2024-09-04 A Felony Postmortem

What I Did

FRONT-END – I’ve now made a few neat little essays:

• Trip-Planning Checklist and Adequate Data: Small Things Always Worth Buying on Adequate Life
• Networks on Gained InSite

I’m particularly proud of the networks essay I’ve been chewing on.

BACK-END – I reorganized what I have left. Things have now simmered from manic anxiety into a type of flow.

What I Learned

I have wallowed in a state of incessant, unyielding shame for years, and this may soon be the termination of that season.

For much of my life, I have possessed several competing values that are legitimately irreconcilable:

1. The only way I can maintain any sense of sanity is by holding steadfastly to the truth, even if it hurts me.
2. I desperately want to get along with people, and resent conflict. Any form of disagreement drains me.
3. I have been convinced that most of the issues in the world come from insufficient information. Even now, I still think the issue comes from insufficient acceptance of the correct information.

This has made me, in general, a transparent and outward-facing quine of a person. I figured that saying the truth would always be worth it, even if everyone hated me for it. In retrospect, it was the utmost faith in humanity that I’d be taken on good faith.

This all marched along merrily in its paradoxical implacability, up to mid-2021, where I ended up implementing my approach towards being abundantly transparent at the worst time and place. I waived my Miranda rights and entered the Convicted Felon Club some months later, years before felony convictions have trended more toward being…trumped-up (badum-CHH).

Many times, a single large-scale event can define someone. The more accurate and common reality, though, is that the protracted conditions after the event define a person in more intimate ways. The industrial accident may take your left eye, but the real challenge comes from learning to live without depth perception and an eye patch, and nothing quite compares to the niche fame you receive for your likeness appearing in a Congressional hearing for another OSHA-related government bill.

In my situation, I was completely unprepared for the feelings of shame that had newly emerged in the presence of a blight upon my legal fiction. I became immobilized by a crippling fear of what others would think and how much everything else I could say wouldn’t matter. I spent all that effort to become adequate through the condensation of every single self-help article I could find, but I was instantly forced to wear a scarlet F everywhere my professional life takes me: “Hello, I, a convicted felon, would like to work for you. Please pretend you didn’t note that on my background check as you place me in the good-pick-if-nobody-else-wants-the-job pile”.

Every single day was scoped down to survival in that lens of perception, and living in a high-suicide state where 1 in 5 individuals here have a certifiable mental health issue hasn’t helped my healing. Nobody cares about what a felon thinks, after all, right? It’s a commonly known fact among the prudish that felons completely waive all their rights to be treated like a human being when the law declared someone bad.

That sentiment has quietly plagued me for a few years, and it had wrecked most of my sense of peace or comfort.

I can proudly say that this season is slowly coming to an end, and it’s all thanks to a new framing of perspective, from multiple angles.

A. This isn’t that uncommon

There are fundamentally a few kinds of people:

1. The people who have dirt to hide from a sketchy, questionable thing they did. This is probably 50% of the people out there.
2. People who have nothing whatsoever to hide, but also have not explored a meaningful life. This is about 40% of everyone.
3. A minority 10% of people who have nothing whatsoever to hide, but have found a meaningful life.

I was #3, and I became #1 in 2021. That makes me pretty normal.

Of course, what’s not so normal is that I’m putting this out in the public space. It may explain why America has a terrible recidivism rate and has permitted a prison industrial complex to profit off a shell game of government money. But what do I know?

B. I was setting myself up to fail

What happened was decades in the making, through my general inexperience (and willful ignorance) with the legal system mixed with my informal nonfiction reading of “Lawmericana”:

• I believed that the entire system of laws and law enforcement existed as a moral, singular, apolitical beacon in a corrupt world.
• I believed the courts and law enforcement would see my general good qualities and judge me on my motivations instead of the specific, myopic domain of how some government words could be understood.
• I did every single thing possible to stay on the straightest and narrowest possible path, to the point that I did not have street-savvy friends who could have informed me on what to do in that situation.

There’s literally no way I would have even thought it was important to get a lawyer before I said anything to law enforcement.

C. I’m not the same person

The toxic background I grew up in led me to an insufferably harsh disposition, especially in the domains of self-evaluation and parenting. I may yet win the award in the Subconscious Gaslighting Mother category for Most Well-Adjusted Person Ever (fingers crossed).

I had been driven to an extreme obsession with competence and accomplishments, especially the codified-on-paper type. Thus, I felt my perfectly clean criminal history was a badge of honor.

Of course, that’s not necessarily true. Many public figures have a perfectly clean official record, but the world is worse off from their existence. In fact, some of them wrote a book about what they allegedly hadn’t done!

I’m sure the vilification of individuals in a punitive justice system causes no money to change hands. Because that would be corrupt.

D. I’ve found a new hope

I somehow imagined in my autism the same fallacies that hit the Age of Reason philosophers: that an abstracted “logos” or moral guide sits beyond our perception, summoned whenever our conscience strikes or good people do good things.

I’ve learned since then that there is no true justice, not in this life. All aspects of human existence and meaning are utterly meaningless. The assertion that everything is meaningless is also meaningless, since those Negative Nancies are simply trying to make meaning through its absence.

But, there is a Tao, a reality, and I choose to believe it exists. Its qualities are non-negotiable, and we can understand imprecise approximations of that Tao that can guide us to a better life.

In all of this, I don’t think I care that my legal fiction has had something pop up on it. That’s just the cost of trying to figure life out.

E. I have over-valued everyone’s opinions

Everyone is a damaged, disoriented mess. Anyone who thinks otherwise clearly doesn’t understand human nature, which makes them a damaged, disoriented mess with awareness issues.

With that in mind, the opinions of everyone else should be taken with all the gravitas and sobriety of missing a high school reunion. That way, you get to define your successes by who your enemies are.

I’m not saying a good reputation isn’t worth striving for, but that all you can do is show up. If you’ve been spectacular, and they still hate you, they may just hate something better left unsaid.

What I’m Doing Now

WHAT I MUST DO:

• Working in an insurance office right now.
• Preparing to move to Texas in an RV.
• Figuring out life with a stunningly beautiful, alexithymic, artistically gifted woman at the maximum threshold of the Crazy/Hot Matrix.
• Slowly succumbing to the standard mental decline caused by maintaining two schoolchildren until they’re old enough to vote.

MY HOBBY:

Marching through my Grandiose Essay-Writing Mission, loosely guided by a Johnny.Decimal-like system:

• It consists of 14,564 files, each one containing between 1 and 10 elements.
• As I go, each condensation or output will make fewer files, but each re-categorization will likely make more files.
• The number is moderately arbitrary relative to results, thereby avoiding the risk of Goodhart’s Law while also implying I’ve made some sort of progress.

I’ve categorized them by type:

• articles – links, a page here and there, and other wayward miscellany that will mostly make its way to my essays.
• edit – content on my essays will be edited for proofing, coherence, brevity, urbanity, inherence, and illegibility.
• games – computer games that are (presumably) educational. Edutainment!
• guides – actual instructions by nerds who outclass me. Will make my essays shine like a dying star, but some will become the primitives for future projects.
  • beginner guides – actual instructions for derps.
  • advanced guides – actual instructions for smart derps.
  • specific guides – actual instructions for niche derps.
• text – typed notes I’ve stored away, sometimes for years. Goes straight to my essays, stat!
• tools – goes straight to my toolbox, but I may have to comment on it on an essay if there’s a bazillion of them.
• videos – inferior-quality content, meant for linear consumption, will probably throw it out once the hoarding gland swelling goes down.