silveradept | A Friday Five I meant to post last week (Reply)

What was the best compliment you ever received?

That's reasonably difficult to say. I could walk back through the comments and notes at work, on AO3, here in the journal, at love memes, and all the rest of the documented nice things people have said about me, and I would probably find a way to say that it was about something I did and not someone I am. Yes, the things I do follow from the person I am, stop using your logic on me.

I think, though, the ones that go to my core are the Hufflepuff virtues that jenett described elsewhere - I you compliment me that I am, or the thing I did / said is, kind and helpful (or just one or the other), then it's the thing that lands in the best space. (Consequently, you can really stab me terribly if you say I was actively unkind and not helpful.)

What are your five best talents?

Also a good question. Because I'm not used to thinking of myself in "talented" terms, comparing myself as a beginner of things to those with the 10,000 hours experts. (The classic Ira Glass problem of taste being ahead of skill, combined with the idea that everyone else is always going to be more talented and skilful than me. I think this particular thing also stems from the part where school always liked to say I was talented at a single thing...)

In any case, the question of "talent" also implies a natural affinity rather than a thing that you get good at through practice and study, which would further restrict the set of available skills, so, yeah. Apparently, that's a very fraught question.

However, there are things that I have some skill in:
- I can accidentally frighten small children with regularity.
- I have been known to avoid collisions that I have no business knowing are about to happen.
- My brain horde of information is organized very differently than others', I suspect, but it absolutely has connections that look and sound strange to others but that help with recalling the most trivia-l of things.
- I can number-juggle reasonably well, which makes for fun when doing more complex maths, because I'm prone to breaking the complex into lots of simpler operations, doing those, and then coming back with an answer much faster than expected. Or at least an approximation. (Which does mean I occasionally give odd values of cash that only become clear when the change comes back with a quarter.) For this skill, I thoroughly blame playing games with family, where skip-counting was encouraged and the young children were required to play the bank.
- I made it through graduate school and got employed in my chosen field. Which means I have the skills learned in school and a strong amount of shamelessness about looking silly in front of other people. This turns out to be useful here and there.

What do you wish most people knew about you, and why?

There's a lot I could say that would fall, essentially, into "I'm not dangerous," but that is essentially asking someone to ignore their own trauma and lived experience and well-formed biases because I said so. And then there will be someone for whom I am, in fact, dangerous, and they should not ignore that because I said so.

In lieu of that, the thing I want people to know most about me is that I tend toward feeling like I'm being a burden or being tolerated and not accepted, so if you think of me as part of the group and you want me there, you may have to say so explicitly and repeatedly.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far, and why does it mean so much to you?

[REDACTED.]

If you could achieve anything in your life, what would it be?

I mean, that world peace thing looks really nice. A successful peaceful first contact, or getting myself to the point where I could be functionally immortal and this be able to spend all the time I want on things would also be good.

Much more reasonably, I think the grand achievement of my life would be to have influenced something or someone strongly by being the librarian in the right place at all the right times in their life, and for them to close the loop by acknowledging it and saying so where I can hear it and see it and take it to heart. (Preferably before the end of my career...) Because I do a lot of sending people out into the world and not actually hearing back from any of them about what worked, what didn't, or anything else.