Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2019-07-25 07:46 pm
silveradept) wrote2019-07-25 07:46 pm
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Sunshine Challenge #7: Tune Your Horn
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.
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 ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
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.)
And I'm working on believing it when other people say nice things about me.
Sure, we can try that.
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 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.