Mama said, mama said...

Well alright it isn't quite that kind of day. I'm hesitating here for a minute about embedding a video that makes light of suicide on a social work blog except...I actually sometimes wish suicide could be taken out of its box of "things that can't be discussed without reaching for the batphone" because (huh this is so not at all where this entry was going to go) I believe the idea of having an escape and being fully in control of whether to go through with This Whole Thing can be a consoling thought for people who are truly unhappy.

The fact that we have to start immediately thinking about hospitalization if someone even mentions it is...understandable, because something un-undoable might be about to happen when it's mentioned. But it's a shame not to be able to let someone talk about it. I'm pretty sure some of the time something real would be gained. I'm certainly glad of my ability with certain friends in times of real misery to vent, albeit in a flippant, joking-about-going-for-the-window way, about the galling, burdensome nature of people's expectations that we will necessarily go on being.

But again, I have just perfected the art of the self-directed thread hijack. I was just going to post about it being one of those days where the idea of doing my job is really galling, I think because I was just reading at A Basement about the whole notion of not wanting to work. I've been having a lot of days lately where the only thing in my head is escape fantasies, to the point where I hardly get a thing done all day.

When I was in private supervision we would talk about this and my supervisor would say, and I always thought this was a good mix of funny and perceptive, "should we be talking about the fact that you want to be fired?" It was only helpful to an extent, of course, because I quickly acknowledged that dragging my feet at work was a self-sabotaging habit based in the...let's for now say unconscious desire not to have to work.

Unconscious is an odd concept because really I was very much aware of it, but it existed in that inconvenient space between awareness and the ability to do anything about it. I have never known exactly what bridges that gap, though the orthodox answer in analytic terms would be, I expect, "working through." And maybe this is so. Maybe if I could lie on the couch and really look at the factors present (compassion fatigue, half-assed conviction about what I do, etc) and past (oh, you know...family of origin bullshit about care->ego-strength->a lesser tendency toward repetition compulsion or something) I could do what most people seem to do, which is make a to-do list and then do it. But then maybe I idealize Most People and lots of people go through this song and dance.

For fun, I'll tell you my worst escape fantasy, worst in that it betrays a lot of consciously rejected hostility-by-way-of-fallacy toward the people I am supposed to be helping. So please do take it with a grain of salt: fantasy meaning "thing that pops into my head no matter my moral and intellectual objections."* It goes like this:

I stop doing my work. I am fired. In the fantasy this doesn't take the endless aeons it would take in my union job. I have a decadent month and then run out of money. My parents do not come to the rescue which, in real life, they would if I fell apart. I lose my house. (Fantasies do not have to be wholly about things you would ever want to happen.) I get SSI unless I mean SSDI for mental health and I move into public housing. (Ok the fantasy stays enough in the realm of the desirable that I don't have to go through the shelters and the rest of that nightmare.)

The rest is hazier as it must be. In any real detail it ceases to function as a fantasy, even with caveats ("yeah but never having to set an alarm again might outweigh not getting to spend money on the fun things I enjoy now.") But in its liminal form, with my conscious objections shelved in the corner, it gets me through a thing or two, sometimes.

Now let's see if that's enough working-through to get me through one report that's taunting me.


*Because really, I think I have a little more the filter for these things that an obsessive person has than, again, my imaginary normal happy person. I have unbidden thoughts very frequently, some of them really objectionable. I recognize them as detritus, the consequence of having the mind Freud tells me I have, which I believe I do. If I thought I had to act on my thoughts, as I understand people with crippling obsessions do, I'd be paralyzed.