Sunshine Challenge #7: Tune Your Horn

[silveradept]

The final Sunshine Challenge for 2019 asks us to say good things about ourselves. At least one, at some length that is comfortable for the person posting.

At this time, we want to encourage everyone to make a post to discuss at whatever length is comfortable something they love about themselves. We recognize that this is both very introspective and personal, and that sharing the results can be difficult. If you need to keep your post private, that’s fine! What’s important is that we all take this opportunity to be daring and push ourselves out of our comfort zones in order to be more kind to others, but more specifically ourselves on this one. Reflecting on ourselves and putting it in writing is the goal.

It's a self-love meme, as it were. (If you're not familiar with the love meme, it usually takes place in a specific space, where people leave their user/names as a comment to the entry and others go through and leave reply comments about what they admire, enjoy, like, or love about that person. A common variation on the concept is the "words and deeds" love meme, which focuses the content specifically on actions and things posted, said, or otherwise more tangibly in the world than characteristics or personality. DNWs are respected, if the host knows what to look for so they don't unscreen comments that would be unhelpful.)

As challenges go, this one is usually difficult for me, for the intersection of a few different reasons.

People who have been raised in (or are culturally adjacent enough to) many Christian denominations, when they come across the various Deadly Sins, are usually taught Pride is the worst of the lot, being the one that Lucifer held when he rebelled against the Being represented by the tetragrammation. The more Evangelical Protestant your denomination or adjacency gets, the higher likelihood that Pride becomes more of a sin that needs strong correction. (And if you are a woman in this context, the likelihood that you will be called out for it (or "vanity") and required to prove your humility through punishment or other self-abasing acts is at least trebeled compared to a man.) In those contexts, someone else (usually, someone authorized for control of you) can be proud of you or proud for you, but you cannot have pride in yourself, because that's sinful.

(Non-Protestants have it too, to greater and lesser degrees, but Evangelicals are loud and demonstrative about it.)

There's another bit that's fodder for drama set in U.S. schools but comes from the reality of being there, regrettably, and that's Tall Poppy Syndrome. If someone demonstrates they're better at something, or even different from the socially expected (and enforced) norm, others work to make sure that the different one feels miserable and terrible every time they do the thing that they're better / different at. Which results in a lot of people deciding it's not worth the aggravation and they stop doing it until they can get somewhere that lets them be the person they are.

(People complaining that internet friendships are corroding or blocking local ones often miss that there are no friends in the locality, or those friends are all people that might be reluctant to, say, let an under-21 in when they prefer to meet at a bar. Or because they're people who expound on adult topics that could get them in serious trouble if someone underage were present for the discussion. Or because the person who goes visible often takes social oppobrium and they don't want to deal with it.)

It used to be that you could flee to the Internet to escape the terrible meatspace around you, but increasingly, the Internet, and especially the social media parts of it, are becoming extensions of meatspace, with the attendant bullying, Tall Poppy attacks, and other problems that a person was hoping to escape, but can't. Even more so if their employer is spying on them or demanding access to them as a condition of interview or employment. Or they've been attached to an abuser, whether they are conscious of such behavior or not, who demands control and refuses to give them any space at all.

We have (and have had) generations of people (but especially anyone not White, cis, peri, male, wastefully rich, and het) being told they should not succeed, should not aspire to succeed, and should bury anything about them that makes them different that they can.

That so many people do it anyway and talk about doing it anyway is nothing short of a miracle.

So, talking about the things I love about myself is in the same general brainweasel orbit of talking about wanting things. Wants are Avarice and Envy, self-love is Pride and Vanity. Yes, there's always someone better. (You Are Good Enough.)

It doesn't have to be profound or all-encompassing or tailored to the audience. (That's what December Days are for, after all.) But it's got to be something that I love about myself, and I'm so used to seeing myself strictly in the terms of my flaws and things I don't like about myself that I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about the things I do love about myself in an unqualified manner.

Because a lot of the things I'm say are good about me are qualified. "I'm usually an even-keeled person. I want to believe I'm helpful. I strive to live by the teachings of Fred Rogers. I think I'm worth hanging out with. Nobody has told me recently that I'm bad at my job. I sometimes write enjoyable stories, essays, and linklists. I try to be conscientious with language choices. I'm pretty good at taking an idea and expanding on it or helping someone else get it into a workable condition or getting past a block."

I enjoy that I can make search tools dance to my whims much of the time, but I trained on how to do that, so it seems less special. It's really useful that I can translate technical terms and processes into instructions that less technical people can follow. Because I do it all the time, but the ubiquity of it makes it less shiny and wow and much less like something special.

I've successfully installed Linux several times (not on a dead badger, though. That's a bad idea.). Which consisted of finding a walkthrough and following it, for the most part, if the installer didn't walk through the process itself. There's no magic in that, unless being able to follow the instructions is the magic. That's cooking by recipe, which is something I can do as well.

Being The Smart Kid and having that recognized as your pigeonhole trait may have made my mindset trend toward fixed abilities, beyond which only incompetence lies, rather than the growth mindset that says everybody can learn and master new things with time, practice, competent instruction, and the ability to fail a lot without it being a reflection of your self-worth or value. I'm working on shifting more toward growth, especially since I encourage it in the people I'm helping with their technology things. Sometimes I have to change their minds about what is possible for them before I can teach them what they want to know. Shifting toward a growth mindset is difficult, though, when you've been praised primarily for your results and end products, and not much at all for the effort that went into them, regardless of whether they were successful or not. I don't have a lot of models of what praise of effort looks like, compared to praise (or criticism) of results.

So if you ask me about something that I love about myself, it still sounds like a question about intrinsic, fixed attributes and values. If I asked the world around about what they loved about themselves, I'd bet on a nonzero set of replies that said "I love that I'm still trying. I love that I didn't give up. I love that I'm improving. I love that I'm persevering." Which are all things I'm doing. Things are better, even if they're not perfect. The effort is something I can love, even if the results are things not yet up to my taste. (I assume you have all heard Ira Glass talking about the real gap between our tastes and our abilities, and how very little but continuing to create and practice can bridge that gap.)

And elsewhere, finch linked to star-anise about the amount of physical, emotional, and cognitive work it takes to be kind (and the insidiousness of the qualifier "just" that often downplays those efforts), and it starts to look a lot more like I don't have to have the Platonic ideal of anything to love it.

I can love that I want to do better. I can be annoyed that want likes to manifest as critical self-talk when better isn't achieved. I can love that I'll do stuff for other people, like cheerlead, that I haven't figured out how to do for myself yet.

I can love that my second reaction to someone saying "this fic is so good I had to stay up and read it" is "sleep is way more important than fic!"

I can like being tall. It comes in handy a lot of the time. (It hurts my head a lot of the time.)

If you are able to share your post in some way, we also invite you to ask your friend list to comment and add things they love about you as well. You may well be surprised by the results.

And I'm working on believing it when other people say nice things about me.

Just remember that we could all use a little sunshine in our lives, and while it's great to have friends and family who love and support you, it important to recognize that sometimes we need to be our own light. Be warm and bright. Love yourself. ♥

Sure, we can try that.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> If someone demonstrates they're better at something, or even different from the socially expected (and enforced) norm, others work to make sure that the different one feels miserable and terrible every time they do the thing that they're better / different at. <<

This largely depends if you're a poppy or a wild rose. If people want to stab themselves on my thorns, well, it's not my fault. Most people learn fast that I am not a safe target, because wickedness generally requires some cover and I tend to respond by ripping the cover off and naming what they are doing very bluntly. This is uncomfortable for them. People don't like having their insecurities belted out in public. But it's not a tactic that works for someone who wishes to be liked.

>>People complaining that internet friendships are corroding or blocking local ones often miss that there are no friends in the locality<<

Absolutely true, and more for some people than others. A person of average intelligence can walk into a room of 25 people and most of them will be within the ~20 intelligence points up or down that is the usual comfort range. Someone in the top 1% would have to talk to everyone in four such rooms to have a chance of identifying one person at their level, although there would probably be a few at the next level down. The chance of finding anyone smarter is vanishingly small. Much the same is true of asexuals, another group estimated around 1%. Most people are sexuals and interacting across that gap can be awkward for everyone.

>>It used to be that you could flee to the Internet to escape the terrible meatspace around you, but increasingly, the Internet, and especially the social media parts of it, are becoming extensions of meatspace, with the attendant bullying, Tall Poppy attacks, and other problems that a person was hoping to escape, but can't. <<

Remember that cyberspace is the Jedi Tree. It contains only what we bring into it. All people need to do is choose venues with good moderation tools, then set decent expectations. People who violate the group's parameters can be asked to stop or kicked out if they won't. I belong to several groups that rarely if ever have problems. You get what you put up with. If you choose to use venues where people are assholes, you have to deal with assholes. But you could choose somewhere else, or even make your own.

>>Even more so if their employer is spying on them or demanding access to them as a condition of interview or employment. Or they've been attached to an abuser, whether they are conscious of such behavior or not, who demands control and refuses to give them any space at all.<<

Those are very serious problems. Boundary violations make it difficult or impossible to have healthy behavior.

>>So, talking about the things I love about myself is in the same general brainweasel orbit of talking about wanting things. <<

Yeah, but just continuing to exist means that you win against people who wish that those of your traits did not. Talking about it will beat them all the harder. Hit 'im again, the critter ain't dead!

Sunshine ☼ Challenge

[oldtoadwoman]

The thing I rather like about Dreamwidth, in that Internet/meatspace way is that I have total choice on each post. Am I willing to put this out there fully publicly where anyone can see it? Or do I post it only to my circle? Or if I'm having a particularly insecure day do I filter it to only the handful of people I have known long enough to really trust? And if I start to feel panicky about that thing I posted yesterday, I can change my mind and lock it. Or if I post something locked and a few days later calm down and decide I was being paranoid, I can make it public again. (I would never survive in a public forum like Twitter.)

It helped me to focus on things that I admire and respect in other people. When I'm judging myself harshly it's often based on very shallow reasons (I feel ugly, I'm self-conscious about not making much money, etc). I think I'm replaying the old judgments from childhood when kids would tease me for wearing unfashionable clothing and I thought the entire school was staring at my latest zit. But when I think of people that I admire, the things that come to mind are "honest, kind, dependable, welcoming, conscientious, thoughtful, smart, analytical, funny…" and none of those qualities fall too far off the mark. Like you, sometimes I feel I should qualify with "I try to be…" but the very act of trying to be a good person kind of makes you a good person.

Thanks for sharing that Tumblr post on "just" being kind. I think "just" is one of those words I overuse as it is even when it doesn't belong in the sentence at all.

Re: Sunshine ☼ Challenge

[silveradept]

The choice is very nice. Several of the very enterprising youth find ways of doing similar things for platforms that don't support that line of granularity, but it's a lot more effort to do.

The old judgements from youth and school really stick around and come back a lot, even when they're supposed to be very far in the past. And they tend to be the reason for qualified statements, because those childhood judgments were about drawing attention the imperfections and taking enjoyment in them, instead of people being supportive of the attempt or understanding that not everyone will be perfect all the time. "Trying to be" is not "always is", and "always should be" is often the standard to meet.

"Just" is such a minimizing thing, and almost always comes out in a situation where the thing is actually really hard, but our human brains believe it should be much simpler than it is.

[suncani]

I know we've not interacted much, but your posts always make me look at things in a different way and think again about something, or go away and research more about the thing you've mentioned.

I think "always should be" is such a pernicious thought because it's perfectionism 10x. No-one is ever 100% a thing good or bad, but its so easy to use the phrase as a stick to hit oneself over the head with.

[silveradept]

If noodling around in my own head helps other people with theirs, that's a success.

Yes, "always should be" is that thing that gets stuck in your head and [whispers/demands/shouts] that if you're not always, then you can't claim it, because all these times you aren't. Which makes it hard to claim anything at all. (Doubly so if you're comparing your complicated internal self to everyone else's projected and constructed public identities.)

[suncani]

Very true and infinitely frustrating. I know people drag social media in particular for that, but I don't see much difference from when it was in person. The majority of people have always tailored our image to one degree or another, it's just amped it up more.

[silveradept]

It has, and it's made that image available to a much broader audience. Having to keep it up for yourself and for all your followers is a much bigger stressor than just for you and your friends.

[enemytosleep]

“I love that I’m still trying.”

That really hit home for me. ♥

[unavee]

I can relate to the part about needing to use qualifiers. Part of it is wanting to be truthful -- as mentioned by others, for these kinds of traits, it's not like anyone always performs to whatever absolute ideal. And usually if it's something that seems worth mentioning/is on the mind, it's because it's something I'm actively striving toward. So then I get into this fuzzy space of wondering how statistically confident one should be before saying "I am this" or "I do this." (...I hate filling out surveys that have you rank things like this)

And I guess the other part of it is what you've also mentioned. Related to not being prideful and worrying about other's perceptions.

Oh yes, I love that explanation about the gap between our tastes and abilities. I think about it often, actually.

[silveradept]

Indeed. "95% if the time I behave kindly to others" is accurate, but not very roll-off-the-tongue.

I much prefer the surveys that explicitly say "If you don't feel like either of these, choose the one you feel the most like" so that I can feel like I'm not making up something about me to appease the surveyor.

I think a lot of us can relate to using qualifiers.

[quietmoon]

I enjoyed reading this, thank you.

[silveradept]

You're welcome. I'm glad it was enjoyable.