Fragments: I Work Hard

I'm tired.

Actually, I’m exhausted.

Yet,

every day is treated the same.

I get up and go to work, and on the way home I have to stop at the gym. If I don’t go to the gym, I have to ruck for a couple miles because I have decided these are things I can’t afford to stop doing. Skipping has become larger than the act itself—the physicality of it has become a mere expectation.

Not going feels like evidence in a case to indict myself. Like a vote cast against the person I am trying to become, or maybe the version of me I’m trying to hold onto.

By the time I’m done, it’s usually dinner time. Most of the time I miss it between the commute home and needing to shower. Then I’m sitting there trying to decide what should be done with whatever remains of the night and, by extension, whatever remains of me.

Should I FaceTime my kids?

Should I go shoot my bow?

Should I sit here and write?

Should I do the laundry, organize some of this shit, look at my bills, and try again to build a budget that explains where all the money goes before I have to look at it again?

There is always something.

There are things I want to do, things I need to do, and things I have spent years telling myself I am eventually going to do. Each one waits patiently for its turn to become another reason I feel behind.

Even rest has acquired terms and conditions.

I can sit down, but I will spend the whole time looking around at the things I could have done while sitting. The drafts stack up, and the divided mind flows from one task to the next—never quite focused enough to see each through.

The moment I wake up, I feel tired.

It stays with me until my head hits the pillow and I close my eyes, and even then I am usually negotiating with tomorrow.

Some of it belongs to the body. The arthritis in my hips and knee provides a steady creak—almost as if, some days, the joints themselves have become sand.

There are old injuries from the years I spent running toward different things, along with newer ones from bitterly refusing to accept that I am getting older. Perhaps some of it is born of the unrealistic standards I have placed on myself, as the mind—still picturing a fitter me—rejects the mirror. Most mornings, the previous day is still sitting in my joints when I stand.

That physical part can be tallied.

This particular exhaustion has acquired a moral quality, though. It does not merely ask what I will do with the remaining hours. It whispers that there are older, easier ways to make the questions stop.

Every decision—or moment of indecision—indicts another. An hour spent writing is an hour I did not spend with my kids. Thirty minutes lingering in indecision is a total loss. Calling my kids means the essay stays unfinished. Going to the gym means missing dinner, and so I guess I’ll eat tomorrow because it’s too late to eat now.

Rest means standing trial before every unfinished obligation once the room gets quiet. Sleep simply marks a passage of time.

No choice completes the day.

It only reveals what was neglected or lost in the ordering—or lack thereof.

On paper, the explanation is easy enough—if not complete. I am a foster care case manager, a public advocate, an author, and a writer. I travel for projects with different nonprofits, speak on occasion, and sometimes work as an armed security contractor when there is room for it.

On the sliding scale of stressful jobs, I’m not sure there is a more stressful one in the mental health field than foster care case management. I spend my days walking into lives that are already on fire and trying to decide which part of the structure might still be saved.

Bound by policy and court orders.

Interview a child; make a hard choice that may bring pain, relief, or both, because whatever ambiguity precedes the decision does not diminish the reality of what follows. The consequences may remain invisible from behind a disheveled desk for a time.

But they will land as hammer strikes during the next home visit, court hearing, or family team meeting.

Policy and court orders are flimsy defenses when you deliver pain, challenge, or chaos.

And I’m too old for “just doing my job.”

Go to court and ruin whatever rapport I spent months building with different family members because my testimony requires me to say aloud what I have seen.

Do some paperwork.

Do more.

Do even more.

Handle so many papers that you start having dreams about going to a pool only to find the water has been replaced with thousands of blank sheets.

Then I leave work and go train, write, answer emails, or begin some project I volunteered myself for before remembering that I am only one person. The arithmetic seems obvious: I built a life that requires almost all of me.

Maybe a reasonable person would consider that explanation sufficient.

I don’t.

Workload accounts for some fatigue, sure. It does not explain why everything I have done to become more capable has produced more things I am now responsible for carrying.

Discipline creates obligations. Competence makes people trust you with bigger problems. Recovery returns you to a life capable of asking more from you. Meaningful work places your conscience inside outcomes you cannot control.

You become stronger, and the weight doesn’t lessen:

it adjusts.

People sometimes ask how I have time for it all.

I never know how to answer, because I don’t.

I wanted to be an advocate, a writer, and I wanted to go places. I saw purpose in the work, and I wanted it.

The visibility came, though I still don't quite know what to do with it.

Objectively, I have done some impressive shit.

And while I rarely discuss those things in my private life and don’t really engage in public flexing—as the youths say—I have no interest in pretending they mean nothing. I worked hard for them. And while I reject the notion of anyone alive being truly self-made, I am prideful and, at times, self-centered or jaded.

Plenty of people shaped me, carried me, corrected me, forgave me, challenged me, and occasionally dragged me forward. Plenty of hands touched the structure.

I still had to do my part of the building.

Before all that, I got sober, lost the weight, and began measuring the mirror against the strongest version of myself I could remember. I punched my little therapy punch card for seasons at a time.

I worked hard.

I still work hard, though much of the motivation I found earlier in life has simply become expectation.

I also mistakenly expected effort to return some of what life took. The bargain was never spoken, but it was there in spirit. Work hard enough, and maybe the old pain would lose jurisdiction. Get sober, lose the weight, go to therapy, become useful, build something, and eventually the distance between the life I had and the life I was supposed to have would begin to close.

Or at least distance me from who I used to be.

Accomplishment would convert suffering into evidence, surely.

But life never signed that agreement.

Whatever I have accomplished simply joins everything else I still carry.

It all stacks.

I don’t know if discovering this “stacking” is profound—it probably isn’t. Maybe it is just how a life plays out against the broader thrum of human experience, and I have only lived long enough to notice it.

Something terrible happens to you as a child and rearranges parts of you before you know those parts have names. Then you get older, and you hurt people in the flail.

People hurt you—and sometimes their grievance against you is earned.

You nearly let something kill you. Then you get sober, have children, lose people, and find work that matters. One minute you are nineteen and relatively weight-free; the next you are carrying a world of sorts.

Years pass between treading water and realizing you are responsible for the vessel.

Then somebody hands you an opportunity, a microphone, a compliment, a bill, another person's emergency, and a memory you thought had stayed buried.

Surprise.

A life moves forward without evicting its earlier occupants.

The abused child remains somewhere inside the father. The addict remains legible to the sober man. The uncertain young man survives inside the professional other people now ask for guidance. Every version leaves something behind.

Maybe people think success removes something. Successful people probably encourage that belief because admitting otherwise is bad for the brand.

“Look at me.”

“I overcame.”

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I have survived things, and I have changed. I have developed discipline, competence, and a few healthier coping mechanisms.

I have done and built things I am proud of.

The old things remain.

The old hollowness returns through the seams.

The old apathy sets the jaw and sometimes becomes convincing enough. Compartmentalization remains the default processor.

That is why accomplishment has failed to provide the relief I expected from it—I confused expansion with escape. A larger life contains more rooms, more people, more responsibility, more places where something can be gained, and more places where everything can be lost.

Recovery gives a person access to the future, and the future arrives with fresh demands.

Love gives us reasons to continue and additional ways to be scarred.

Purpose keeps us alive and makes failure a visceral experience.

“Overcoming” implies a finish line I have yet to encounter.

So when somebody asks how I have time to do all of this, the question feels beside the point.

The better question is: how much more?

How much more can happen before the tired wins?

Before I stop answering the email or opening the document?

Before I stop going to the gym, going to work, going to court, going home, calling my kids, looking at the bills, and trying to become whatever the hell I have spent all this time trying to become?

How much more before I decide I have done enough?

I know how that sounds. I’m doing alright, and I am definitely not disguising a cry for help as an essay so I can act surprised when somebody asks whether I am okay.

Yo, chill—as the youths put it.

I am describing the fatigue that appears when a man realizes life may continue asking long after he believes he has already given enough.

Keep going.

Perhaps such a notion is ultimately misguided, because I always seem to have more to give.

Go on now; tell it to the soul.

I’m tired of surviving something and then being told to admire the strength it required—or that my strength is admirable—as though strength was the thing I wanted.

I would have preferred not needing it.

I also understand that life did not make every decision for me. I have made plenty of my own problems. I walked down roads after reading the signs.

Sometimes I stopped, examined the sign, correctly interpreted what it said, and continued walking anyway.

Some of the damage is mine.

A lot of it.

Maybe most of it.

“Oh boy, if it isn’t the consequences of my actions” has been a slogan lately.

The line between what happened to me and what I did afterward runs through the same body—and the tension refines.

Character—a word modern discourse has nearly beaten senseless—cheapens whenever it accounts only for what other people did to us.

Endurance, when made into an identity, eventually becomes self-worship. Every consequence becomes another injustice—or justice, if you fall into that odd self-flagellation thing—and every survival becomes proof of exceptional strength.

I have lived enough life to know better.

There are wounds I received and wounds I co-authored. There were times somebody else had to survive me.

Still, there are moments when I look at the whole thing—from what happened when I was a boy, to the addiction, to the work in my twenties, to foster care, to the losses, to the private fractures of the present, to whatever is waiting around the corner—and ask a very simple question.

How much more can one man endure?

More.

It’s always more.

Some of the worst things that will ever happen to us may not have happened yet—and that sentence would probably perform poorly as a morning affirmation.

We prefer the idea that suffering always accumulates in a useful way, as though every terrible thing pays into an account until, eventually, we reach the deductible and life begins covering the rest. Survive the worst thing, pay enough, extract the lesson, and surely, you’ll be rewarded some immunity.

Life has never honored that arrangement.

A person can survive the worst thing that has ever happened to him and later encounter something worse through no failure of character. He can become disciplined and still fall apart. He can get sober and still lose people. He can make the correct decision and receive an outcome that feels like punishment.

Character doesn’t offer immunity.

It cannot make testimony painless, keep children safe, return the dead, or make love reliable. Enough good decisions will not generate a force field around a life.

I keep thinking character has something to do with whatever authority remains after life has narrowed the available choices.

There is still force in a tired man.

The question is where it goes.

Discipline can carry a person remarkably far. That does not make every destination worthy. Some refusals preserve us. Others become another way of hiding. Some forms of persistence are courage. Others are vanity with better posture.

Life narrows the field.

Character governs what remains.

Even that may be too clean. Pain reaches into the range of available choices until every decision can feel contaminated by what came before.

There is usually some small territory left.

Sometimes it is no larger than the next decision. Tell the truth in court. Apologize. Stay sober for the next hour. Call your kids. Ask for help before pride converts pain into isolation.

Character lives somewhere in that territory. It does not erase what happened or make the outcome fair. Circumstance may write whole sections of a life without earning sole authority over what follows.

Sometimes pain is just pain. Sometimes it makes people cruel, hollows them out, or damages something that never grows back correctly no matter how much therapy language we pour over it.

Suffering carries no automatic virtue. Plenty of people suffer and become worse.

Whatever virtue appears has to emerge from the decisions that follow.

…

How much more?

I don’t know—more.

Okay…

Then what?

You work hard.

For how long?

Jesus dude—for as long as it fucking takes.

That answer risks sounding like the same motivational bullshit I have spent half this essay—and most of the Sympathy Olympics series—stripping down to the sweet nothings they ultimately are.

Fine.

But work will not cure grief. Discipline will not make me invulnerable. Another set at the gym, another mile under a ruck, or another essay written late at night will never transform me into somebody life cannot reach.

I continue participating in life because there are still things in front of me, many of which I chose. Children I helped bring into the world. Work I claimed mattered. People whose trust I asked for. Promises I made while believing I was the kind of man who kept them.

Purpose. Love. Spite.

Some stubborn sense of worth.

A life can become stupid-heavy without becoming meaningless.

Setting every obligation down would require abandoning parts of myself I still believe ought to remain.

Maybe the stubbornness belongs there.

Maybe character has always been less concerned with how much force a man can produce than with what he allows that force to serve.

The next decision may be all that remains.

So I get up, and every day is treated the same. I go to work. I train. I call my kids. I write when there is something left, and sometimes when there isn’t. Most of it does not land here.

This one almost didn’t.

I work hard because what remains is still mine to govern.