It's hard to find surprise and delight when you think of yourself as mostly failure

[silveradept]

sonia talked about doing things that your earlier self would be delighted and astonished in. This should be a simple enough exercise, right?

Weeeeeeeelllllllll…

Perhaps it's the recency bias at work, but it's a lot easier for me to think of things that my younger self would have been disappointed in
rather than things they would have astonished and delighted about. I think some of that, though, has to do with the upbringing that I had and the expectations I had for myself. When you're raised in the middle class, with a stay-at-home parent, and without many of the struggles that others might point to where surviving and thriving is the accomplishment all of itself. It was always going to be that there was a college education, and doing well in schooling, and finding work and doing well at it. Those were things that were assumed to be true, rather than things that could be considered accomplishments. (They are, very much, accomplishments.)

When you set your standards that high, what goes on top of that is the sort of thing that doesn't happen to everyone, and is just as much a matter of luck as it is opportunity and skill. The thing is, when you go into a field like librarianship, there are only a few spaces and places where you can become famous and nationally known, and even then, it's most likely that you'll be famous only among other librarians. So that part of being raised with the expectations that as a result of your privilege you can do anything and will be well known went splat. And that's before the genuinely aggravating recognition that for far more than my career than I would like, I have been working with or under someone who has been actively trying to get me into trouble or to fire me from the position. (First, incompetent manager. Then, according to a co-worker, one of my other co-workers was trying to get me in trouble. Then there was the other co-worker who was, as best I can tell, frosty to me and everyone else.) The potential saving grace for that is that none of those people seemed to take offense to me because of the work I was actually doing, but for other, unrelated things or their own personal situations. Still, it's paranoia-making to have had so many people upset with me and me not to know it. I'm apparently not good at figuring it out. Since I, perhaps naively, assume that people will tell me if there are problems, or that if I can get along with someone professionally, that's going to be good enough for both of us, I don't really worry about it. Which is good, I suppose, because it means I don't end up second-guessing everything I do. It is…disappointing, though, and a blow to the thought that I'm actually good at my job if I have people that I work with campaigning against me like that.

Being raised in a space where people are married relatively early on in life and raise children because That's What You Do and what God Said To Do, well, being unmarried and, worse, not having married the sweetheart I was supposed to have found before exiting college, nor the person who I fell in with right out of college (and not the person after that, either) is a thing that my younger self…is kind of okay with. The disappointment part is really that I don't have children of my own. Although that's tempered by the reality that I don't have the means to do it with, and I'm not so full of my own privilege that I'm going to forge ahead with having children that I don't know that I will be able to raise and provide for. There's a little bit of substitution that happens with work, with all the other children who I get to borrow for a bit to help or do programming for and then give back, but I don't have any younglings of my own. (And sometimes I worry that I wouldn't be able to do it well, even if I had the means.)

And then there was the disaster of The Ex, a pretty terrible blow to any confidence I might have had that I was capable of a working relationship, and the consequences of that terrible time, where it's obvious that I'm happier and better now compared to what I was, but it also impacts the self-thought that the job of the dudely-looking person in the household is to be able to provide for the people (and pets) in the household. Which is further aggravated by the regular hearing of "if all my problems could be solved with more money, then I don't have problems," which, well, yes, in the sense that problems money can solve are usually not super terrible problems, but while money nominally can't buy happiness, it can certainly alleviate a whole bunch of issues if you have enough of it.

So, yeah, I set some pretty high expectations for myself. (And realized what I was doing and where I was headed as early as the fifth grade, when I specifically asked for something other than "Academic excellence" to be the thing that I got for the yearly end-of-class awards. It ended up being "academic excellence and…" a thing that I don't actually remember because I was so aggravated that they hadn't actually done the thing I'd asked. It was pretty clear at that point that I was always going to be the smart kid, and so I might as well lean into it. Which causes its own problems when something happens that challenges the identity you've built around yourself.

I opened a letter from the self of twenty years ago his year. They included some newspaper clippings, some political opinions, some self-assessment ranks, and a computer catalog with some commentary. I think they would be suitably impressed with the way that mass storage has gotten cheaper and bigger, to the point where they would blink at the idea of eight terabytes being available in a portable-ish drive, with full high-definition video files on it. And the speeds of the computing machines that I'm writing this on, as well as the widespread availability of broadband connections, rather than the world of dial-up. They might also be pretty interested in the portable computer in my pocket and the tablet machine, and my successes at bending various devices to my purpose and keeping them updated well past the point their manufacturer support has ended. Collegiate me would be properly impressed that I have set up and use multiple Linux-based machines after some terrible abortive attempts with Mandrake Linux some time ago. Current me would say that it was merely a matter of following the recipe, but that would be eliding over a significant amount of troubleshooting, documentation reading, and in one memorable case, causing a hard jump to debugging mode by deliberately shorting a circuit to the right pad. Current me would think that the work that goes into making those recipes is the important stuff, but the other people in my household point out that being able to follow the recipe indicates a certain amount of understanding and knowledge that is not a default setting for everyone, as does being able to troubleshoot things when they go slightly sideways.

My younger self and I would certainly commiserate about how all of those things that Dad tried to teach us and that we didn't want to learn turn out to be really handy when you have a house and you have to do minor repairs, and minor destruction, and all those other things that need tools and knowledge of how to use them. I don't think they'd be impressed at all the stuff that's been done, but they'd certainly help me grumble about how we learned them and they ended up becoming useful.

I'm not entirely sure how my younger self would react to the knowledge that we're published and have given talks, to be honest. It's not the nationwide fame that is supposed to be the thing I was shooting for, but I do have some chapter credits in various publications, some article credits in others, and one of the most effective ways I get my organization to send me to conferences is by coming up with ideas for things to get accepted as talks in the places where I want to go, so there's that.

You can see the difficulty in finding something that matched the prompt, because the expectations early me set for themselves, or at least assumed were the spaces where we could confidently say we've made it are the kinds of things that show an intensely privileged background and quite possibly trying to hold myself to highly perfect standards as a compensation mechanism, either working correctly or malfunctioning, to the stuff going on in my head. In just about all the metrics that I've set for myself, I've come up short, and for all the successes that I've had, I can't muster enough pride and happiness in them to think of them as the things that my younger self would be really proud of. Perhaps because I don't have a lot of practice in internalizing the idea of effort as valuable by itself, as opposed to results.

In that regard, the lack of a singular metric by with which to measure success in fic efforts is sometimes really helpful, because it lets me (forces me to) decide for myself what qualifies as good which allows me (suggests strongly to me) to see it in a positive light. Younger me might be delighted that I've kept up the old tradition of writing fic and that I have an audience who have said they enjoyed it. They might equally be embarrassed and flabbergasted at the idea that I let it out to other people instead of keeping it stashed in the places where only I would see it. Depends on which of my younger selves we're talking to.

The closest thing I might have to my younger self being very happy about where my older self is now might very well be that my younger self would look at the flaming wreckage of what happened between then and now and go "We survived this? Well done, us." Possibly with a fistbump.

Feel free to tell me if there are things you would think my younger self would be much more agog about, or what the things are that your younger self would be delighted or astonished about?

Comments

[silveradept]

Thanks. Yes, it's worth something, since a lot of the stuff that I end up doing and saying seems to go out into the void, with the possibility of something coming back a long time later.

[batrachian]

Like, it's not perfect overlap. (Nor should it be; I amn't actually you.) And the bits that don't match make me hesitant, because what if appropriation (if that's the right word. It's not entirely wrong, anyway), since I don't dare lay claim to any lived experience except my own.

Yet. I don't know whether kid!me would even recognize me. Or whether I'd want him to.

[silveradept]

If it resonates, it's probably because you have some lived experience that makes you sympathetic or empathetic. I doubt that you would want to take all of my experience and pass it off as your own, anyway.

Being unrecognizable to your younger self shows a lot of change has happened. Whether it's good change or not is something you get to decide.

[batrachian]

Where it gets fuzzy: without the context of knowing my lived experience already, trying to map which parts have resonance is...difficult? And actually providing that context is something that I frequently, err. Struggle with. So I'm not intentionally claiming It All, but still might end up giving the wrong impression from a mismatch on pieces.

Some is good, some is not. Some is flood blessings. Speculating on What If (especially re: certain watershed events) is a good way to lose a day to brainweasels. :/