Collin Willis

I keep a notes file of quotes. These can be anything from a book I’m reading, a show I’m watching, or something I stumble across in the real world. There’s one from my Dad that I reflect back on often. “I don’t really write them for anyone, I write them for me.” It’s something that I wholeheartedly agree with and it is something that I would happily use as a mission statement for this blog. While the topics on this blog jump anywhere from politics to movies to personal turmoil, at the end of the day there isn’t a single post on here that isn’t written primarily for me. Writing is how I process complexities and give shape to the thoughts and feelings that are often too opaque when kept in my head.

I started this blog back in 2016 because the cat chased a mouse onto my bed while I was sleeping. It started as a way to share stories and overtime it has slowly evolved and reformed to be a place of vulnerability and growth. That said, this blog is also a place of control and I’d like to dissect what that means and how I’ve wrestled with having control wrested from me in the events of this past year.

Stand Still

When I was twelve I was caught in a rip current. I didn’t know what a rip current was, and I wasn’t a big fan of the ocean to begin with. So when I found myself swimming forwards and being steadily pulled further and further from the shore, I was not thinking optimistically. I thought I knew the ocean, I thought I knew how to swim, yet despite the knowledge of those limits I was in a situation that was never in my control. This past year has felt a lot like that rip current. In a lot of ways it has felt like no matter how hard I try to swim forward, the same forces keep rushing me towards the opposite direction. When I was caught in the rip current, it took my friend’s older brother swimming over and teaching me to swim sideways from the current to get me out. Here there doesn’t seem to be a sideways option, just the choice to either swim forward in vain or just let the torrent carry me out to sea.

I talked a bit in Buzzard Food about how I’ve had to learn to temper my expectation of control. There are a lot of things personally, professionally, academically, and even habitually that have not gone according to plan. There are situations I felt I had a lid on and circumstances I thought I had figured out that took me in directions I never expected.

Unplugged

I don’t think that I am any more or less in control than I have been in the past. Rather, I think this is more akin to a child realizing that the “special controller” their older sibling has been letting them play with for the past five years hasn’t once been plugged in. (Sorry, Caitlyn and Micah, I’ve done that to both of you). This year has been a real gut check on just how foolproof my plans have been and how much is owed to circumstance.

For the most part I’ve been spoilt in my personal and professional life with a solid degree of control. My previous two jobs saw me in leadership positions where I was allowed a lot of freedom. I got to help define my work flow, institute my own ideas, and go to the bathroom without raising my hand. Even further than that, those where jobs that I felt like I had manifested. I told my mom that I first wanted to work in Children’s Ministry two years before the opportunity came my way. My job with Arts Partners was the first “real” thing I applied for out of college. Those things happened precisely the way I wanted them to.

My job now was meant to be a stepping stone to my next manifestation, not the bear trap its been for nearly two years. I feel a lot like I did with the rip current, as if my only two options are to let it carry me on to a career I don’t want or to swim vainly forward until I tire and burn out. The sideways opportunities have not appeared like I promised myself they would.

Anticipation

On the personal side of things, when I got out of my abusive relationship last year I had it mapped out in my head exactly what recovery would look like both for me personally and socially. I knew things would be bad, but I thought by keeping my head down and not rising to arms I could restore the situation. Needless to say I was wrong. I stand by my actions and I know that I did the right thing, but that doesn’t change the fact that the outcome sucks and was not according to plan at all. The fact that I’m still the subject of gossip and flat out hatred this far removed is not something I ever anticipated, let alone planned for.

Every time I write something along these veins I inevitably get the same reaction from that particular group. “Why don’t you move on?”. It’s hard to move on when people keep kicking your shins as you walk. I think it should be expected to have reactions like that to something like this. First off, I’m discussing a subject that prying eyes and ears love to discuss with or without my involvement. Second, this blog is a place where I am often at my most vulnerable. To share these feelings and what I learn from them is to create a target, I’d be foolhardy not to expect someone to take aim.

Control

I think this blog represents control in a lot of conceptual ways. I am stuck in a lot of situations that I feel little control over. Yet when they become written and digitized, I gain a certain degree of leverage over the situation. This is my little world where I can dissect and analyze an idea as much as I want. When I write these, I write them for me, and I write them so that I may get a teeny bit more of a handle on the situation. I think that understanding brings a sense of control to most situations. In all that I’ve been through in the past year, the things that bother me the least are the ones that I understand.

I get why the people in the blast radius act or think the way they do. While I may not always like it or agree, I can at least empathize with them to a certain degree. I wasn’t surprised that my ex acted the way she did, I was surprised by how many people joined in on it. What I do not get, and where I feel frustrated by the least amount of control is by the actions of spectators who still heckle and hurl tomatoes from the stands. The endurance of the uninvolved is what has given me the most headaches these recent months. Like I mentioned in my previous post, my ex hasn’t been the issue for quite some time. Neither is the person currently in that location who has the most reason to dislike me. Rather it is those who joined in out of boredom or predisposition to vitriol that perplex me.

Take the guy who’s been subtweeting me all year for instance. This guy is so jealous of the fact that the girl he crushes on briefly had a connection with me that he’s spent nearly a year reply-guying me over the internet. Despite the fact that this talking stage ended on par with the maiden voyage of the Titanic, he’s seemingly made it his life’s mission to be a pighead in my honor. This really got under my skin at first but now its just sad. After about the third month, I found myself going “is he really still doing this?”. That was seven months ago. I’ve moved on, found someone who treats me the way I’ve always wanted to be treated. I’m baffled that I’m still feeling the lashings of things that were painful but radically less significant in the grand scheme of it all.

And I’m sure he’ll subtweet this just as I’m sure he probably subtweeted the last one. I don’t care anymore. Which brings me (almost) to my next point.

Bad Press

The gossiping and rumoring and downright hatred I have faced from a particular group of people in the past year has been disheartening to say the least. Yet there is another element of control in play that has becoming harrowingly more obvious in my journey to understand and move beyond. Attention is attention. As much as I hate being talked about negatively, I like being talked about. There is a twisted sense that you’ve made some kind of impression in order to be gossiped about.

I work a job where I don’t feel important. I am an easily replaceable cog in the Mickey Machine. It takes three levels of promotion just to get above the poverty line. Above that there’s about a half dozen other levels before you get your own office. I am a seashell tossed into the ocean. What few extra responsibilities I have are still nothing in terms of upward momentum or irreplaceable importance.

Knives Out

That’s where the knife twists, because to be the subject of gossip and hate is to be someone of a kind of importance. There is a sick part of me that gets a maniacal ego boost from the very poison that twists my stomach into knots. While I cannot do anything to stop the spewing of venom from another’s tongue or Twitter, one area I have not exercised control over is my exposure to it. I’ve been standing in a fallout radius with a Hazmat suit, when the real solution has been to leave the radioactivity not just pad yourself against it.

Now that I find myself staring down the finish line at Runaway Railway, I seem to have found a degree of control that wasn’t previously possible. In Social Circles, I talked about letting people in who didn’t deserve access to you. I realized that I haven’t been taking my own advice. I have been misled by this continued belief that I can control the situation just by being nice and expecting people only interested in the *tea* I had to offer to change their minds. I held a notion of control when really my controller wasn’t even for the same console. My swim forward wasn’t taking me anywhere but the same place I already am.

It’s time for me to swim sideways. Fighting against the current isn’t an exit strategy, it’s a good way to get yourself lost at sea.