Broken

Ha! So, I am looking for work. I really must create additional income for my family. The pressure to do so is taking a serious toll on the climate in my home and there’s so much more I could whine and complain about when it comes to this topic, but if I don’t comply and get a job, my family will likely fall apart. (I believe getting a job may just be the impetus that breaks us, but the other way—where I stay home and try to be the culture keeper of a culture my family rejects while our financial resources continue to diminish—is definitely not working.)

If you’ve been in the job market lately, you know securing a position is a crazy hard task, requiring considerable hoop jumping and clever tactics just to get noticed.  I actually have a couple of offers. And they’re both really fucking with me. They are as follows:

Being the youth program director for a non-profit that connects families of children with mental illness with resources, offers programming for children with mental illness, and works to educate around and de-stigmatize mental illness.

Counseling people seeking to take advantage of their employer’s EAP (employee assistance program) and SUD (Substance Use Disorder) program, ensuring they know how to navigate the system and receive the support they’re seeking.

Good God. I blog about how we’ve been broken by our education system, and the only jobs I can get considered for are those that just put bandaids on the wounds we’ve created with our mess. I don’t fix broken shit. I know this sounds callous, but it is seriously at the bottom of my Strengthsfinder profile. “Restorative” is number 34 out of 34 themes, meaning it’s something I should avoid because it sucks the life out of me. Besides, we’re not really “restoring” anything! We’re jimmying fixes to plug the dike as long as possible before our collective broken conscience obliterates the instable wall that’s barely holding it in check these days.

What’s my sweet spot? My strengthszone if you will? Working with people to recognize and maximize their strengths, with people who are motivated to discover and live their best lives, in systems where people view the world through a lens of possibility. Maybe we can start taking the wall down intentionally and systematically, dealing with the fallout little by little and restoring human nature to the social stewardship that actually honors each individual for meaningful contribution instead of coercing compliance to the capitalist gods.

I like to think my natural role is to create environments that don’t require mental illness labels and/or don’t contribute to mental illness. Mental illness diagnoses, imo, are usually an indicator that the person didn’t conform to social norms and the oppressive environments we’ve designed OR they’re traumatized by them or by families in which the parents were traumatized by them. How about instead of destigmatizing mental illness, we prevent it?!  

Addiction is a maladaptive coping mechanism for attachment voids created by broken systems (including dysfunctional families.) We wouldn’t need to treat so much addiction, if we would recognize the cultural dismantling of unconditionally supportive communities and work to reinstate them.

If we could recognize the culpability of the systems we’ve designed in the creation of mental illness and addiction, we could potentially slow the momentum we’ve created toward humanity’s fall from grace. But what do I know?

In the meantime, I guess I join the giant triage crew—the industry that makes hordes of money on the needs of the broken masses. Question is, do I take the more instable job that allows me some autonomy and creativity offering at least the illusion of freedom? Or the more boxy job with secure pay and benefits? I hate this decision. I truly fear that either way, my own diagnosis is nigh.