I write standing at bus stops, sitting in lobbies waiting for clients, in breaks between online sessions, standing in crowded buses, often even while walking from appointment to appointment because bills need to be paid and expression doesn’t do that. Especially not vulnerable, commercially suicidal honest expression.
Some sessions with clients drain me, some energize me. Am grateful for all, because I need the cash. Mostly for my son. Partially to make my sessions better. Like today I bought a quiz game about beer. Many of my Central-European clients love beer and AI can now do what I do, except AI can never give them real warmth, real cosiness or real memorability the way I can. My commercial value today is not grammar, it’s not even application of things like the paradoxical theory of change, it’s something that people used to get for free: someone sitting with them and making them feel seen and welcome.
Luckily I don’t have to fake that and I will happily soak up a person’s pain and repurpose it, channel it into something.
Yesterday after a day that went from 7.30 to 18.30 I did it for two hours for free.
With a man so hurt by life he was ready to give up on life.
This morning he wrote me about three practical solutions to his woes he has found.
None of them was offered by me.
Just sitting with him and really listening to him allowed him to think proactively again.
It’s quite discomfiting and puzzling to see how the less pleasure there is in my life the more I compensate by trying to lift others up.
Pleasure has never looked less attainable to me. In large part because nobody seems to know real pleasure anymore, they only seem to perform pleasure for visibility on social media. Never convincingly.
The lady next to me wants to get off the bus, so I’ll stop here.
