but this was something else altogether.  The biggest challenge since its submission has been returning to a stable mental state.  I love what I do, no question, but the amount of strain that it put on my emotional state is unparalleled. There were major events that I've not been able to process.  I've barely reconciled the fact that I've aged six years in this time and am no longer in my early 30s.  The only thing that served as a reprieve from my work is the news and lord knows how that's going.

Part of graduating is just decompressing, taking a big breath, and letting my brain return to an active stimuli-response functionality.  Slowly, I've been able to return to allowing myself access to some emotional release that I've had to brush aside for a while.  The other day at work, listening to music became an adventure through nostalgia.  Every single song triggered a memory of some event, some person, some setting that I hadn't had room to think about for years.  I started listening to a lot of Jason Molina, but also punk bands from childhood.  Hell, New Order's 'Regret' nearly had me in tears.  I remembered sitting in my childhood bedroom, with my crap-ass stereo, hearing that song on the radio in the early 90s.  Warm room, summer sun beams and lazy weekend days.  Before everything got all complicated.

Thing is, what I would love to do is reclaim the emotionality and innocence apart from all this heightened anxiety I've been battling for years.  Trying to take weekends.  Work on hobbies.  Exercise.  Eat right.  Be a good partner and friend.  Feed the birds.  Take walks.  Get a fishing pole.  Go to restaurants.  Enjoy life.  Go slow.

Again, it's not that my graduate experience was awful.  No, it was fantastic.  It was also emotionally exhausting and mentally devastating.  The point of such programs isn't just to teach you new things, it's to develop you into a different kind of thinker.  That's a massive neurological endeavor.  I've always been sciency, but now every question gets turned into measurement, into distributions and likelihoods, relative to its impact on long-term outcomes, judiciously socially just and epistemologically and ontologically questionable.

It takes a lot out of a brain to put that much into it.  But it's all in there.  Or, at least, the pathways for getting it in there are developed.  The trepanation is completed and now I can bask in the warmth of my brain fluids.

Yeah, see?  Now it's time to think like this again.

I'm going to go and listen to all the music now.

(Oh, and because I didn't make it explicit, this album is one of the few that would help to calm me down during points of stress.  Their music is like sunbeams in the forest.  More on this later.)

"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

I haven't posted since the election, because I keep waiting for some profound idea to come to my head, but I'm still just stumbling about and trying to evolve coherent thoughts.  Clearly, I'm enraged and saddened.  I'm confused and scared to a point that it has truly impacted my mental health.  That's pretty incredible, right?  From an election?  I'm an anxious, avoidant guy, there's no doubt about that, but this has impacted my perception of reality.  I'm terrified for all my friends and for billions I don't know.  Are my friends going to find themselves un-married one day?  Did Trump just reignite the ire of India about Pakistan?  And China about Taiwan?  Is my Taiwanese friend now stuck in a mess because Teflon Don can't help but middle finger China?  Are we going to have a bathroom bill nationwide?  Is California's smog coming back?  Are we going to fuck public schools up forever because rich people like rich schools but don't want to pay for them?

I'm terrified for myself, too, since I'm some sort of scientist and I rely on federal research dollars to figure out ways to stop locking up minorities and poor children.  Gee, I wonder how that'll work in a "law and order" society.  Not well, I imagine.


I think the end result from all of this is that I am again reminded of why I'm in social work.  Social work is about resistance.  It's about ethical fortitude and social justice.  Community-building and unification.  It's a values-based discipline that represents and supports the underrepresented and the disenfranchised.  And since that's going to be a solid 40% of the country in 6 weeks, it's important that social workers unite to start and lead movements and to prop up those who are most affected.

As a kid, I was rebellious and angry and I wanted to "fight the system," although, you know, I was 14 and couldn't clearly explicate what "the system" was or why it made me angry.  But, I knew some people were not treated fairly.  Some people had it harder than others, some were not treated as people at all, and that there were structural reasons for this was inherently wrong..  I had it ok in some ways, hard in others, but I knew I had to help people with whatever privilege I was given or earned.  What good is being human if not to help other humans?  To leave the world in a better place than it was provided?  It's what brought me to social work, which I'm now convinced is the progenitor of punk rock.  Exposing power structures, DIYing the hell out of everything, breaking down barriers and forming a community of inclusion. On top of it, we will kick in your door and save your children from whatever horrific shit you're doing to them.  We will save you from yourself.


This new leadership feels like it's going to bleed into every aspect of life I've ever taken for granted as "normal."  We became complacent, assuming the world was progressing slowly, but surely.  That's now in jeopardy.  We will see new barriers, new oppression, new dangers to people's lives, in addition to a resurgence of the old ones.

It's time that we Jane Addams the fuck out of this country.  It's time we kick complacency in the shins, unite, and undo the wrongs we see around us.

We can laugh about 2016 being a dumpster fire or whatever, but I'm putting it out here now that 2017 is on notice.  It's time we secure the good for all of us.  And if 2017 pulls any of the bullshit we've seen this year, we're going to have to fuck it up.