I don't know

confronting confusion with equanimity (and satire)

Our seventh attempt to get through to a hotline. You are number 120 in queue, your wait time is 45 minutes.

Thirty minutes later: You are number 97 in queue, your wait time is one hour and twenty-eight minutes. Wait, what?

Almost two hours later: A noise that sounds like someone picking up the phone to answer. And maybe they did, but we’ll never know, because the call was disconnected.

[OH EXPLETIVE]

Have I complained about government paperwork enough already? Too bad, here we go.

If you’ve never heard of it before, let me introduce you to the concept of the “Circumlocution Office.” You’ve probably experienced it many times, just not by that name.

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office.

– Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

The Circumlocution Office is where All Things Bureaucracy and Paperwork go to die. But they don’t just die – they relocate, then circumvent, then redirect, then dawdle sluggishly toward some oozey pit of phone lines, paper-stuffed cabinets, and stale TicTacs in a room like a giant coffin with apathetic lighting until all papers within have disintegrated from the erosion of procrastination.

Thanks to the guardianship process for two of our kids, we are in the middle of applying for multiple programs for both of them. (This is required, not optional, don’t even get me started.) I’ve mentioned before that paperwork and administrative duties are my hate language – as opposed to actual love languages like coffee, memes, and good sushi – and the process of navigating this system has challenged all my efforts toward healthy self-medicating, including prayer, staying up too late reading, and a slightly addictive obsession with Sudoku.

If you’re not familiar with Sudoku, the instructions are precise: Every row, column, and square must have only one of each number (or in our case, color). Even at the higher levels, it’s hard but not confusing. When you feel stuck there’s always a solution if you consider it long enough. The rules are simple and they don’t change.

In spite of being in the guardianship process for over a year, we have yet to find a single corner of this arena where experts agree on how the process is completed, and none of it has been streamlined for ease and efficiency.

It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

– Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

Enter Paperwork Saga, round two: Day of Phone Calls.

Paperwork requires phone calls because applications and government websites are designed by mystical regulatory leprechauns in such a way as to give you only a third of the information you need to fill them out. The rest is a riddle of precision guesswork spiked with threats of legal retribution if you forget to cross a T or you accidentally double dot an I.

It turns out though, there are some wonderful people whom you can call. Most of them admit the system is a mess, and none of them actually work for the government.

Unfortunately, none of them know the same things. For example, I have asked approximately fourteen people if we could apply for a particular requirement for our kids before they turned eighteen, and every answer without fail has been “I don’t know” until one person finally said, “Oh, absolutely. In fact, it takes about a year for it to go through. So you should’ve applied a year ago.”

*headdesk, headdesk*

But here’s what I’m learning: Most of the things we dread are not as bad or hard as they seem. And when they are, you get writing material out of it. (Also, the extraneous forms and duplicate paperwork can usually be composted as bedding in the chicken coop.)

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen…Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving — HOW NOT TO DO IT.

– Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

One government website says “You can try applying online.” (Try? Try? Like it’s one of those ball-throwing games at the State Fair?) The instructions continue with this disclaimer: “Depending on your situation, it may be hard or it may be easy.” Um. Greeeat. Turns out, if the website craps out in the first thirty seconds every time you try filling out the forms, it’s definitely hard.

Two people told me, “Call this office. They will definitely be able to help you get this waiver.” They had to tell me repeatedly because, at this point, you can see how skeptical I am of anyone’s surefire solution. But I finally called the office and left a message. The following week, I heard back.

“No, sorry,” the guy said, “we only do this waiver, and you need this other waiver. There are actually five different waivers,” he admitted, “and I know it’s really confusing. But you need to call this office, in Anchorage.”

How are we supposed to get anywhere when even the professionals who are supposed to guide you through this don’t know what they’re doing because the system is so bloated?

…The Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not to do it, in motion. Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it…

– Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

After that blunder, someone assured me, “You can call this number for help, these people definitely know what they’re doing, they do this for a living.” Thereupon I called the number and an answering machine picked up; it said they may (What? May?) return my call within ten business days.

But hey, to their credit, they called two days later and got my voicemail. It was a woman whose first language was definitely not English, and her message directed me to the same website that was unnavigable in the first place.

Numbers of people were lost in the Circumlocution Office…Boards sat upon them, secretaries minuted upon them, commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered, entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away. In short, all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the business that never came out of it; and its name was Legion.

– Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

Among the many things we don’t know about this process is that all these people (the ones we’ve dealt with, at least) are actually kind, respectful, and encouraging. Maybe I was prepared for otherwise after two years of officials behaving like Gestapo who wouldn’t even respect a person’s right to breathe freely. (Those protocols really brought out the worst in humanity, didn’t they?)

Had they used their faces, not for communication, not to utter thought and feeling, not to share existence with their neighbors, but to appear what they wished to appear, and conceal what they were? And, having made their faces masks, were they therefore deprived of those masks, and condemned to go without faces until they repented?

– George MacDonald, Lilith

The difference is that during the plandemic, those officials demanded that you wear a mask, too, and they turned into freakish banshees if you refused – and ironically, instead of covering ugliness, their masks revealed what was really inside and made them more hideous than ever.

“How long must they flaunt their facelessness in faceless eyes?” I wondered. “How long will the frightful punition endure? Have they at length begun to love and be wise? Have they yet yielded to the shame that has found them?”

– George MacDonald, Lilith

But it seems like most professionals have come back to just being decent people, truly trying to help. And we need help, because the system is a convoluted mess.

It’s such an intimidating process. Court documents flooding my inbox, meetings with lawyers, interviews with court visitors. It all seems very official – and it is – but it’s also very human. And maybe this is a secret, but the formality is a cover for an extremely informal, fluid process. It, too, is just a mask.

We want to walk through the process correctly. The problem is that there’s no correct way to do it, and all the experts tell you something different (unless it’s “I don’t know,” which is alarmingly consistent).

And honestly, I would rather hear “I don’t know” than a bunch of misleading information. So this is a good step – a cultural willingness to admit humility, to let go of pride and ego, to acknowledge we’re all in this together, needing answers. How else do we make sense of the things that don’t?

Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all people. For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another.

– Titus 3:1-3

Of course, cooperating with a system isn’t the same as capitulating or conforming to that system, just as being “submissive to rulers and authorities” isn’t the same as sucumbing to tyranny. So we work the problem in front of us, sitting in the discomfort of not having immediate solutions. The answers are there, regardless of how ambiguous they look right now. Time will either bring the solutions to the surface, or they just won’t matter because we will have bigger things to deal with.

What I’ve really needed to hear from someone is, “Yes, it’s a mess. Yes, it’s confusing. You’re doing fine.” And praise God, the Lord brought someone who said that very thing, and it was such a comfort. (She still didn’t know how to file for SSI…but I digress).

So friend, if you are walking through something hard and complicated, and there are no clear answers and lots of confusing directions, let me tell you: Yes, it’s a mess. The world is a cleanup operation, and these are confusing times. We don’t have all the answers but Jesus does, and we have the mind of Christ so we are able to discover Kingdom solutions. We can wait for the revelation while we sit in the mystery. You’re trying and waiting and trusting? You‘re doing fine.

There’s another number sitting on my list that I’ve been referred to multiple times. Overcoming my jadedness, I finally call and a woman with a smoker’s voice answers.

“You have access to the internet?” she asks, and directs me to a website with a big yellow button to apply.

Short form, easy. Now I feel reckless and brave, and ask if she can help me navigate this other arena.

“Yep, that’s the Something-something-aging-something office. Their number is –”

“Wait, that’s the office I need?”

“Yep. Their number is…” and she gives me a local number with real people who live here in Alaska and actually answer questions.

Miracles abound.

I called the lady and she was so nice. The person with all the knowledge and resources and answers will call us next week and help us through the whole process, she said.

“Of course, you don’t have to go through our office, we’re just here to support you. You can go directly to the federal government website if you want.” And it was all I could do to not scream, No! I need you, please don’t leave me! (Of course, she hasn’t called me back yet, and it’s been over a week. So I guess that’s on my to-do list again tomorrow.)

But something that keeps recurring to me is that many of these things that seem like such a big deal – so time consuming, such hassles – end up being nothing in the long run. I don’t just mean that in perspective they are small, but that they often just dissolve into nothingburgers, distractions that just took up too much brain space when we could’ve been cultivating peace and productivity elsewhere.

The Spirit reveals what we need to know when we abide. And often we don’t need the answers as soon as we think we do, so resting in the mystery of His timing is an exercise in growing in trust and equanimity. It’s easy to slip into intimidation and pressure, but taking a step back means we won’t allow the enemy to magnify that stress in or around us.

Instead, we can counter that stress and confusion with prayer, compassion, Sudoku, and mockery of inept government systems as we expose the mask and move toward a more transparent, healthy, and secure culture. We will try and wait and trust. My big situations, your big situations – will they even matter in the big picture? I don’t know; it’s a mess out there. But you’re doing great.

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