A goy friend got some money and her Jewish friend advised her to "invest it and Jew it up." BF comes by says, "I'm here to pick up the Jew."
— (((Luke Ford))) (@lukeford) September 14, 2017
If a Jew tells you to invest your money and “Jew it up”, is that anti-Semitic? Asking for a friend.
If a black tells you to buy bling and get negrofied, is that racist?
Does that look ok to you?
Last night I was watching episode five of season three of the TV show Halt and Catch Fire. It featured yet another young man yelling at his dad for not being around enough decades earlier.
It seems like most movies and TV shows about fathers and sons show the sons resenting their dads for not spending enough time with them when they were growing up.
I don’t think I know anyone like this. I don’t think I know anyone who wishes that their parents spent more time with them. It certainly never occurred to me as a kid nor as an adult reflecting on my childhood that I yearned for more quality time with my parents. I never wanted them to attend my athletic events or my school performances or spend more time with me in general. I don’t remember resenting my father for being on the road. I was proud of him for his influential role in the church. I was proud that he was living his dreams and affecting hundreds of lives. I always thought he was a great man. It never would have occurred to me to distract my dad from his mission by playing some stupid game with me. I had friends to play with.
From about age six on, I was free to roam. I’d leave the house after breakfast and wander freely (or go to school starting in second grade at age eight) until I got hungry for lunch. Then I’d eat and wander again until I was either hungry or it was dark outside. And look how I turned out.
I fall in love way too easily, way too quickly, and way too intensely. I’m an easy target for mockery because I can’t help wearing my feelings on my sleeve.
I’ve had long stretches of my life feeling helpless, feeling small in a big world, and feeling in desperate need of rescue. And I’ve had equally long stretches of feeling masterful and grandiose.
My life has bounced from crisis to crisis.
Half of the people I’ve fallen in love with have been guys. I don’t want to have sex with them. I don’t want to be gay. I don’t want romance with them. I don’t want to hug them. I just like hanging out. I just like learning from them how to be human.
I naturally adore some guys and some gals. It’s like a fever. I can fall in love with a man or a woman without wanting to be romantic or sexual. There’s just something in my autonomic nervous system that gets activated and I feel high in the presence of certain people. (Every rabbi I’ve ever wanted to devote myself to has turned out to be a scam artist.) I feel myself slipping into worship and emulation mode. It’s beyond my rational processes. It’s beyond my cognition. It’s beyond my control. I just want to make other people my higher power. I feel like they can fix me. I feel like they are just what the doctor ordered. I put them on a pedestal. Sometimes this adoration lasts for decades. At other times, it is destroyed in five seconds never to return (such as when the person demeans me).
Like other narcissists, before recovery, I tended to put people one up on me or one down. I naturally tended to idealizing and devaluing people (including myself).
I think these are symptoms of love addiction. It’s not just about sex, you know.
When I make God my higher power, and seek to live a life of service to others, these fevers hit me less often and less intensely. I have less need to make other people my higher power.
On a psychological level, I think this is about attachment. Spending most of my first five years in foster care, I grew up with anxious attachment. I naturally obsessed about my attachment to people I cared about and whether the attachment was waxing or waning (which usually led to the destruction of the attachment). Through 12-step work, I’ve moved in the direction of secure attachment. I think it has been years since I got up in the middle of the night to see if a person had unfriended me on Facebook.
I want to be more masculine. I want to live in reality more than fantasy.
“I’d hate to see you waste your whole life in delusion,” said my long-time therapist. Another therapist said he’d hate to see me end up as the guy on a bar stool talking about what a success he could have been.
The more serene I feel in daily life, the less need I feel to escape through fantasy. I’m sure there are healthy forms of falling in love. I look forward to living them.
I remember in grade school there were times when the cool kids would bring me into their circle. Often, a great kid would befriend me and my life would dramatically improve. “I’ve finally gotten things figured out,” I’d say to myself. And then the kid would die or one of us would move, and I would be left once again outside the winners circle. I’d loved living on borrowed functioning but it never lasted. It can’t.
There are lots of parts of human connection that don’t come naturally to me. So I love it when other shlep me along into the world of normality.
I think part of my sports addiction comes out of my need to love, to worship, and to feel excited. The more together my life is, the less dramatic of a role sports fandom plays for me. There were some years, such as 2007, when the success of the Dallas Cowboys felt like the greatest thing in my life (and then in January of 2008, they were knocked out of the playoffs by the New York Giants, who went on to win the Super Bowl).
This is the home I grew up in on Currans Road in Cooranbong, Australia. I lived there a bit in my first four years and constantly from age 6 to 11.
I remember training in a field where one teacher (alone among all the teachers) was not particularly interested in teaching us. He was a superstar in the field, and he would show up late 95% of the time, and when he did show up, he’d often be on his phone and he usually wanted to talk about anything but the subject at hand (he particularly enjoyed discussing religion and politics, areas in which he had little expertise but very strong feelings). He was not afraid to reveal a lack of interest in various parts of the curriculum. He had no interest in following the rules (which forbade discussing sex, politics and religion). He usually didn’t care about teaching us beyond a narrow ritual which he repeated over and over. That said, he was an amazing teacher, even at times, my favorite teacher. I dug his rebellious attitude. When he was around, I was never the most inappropriate person in the room. He might even be the greatest at what he did in the world, but his lack of drive for working with us was all too apparent. He just didn’t give a damn beyond the minimum he had to do to get a paycheck. He had bigger fish to fry. He worked with celebrities. He had dreams. He had problems. He had other things that concerned him far more than teaching us.
Needless to say, he wasn’t a happy man.
I know a lot of writers who teach and many of them, perhaps most of them, teach primarily to make a living and not to be of service. They generally hate teaching. They resent it for taking up the time and energy they would rather devote to other things, such as their own writing. These resentful guys (usually men) don’t tend to make great teachers. They see their pupils as a necessary evil at best. We are in the way of their dreams and we know it. These teachers are the opposite of someone like Terrie Silverman, a great writing teacher in Los Angeles who wants to be of service to her students.
Work has long posed a challenge to me. I don’t tend to like it. I usually find it annoying. It rarely serves the parts of me that I want to unleash. My natural tendency is to be all about me (at work and off work). My natural tendency is not to live in service to others. At age 45 however, I realized once again that my approach to life was not working, that religion wasn’t fixing me, that therapy wasn’t fixing me, and the only substantial relief I got from my depression was going to 12-step programs which taught that the only path out of addiction was a life of service to others.
My natural approach to work is to seek as much money as possible for doing as little as possible and in the tension between those two ends, I’ve usually been willing to sacrifice earning for ease. I naturally incline to using work to try to get as much attention for myself as possible and to live out my habits of sexual and romantic obsession. Surprisingly, this has not led me to success.
The times that I naturally succeeded at work prior to recovery were when my ego fit the demands of the job and my inclinations pushed in the direction of achievement and earning. In other words, when I was writing for a living, my ego oft wanted to dazzle my readers. This drive led me to some success (I was able to make a living as a writer from 1997 to 2007 and partially live from writing through 2012) but I was limited by my limited desire to be of service to my readers (and to various sponsors and employers) and my life remained small. At other jobs, when I loved my boss, I naturally inclined, at least some of the time, to working hard to make him happy.
Under-earning is a disease of hiding and biting. Just as a wounded animal wants to go hide and will bite anyone who tries to bring him into the light, so too under-earners squander our talents and live in vagueness and fantasy.
I remember this tedious landscaping job I had in the summer of 1985. For the first three days, I hated my job. On the fourth day, I felt seen by this client Doug Hanzlick and my love for this man and for his family inspired my landscaping work over the next three years. Because of my love, I felt joy coming to work, particularly when it offered me the opportunity to cross paths with a Hanzlick. Such a classy family. I wanted them to adopt me.
Most jobs I’ve held, by contrast, have not been like that. I come to work and I don’t get enough attention and I have to choose between my ego and my empathy for my employer. The more I devote myself to serving my employer’s needs, the less room I have to indulge my basic instincts. If I want to live up to being my employer’s representative, then there are all sorts of behaviors and verbal play that I cannot indulge in at the workplace. I don’t naturally incline to service, but I do best at work when I do that very thing that doesn’t come naturally.
It seems to me that with the exception of those times when following the ego is in alignment with one’s source of income, that the more ego you have at work, the less interest you have in serving your employer. By contrast, the more interested you are in being of service at work, the less ego you have.
When you take the 12-steps seriously, you see that not only are you a servant of your employer, but you are a servant of God (and not just at work, but throughout your life). According to the Big Book, there should be no difference between the way you treat your employer and the way you treat God. No matter the job, in the 12-step approach, you are working for God. So there’s no room for indulgent ego. There’s no room for disregarding the feelings and needs of others. You are a servant of the Master of the Universe.
Over the past couple of years, the space between serving my clients and serving God has narrowed. On many days, there is no difference between the way I treat clients and the way I treat God. On other days, my ego pushes in and I start doing things that I want to do that are not in my clients’ interests. Luckily, I have various 12-step programs that enable me to reset myself. Every time I go to a meeting or study 12-step literature or talk with my sponsor, it is a little bit of a shock because my natural tendency is not to live a life of service. Unfortunately for my ego, any other way of life leads to my destruction. I either live in service to others or I screw up. When I’m constantly colliding with other people, I know I’ve gotten out of alignment with my highest purpose in life (to be of service to others). On the other hand, when I see myself living a life of service, I furrow my brow and think, “Who is this guy? I hardly recognize him. He seems so happy.”
