Volume 1, Entry 38: Toxic Good
As a decidedly human person, my words unsurprisingly carry no magical powers. I have no Hogwarts training, I’ve never read from the Necronomicon, and I am barely still fluent in Spanish let alone Elvish.
And yet this does not stop me from believing I can jinx something good by speaking about it at the wrong time.
It’s a decidedly quantum brand of weirdness: my mind insists that, by observing some good outlook or remarking on a positive trend, I have marked it for failure. If I mention that a pitcher has a perfect game going, they’ll lose it. If I talk about a day going well in the morning, something bad will happen that sours it by lunch time. And I will feel responsible for initiating the collapse, my words and optimism providing the jinx that interrupts what would otherwise have proceeded ideally without me casting my fatalistic curse.
Along this line, my prevailing thoughts over the course of the last two weeks have fixated on how I jinxed myself early on when school was beginning. After months of being home and making myself physically healthier, I discovered that I was also decidedly healthier emotionally and mentally. Sure, I had been lonely and listless and bored often, but none of those negative feelings slowed me down. I wasn’t belittling myself, I didn’t think about dying constantly, and I felt in control in a way I’d never felt before. The voice in my head was quiet and uninspired.
I was living alone in a time loop, and yet I was thriving and looking forward in unheard of ways. Future projects seemed possible, I was walking outside multiple times each week, and I was getting things done simultaneously. It should have been the most miserable time, but it was also somehow freeing. My default state will always be unhappy, but I was aggressively not unhappy; neutral deserves celebration when living traditionally in misery.
And yet, I tried not to acknowledge this; I told no one about it. I didn’t want to jinx it. Shooing it from my own thoughts was a challenge, but there were so few people to talk to that I didn’t have to stress over jinxing it out loud. It felt like a closely-guarded secret of sorts; it was my silver lining as things weren’t going well outside my constrictive home space.
But then, as time moved toward August, I had people around—outside, socially-distanced, but around. These friends and coworkers seemed to notice the changes in me. I had a pep that matched my altered appearance. And in a moment of weakness, when pressed about it, I let slip that I was feeling good. Finally feeling good. I said it to multiple trusted people—and not just because it was what they wanted to hear and expected to hear and would turn away from if they didn’t hear but because it was actually true. I confessed that I wasn’t miserable; the relief was there when I said it out loud because I had been hiding from saying it to myself and jinxing it.
The words marked a victory: I was proudly no longer miserable.
But I am miserable again, and it’s in that same familiar way I mostly always have been. I jinxed it, just as I knew I would. If I just hadn’t said anything shrugged away their questions.
But I didn’t jinx it. This regression to misery and self-loathing and unhealthiness is not because I observed it and thus decided it. My mental health is not some Schrödinger’s cat only definable when observed as its box cracks open.
Teaching caused it. Returning to school and everything that accompanies it—that is responsible, not my admission of contentment. My mind is perpetually coated with kerosene; my job is the a giddy pyromaniac with a lighter.
This is a potentially confusing claim. How could I, who so loves his job, who so capably executes both its academic and social-emotional components, and who so readily and authentically seeks to build connections within and beyond it, be torn apart by this work? For all the good I not only can do every day but literally do every day, how can I claim it as poisonous?
Because it’s toxic good. Not to those on the receiving end, of course; my goodness is only toxic to me.
My perfectionism is untenable; every form needs a colorful, original header and every line of the notes looks sloppy until I rewrite slowly. Every word a student submits deserves attention and my comments in response need to validate them and convince them that I care about them and prove that I was reading carefully. Every exam needs to be rewritten and crafted again—they basically always are, so that no one can cheat using an old version and that others cannot diminish my investment and think less of my work ethic—and every problem set needs to be calibrated and refined to better suit the truncated schedule. I have to be not just on stage and entertaining and kind and call back to earlier jokes to forge community and connect disconnected, lonely, hurting people losing the tail-end of their adolescence but also informative, efficient, and rigorous. I have to make decisions and then justify those decisions to myself, explain them to others, and then justify them to myself again as they all cascade forward to something bad. My lack of control over anything screams at me in my head at all times—the voice was just recharging—and every valid, trimmed assignment feels less like a learning tool than a burden I cast onto the shoulders of other people I care about and am responsible for (that caring filling my mind with ideas for ways to honor them and penning phantom recommendation letters in my head for them that I have no time to physically write with the treadmill time becoming grading time more and more so that I make sure that I don’t fall behind so that they think I’m not invested or I’m slacking because I am not slacking, even though turning on a single inning of baseball in the background feels like cheating and Nathan had to tell me the A’s had clinched because I had forgotten there was a season let alone a clinch scenario). And the day ends after a mad scramble at a relentless pace that has already delivered an in-class panic attack amid a fantastic modified lesson about critical numbers and that sky rockets my heart rate the moment I open Zoom each morning and leaves me constantly massaging my rib cage in hopes that it helps...only to open up into more and new responsibilities to people, to rewarding work that brings people together and gives people something to do and, when a bunch of them won’t leave because they’re having fun and I know that I am having fun, that momentary kernel of observed self-joy is stained by the knowledge that eleven others things have to be done before bed and I haven’t even gotten the second treadmill hour and if I want to actually get five hours sleep I’m already behind the pace and there is no time for the joy because another new form will be implemented, another contest will need funding requested, another person will want to talk through something going poorly, and I will want to do all of it and conjure from the bottom of my spirit the most attentive, compassionate, goodest person to listen to them and honor their struggle and openness because what this whole job reveals is my central axiom that I don’t matter as much as everyone else does and it is my duty to serve them. If I don’t serve them, then I am nothing but the target of the dark voice in my head.
But it goes beyond that even: nothing is ever enough to satiate that feeling. So skilled am I at crafting, organizing, and building that every task is possible; every project is one that I am absolutely capable of working into existence. This should be a badge of pride, but it is a classic curse because it means that I feel like a failure not just when my own work is imperfect but also when I can’t take on and build up a new project. My long-term to-do list may be buried in my notes, but I don’t need to see it every day dozens of times to feel its weight, to access a pit of pain for never redesigning the personal data form or finishing my apology letter to Will; even though no one else even knows about these fizzled projects to miss them, I do—and I will feel them again as rich new commercial ideas and modified problem sets and validating messages float into my head. I will see a path to completion and, even though the project is unnecessary, failure will gnaw at me when I leave that path I disturbed to barely handle what is required of me. Hypothetical good haunts me too.
That’s it—I know it when I reach it. I’ve taken numerous paths there, like that nonexistent multivariable limit I finessed for a former student between videos via text message rather than focusing or breathing. Every single path I follow leads back to this same feeling. There is no amount of good I can engineer because I am incapable of treating myself and my needs and desires as primary ones. That self-hate is grafted onto my bones like Wolverine’s adamantium; there’s no extricating myself from it because it is my skeleton. Doing good for others every day and investing in them with every ounce of energy I have means that positive outcomes come from that deficit of self-worth, so I keep doing good to justify my own existence and make my rich array of skills valuable to the world. I am a person who decides to eat fruit for dessert instead of candy only to discover that they are allergic to peaches; the good that I do and pursue is toxic to me. Give me a universe of one me, and I can thrive and think and grow and step out of my comfort zone; there’s no one else for me to prioritize. But return me to a universe where my decisions affect other people and watch me lose myself in the quicksand of impossible tasks that I cannot stop pursuing against all logic because even though all of it is poison to me, my reaction is powerfully healing to everyone else.
Would you not drink the poison to make everyone else happy? Would you not take the bullet to let them survive? Would you not accept an invisible darkness to help others escape their own?
It’s either the vortex of meaninglessness and isolation and hollow, solitary victories or writing my own eulogy with selflessness designed to provide lasting value and inspiration to other people. My pain is good for them, but my deeds remain toxic to me.
(Is there even a choice?
Or did I jinx it?)
There’s no help to offer here. People try to remind me how much people appreciate what I do and how much they care, but the problem is that it doesn’t matter; no amount of reward or gratitude fixes the chemical reaction. I am poisoning myself every day by doing what I am best at and what I love, but there’s always something else I should be doing or someone else I could be supporting.
[[I know it’s not really poison; I know that I am the toxic thing. What I do activates the chemical reaction that slowly kills me, one act of good, one extra flourish, one validated person at a time. But please let me have this metaphor. Please.]]
What’s the point of living if life is worthless to the world? But what do you do when giving it meaning simultaneously kills you? How do I stop drinking the poison when my illness is so good for everyone else?
(I don’t.)
Bottom’s up.
Content Consumption
FILM
Trolls World Tour (2020)
Sometimes I turn on a movie to feel emotion or to explore an idea, and sometimes I choose a film to just turn off my brain. Trolls World Tour was undoubtedly the latter, a $5.99 rental that would offer benign musical covers, pretty colors, and a mindless 90 minutes on the treadmill. To my surprise, a mature lesson was included and handled well enough to reach a fairly young audience...while my senses were treated to a visually inventive kindergarten fever dream of texture and medley like none I had ever seen. While the story ends up somewhere meaningful, it’s not much: an evil hard rock troll plans a takeover of the entire Troll Kingdom and our heroes Poppy (Anna Kendrick) and Branch (Justin Timberlake) must sing and dance through the musical genres to stop her. Trolls World Tour is often disorienting and predictable, and the characters are as thinly drawn as they come; their battles’ stakes are unimpressive and smaller viewers must be more invested in the side characters than me because I only remembered Poppy. But the texture of this movie is a delight; everything beckoned my fingers to reach out and feel the soft yarn or cotton candy or run my hand over the intricate felt card Poppy sent. Songs broke out of nowhere, most of them awkward crammed pop or rock hits, but the visual feast never faded. It was glorious to behold, even while the movie was at its silliest. That Trolls World Tour eventually arrives at a lesson about accepting and celebrating differences rather than assuming others are wrong was merely icing on the cake; this was a movie that hit the spot for someone needing to de-stress before a big event and earned me a Nobel Prize for self-discipline considering how often I wanted to feel my TV. It’s not high-cinema, but there’s enough here that I can respect its inane charms.
Even after writing this and revising this and thinking about this, the words don’t feel like mine. But they also feel painfully true. Hooray for writing to learn.