![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#3: "I'm Barely Above The Bar Of Acceptable Behavior."
Apparently, the RNG wants me to keep talking about toxic masculinity for the early part of this year's series. (As a sidebar, it's weird to look at a "this is how you generate a random number in a range in bash" command and go 'Shit, I understand every component of what's going on here." Not just the modulo math operation, but the the reason why you add a number to the result of the modulo to establish the bounds of the range. Maybe I'm better at some of these math things than I thought.)
I appreciate the work that's been done into seeding into our conversations and our brains the idea that behavior is the thing that needs addressing, that can change, rather than allowing the conflation of behavior and innate disposition. What a person believes may make them more likely to do certain behaviors, but it is absolutely possible to get someone to behave in specific ways, even if those behaviors don't align with their core beliefs. Even more so if changing their behavior avoids bad consequences and/or courts good ones. It's a very useful frame for when people behave in -ist manners, because you can sidestep the entire derail about how they believe in their heart of hearts that they're not a bad person and keep the focus on the concrete thing that can be changed and needs to be changed.
So, if you've never seen me in person, or a photograph of me, the important part to know about this is that I look like a tall cis white man. I expect people who don't know me well enough to know which of those descriptors above are false to treat me as a tall cis white man, and that means I have to try and keep in mind how the things I am doing and saying come across as if it were a tall cis white man doing and saying them. Sometimes I succeed, but as someone raised as a cis white man, I don't always know all the things that I need to be aware of, or how the privileges that I have with that appearance can distort my view of reality such that I fail to properly understand things. (And thus might suggest solutions that seem straightforward to me, but that would be snarly or impossible for the person who actually tried to implement them. Or do behaviors that I think are harmless that aren't necessarily harmless.) Because of the difference between belief and behavior, I can believe I'm a good person who wants to do well around others and hold healthy suspicion about whether or not my behaviors are helpful and good to others and myself. I don't know what I don't know, so it seems safest to assume that my privileges cloud my understanding sufficiently that I'm not part of the advanced class, or possibly even the basic one. It's above the line of acceptable behavior, but it seems foolish to attribute anything more than "barely over the line" to those behaviors, on the assumption that there are so many other things that I don't even know I don't know that keep me from believing that I might be doing okay.
( Presenting the evidence against this dim view of myself )
This is one of the phrases that I don't believe fully, rather than I don't believe at all, because of my developed sensitivities. There's been enough evidence put in front of me to make the case that I'm not barely above the bar, and that where I think the bar is often is above where other people think the bar is. But I have to consciously think about those pieces of evidence to get to that conclusion, or so that I have a chance at smacking brainweasels off of me when they're swarming and biting. Self-forgiveness is not easy for me, as we'll explore later on in the series, and I'm still not great at untangling "what you did" from "who you are." With time and practice, perhaps, it will become easier.
#3: "I'm Barely Above The Bar Of Acceptable Behavior."
Apparently, the RNG wants me to keep talking about toxic masculinity for the early part of this year's series. (As a sidebar, it's weird to look at a "this is how you generate a random number in a range in bash" command and go 'Shit, I understand every component of what's going on here." Not just the modulo math operation, but the the reason why you add a number to the result of the modulo to establish the bounds of the range. Maybe I'm better at some of these math things than I thought.)
I appreciate the work that's been done into seeding into our conversations and our brains the idea that behavior is the thing that needs addressing, that can change, rather than allowing the conflation of behavior and innate disposition. What a person believes may make them more likely to do certain behaviors, but it is absolutely possible to get someone to behave in specific ways, even if those behaviors don't align with their core beliefs. Even more so if changing their behavior avoids bad consequences and/or courts good ones. It's a very useful frame for when people behave in -ist manners, because you can sidestep the entire derail about how they believe in their heart of hearts that they're not a bad person and keep the focus on the concrete thing that can be changed and needs to be changed.
So, if you've never seen me in person, or a photograph of me, the important part to know about this is that I look like a tall cis white man. I expect people who don't know me well enough to know which of those descriptors above are false to treat me as a tall cis white man, and that means I have to try and keep in mind how the things I am doing and saying come across as if it were a tall cis white man doing and saying them. Sometimes I succeed, but as someone raised as a cis white man, I don't always know all the things that I need to be aware of, or how the privileges that I have with that appearance can distort my view of reality such that I fail to properly understand things. (And thus might suggest solutions that seem straightforward to me, but that would be snarly or impossible for the person who actually tried to implement them. Or do behaviors that I think are harmless that aren't necessarily harmless.) Because of the difference between belief and behavior, I can believe I'm a good person who wants to do well around others and hold healthy suspicion about whether or not my behaviors are helpful and good to others and myself. I don't know what I don't know, so it seems safest to assume that my privileges cloud my understanding sufficiently that I'm not part of the advanced class, or possibly even the basic one. It's above the line of acceptable behavior, but it seems foolish to attribute anything more than "barely over the line" to those behaviors, on the assumption that there are so many other things that I don't even know I don't know that keep me from believing that I might be doing okay.
( Presenting the evidence against this dim view of myself )
This is one of the phrases that I don't believe fully, rather than I don't believe at all, because of my developed sensitivities. There's been enough evidence put in front of me to make the case that I'm not barely above the bar, and that where I think the bar is often is above where other people think the bar is. But I have to consciously think about those pieces of evidence to get to that conclusion, or so that I have a chance at smacking brainweasels off of me when they're swarming and biting. Self-forgiveness is not easy for me, as we'll explore later on in the series, and I'm still not great at untangling "what you did" from "who you are." With time and practice, perhaps, it will become easier.
