silveradept | Jan. 11th, 2016

In your own space, make a list of at least 3 things that you like about yourself.

Well, that didn't take long. Goal 2, called up to account already. So, here it goes, I guess.

Thinking of things that you like about yourself raises a few spectres. If you read the guest post I linked to in an earlier Snowflake (about Twilight as a story of a girl desperately trying to get away from all the attention focused on her), there's a really big strain of perfectionism, and it's accompanying binary thinking, baked into my being as a defense mechanism against children that exemplified Tall Poppy Syndrome. If they can find no fault, then I'm safe. What that also does, though, is set up the duck problem (those placid-looking waterfowl gliding on the surface of the water are actually paddling furiously underneath it - everyone else looks like they're gliding along effortlessly on the river of life, while you know you're just trying to stay afloat) in such a way that things that might be good things about you are discounted or qualified, because you know that you're not all those things.

Incidentally, this is the best illustration of the duck problem that I have seen.

The other issue is the one of scope. With our communication methods and worldwide connectivity, we have the idea of "local celebrity" or "Internet celebrity" - the making explicit the domains by which sunshine can become a famous person, with general worldwide fame as the pinnacle and a place in the history books as the ultimate goal. Since very few people actually make it to that point, it's very easy to discount everything you do because you're not like those people who have the world hanging off their every word.

And then, of course, there's feedback. Many of the talents and skills we have are great, but without someone else noticing them, how will we know that they're good and have had impacts on someone's life? I got a very nice piece of feedback last week about a young woman that had come to a beginner choosing class I had put on. Apparently, she caught the programming bug, to the point of her parent enrolling get in camps taught by a local company. Without that conversation, I wouldn't have known what happened. Now I can be confident I put at least one child on the programming path, and I hope that nobody and no society dissuades her from it.

These things all run interference with trying to find good things about yourself. I've been trying to fight them off with daily (

awesomeers) and weekly check-ins (

synecdochic, among many others) that challenge is to talk about the good things that have happened and what we are proud of. Some days the proudest thing we have is that we were still here the next day. Other days are happier. I don't know if it's causing big changes, but I stare at that prompt every day, trying to see what I can come up with that was a good thing. And sometimes I'm supporting others more than talking about myself.

So, here are three things that I can say I like about myself:

I'm a wizard. Seriously. I make magic every day with finding useful material, doing programming, making recommendations, presenting, and learning. It's very Hufflepuff magic, the kind that doesn't create a lot of flash and that doesn't anyways generate a lot of feedback, but it's magic all the same. For as much as I get aggravated and annoyed with the way The Organization runs the place, I can see the magic happen regularly, whether by me or by others in the same profession.
I'm creative. That's...surprisingly hard to write, but if I stop thinking about creativity in a narrowly-defined zone of "stuff that produces a product" like art, writing, code, and the like, and include the things I do actually do, like essays, teaching, troubleshooting, technological and code adaptation, documentation, problem-solving, and engineering, as well as the fantastic grades obtained all throughout schooling, then there's creativity in spades at work in my head and all around me. It takes some perspective to get it, though, when you've been raised on the idea that creativity only has a limited domain. If I actually think about it, when younger-me wrote a noir detective spoof, the audience laughed when I read it aloud. Current-me still gets people having a good time at Story Time. These are creative endeavors, and they need to be acknowledged as such. As is the practice of arranging links next to each other such that their context days more than their individual selves, or that they tell a story despite being from disparate sources.

Remind me of this frequently, please. It is difficult to remember.
I'm making an effort. I often describe my upbringing as provincial for a reason - the state is not particularly friendly to people who don't fit in the boxes, and the town I was in did not particularly find compassion for people who expressed something other than the ideal of provincial normal - cis, straight, and very interested in "traditional" gender roles. One teacher had their classroom destroyed as part of a malicious prank while I was attending - I now don't think it a coincidence that she was unmarried, teaching advanced maths, and took no shit from anyone. Since then, she did get married, but that was the only change. There are lots of homophobic jokes, rumors about various acts that would actually satisfy one of the more outspoken feminists, and the stereotyping that accompanied any students that weren't white. I thought things got better at University, and they did, somewhat, just by exposure and by being in a culture that valued a more diverse experience. Now that I'm working on my community, I get the full thing of navigating an entire body of possible identities and cultures, and am charged with providing good service to all of them. And I'm friends with a very diverse group of people that teach me more about the experiences of their lives every day. Rather than throwing in the towel and declaring that my brain is full and I'll never be able to understand, I'm making the effort. I'm going to fuck it up, probably spectacularly, a lot in my life, since I already have before. So long as I can keep making the effort, though, I can be proud of that.

That's a really hard exercise for me. I'm much more comfortable talking about flaws and foibles than things I consider strengths. Possibly because I'm still holding on to the defense mechanism against those that want to cut down the smart and talented kids so as to make themselves feel better.

Here's hoping it comes easier later.