silveradept | To Do Is To Be, To Be Is To Do, Do-Be-Do-Be-Do

I held something out from the last ball of links, because I thought it warranted a little futher introspection. It's a piece on the potentially terrifying reality that no matter how much you feel like you don't have power or are pretending, there is someone out there who looks up to you and who thinks you have that power. Which comes with an admonishment that because we have that power, we can't let our own feelings of inadequacy allow us to treat others cruelly or thoughtlessly.

It's slightly terrifying to think that someone might think of me as worth idolizing or thinking well of, because I'm not used to it, but also because I'm worried that I'll screw it up, or that I'm fooling myself and others about how good a person I am. Which requires a touch of unpacking, most likely, for full understanding.

So. The tradition I was raised in, unlike many of the others that are in the same family, is one that believes that one not only has to say the words to invoke salvation, but there have to be actions that accompany those words. While also maintaining the position that any human is unable to achieve salvation (and they're not too sanguine about the ability of humans to be moral creatures at all) without the assistance of the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, His Designated Intercessors, and/or appropriate Staff that can assist humans. There's a lot of "you have to do good to be good, and best to do it in ways that don't get you fame or recognition for it, or it stops being good."

The cultural context that I have in the States, growing up ruralish and white, doesn't quite completely mesh with that tradition, but it does pretty well when it comes to the cultural imperative that white people are Good people. (Historically speaking, not so much, but there are a lot of inconvenient truths that are considered rude to bring up.) To the point where you will see a lot of effort expended to push someone who turns out to be indefensibly Bad out of the group. "Well, he's not really one of Us, because we're Good people, and Good people aren't [ν]"

There's a useful framework around Good and Bad that could help with some of this, which separates out things like intention from things like effects. Which allows for the construction of saying "You did a bad thing" that allows it to be entirely divorced from the concept of whether you are an intrinsically bad person. To the immense frustration of people who are trying to use this construction, though, to a lot of white people, being a good person and doing good things are very tightly wound around each other, and pulling on the one means the other resonates, and it gets frustrating to keep having the one be substituted for the other, because that demands extra work be done to soothe the feelings of the person who thinks they're being told they're a bad person, when what they're being told is hat they did a bad thing. (Doing a bad thing can be learned from with the aim of not having it happen again. Being a bad person is an intrinsic value that can't be changed, so there's no point in trying.)

With that in mind (do good works, be a good person, but also, nobody can be good or do good without intervention), we'll add on an additional wrinkle, which is that even if it's not a neuroatypicality with a specific name, there's definitely something up with my brain that makes it extra sensitive to the possibility that I've made a mistake or committed a wrong, and to believe the consequences of those things are much bigger than they actually are. This isn't helped by the concurrent traumas of The Unnameable Ex, The Incompetent Boss, and at least one co-worker in my career who wanted to get me fired. Plus childhood experiences, the kind where I don't even realize I'm doing something, and nobody around me has both the vocabulary and the patience to explain what's happening. I didn't get a lot of practice in "wait, do you want commiseration or advice?" until later on because I didn't know that was a thing to ask. That kind of thing. It's pretty easy to convince me that it's my fault about just about anything, because bad brain chemistry and bad people in my life. (I can tell you that it is the responsibility of the abuser not to abuse, but believing it in my own life is harder, because I'm comparing my inside to your outside.) This does not leave me disposed to self-compassion, shall we say, and so while an accepted best practice when someone says you did a bad thing is to own it, apologize, stay engaged, and thank the person for the trust they have in telling you this, (or similar), there's a good chance that the embarrassment squick is going to override any learning, and that I might need to have time away to process what's happening and to feel through all the emotions that come up and remind/convince myself that what's being said is that I did a bad thing, not that I am an intrinsically bad person. And that's sort of the "rock/hard place" spot, because I don't want to burden the person telling me with having to deal with my emotional reactions, because that's not fair to them, but it's also not fair to them if I disengage and can't help or learn until I've gone and had a good cry/rage about it. (And it's not an excuse to say, "ah, well, neuroatypical, so you have to take on this additional burden if you want to help me get better.")

So far, so good? Culturally intrinsic need to be a good person, tradition that says it's impossible to be a good person (or possibly even do good things) without help from the outside, tendency toward all the strong (wrong) reactions to being told I've messed up. Then we add the final layer, which is the inevitability that I'm going to screw up somewhere. This is not negotiable, because even though I might believe I can achieve some sort of no-miss always perfect with everything in my life, it's already been demonstrated repeatedly that I haven't achieved it. So on the inevitable failure that's sufficiently close to that core of "must be a good person", it's unlikely that I'm going to react well, and there's a good chance that said not reacting well will be public enough or memorable enough or something else that a person who admires me will see me both make the mistake and will see me react poorly to the mistake, and I can't imagine that either of those, much less both of them, will make that person who admires me keep admiring me.

It's probably entirely selfish (and, I think, part of the cultural pillars of whiteness) to want to fail spectacularly in private, where nobody sees it and I still get all the benefit of learning, but it's unlikely that I or anyone else will be that lucky. (Sheltered, maybe, but not lucky.) Failing in private, with no eyes on you, with no expectations or followers or people who look up to you seeing it, is a luxury. And, frankly, the easiest way to ensure that your failures don't happen where people who admire you can see them is to not have admirers in the first place. So long as I can believe that there aren't people who look up to me or who take my word as something important and informative (at least, in those times when I don't have the Librarian Hat on, and yes, I'm aware that when I have the Librarian Hat on is one of the times where it's more likely that I'm going to put my foot in my mouth, with research to back it up, not less), then the stakes of participation is low enough not to cause worries. Telling me that there's always at least one person who looks up to me enough that I could hurt them through careless action is both true and terrifying, because it means that I'm going to hurt that person with the inevitable screw-up, which is going to trigger the feelings that instead of doing a bad thing, I am a bad person, and those are going to be intense feelings to the order of "nobody should be following me anyway, when I can't give them the perfection they deserve because I am a terrible person who will inevitably continue to mess things up" that I really would rather have somewhere and somewhen than right here, right now, and those feelings will always come back to say hello at the slightest provocation.

I agree entirely with the piece that we probably all have greater influence than we think, and that carelessly lashing out is going to show us just how far our influence had reached, as people we didn't even know we were affecting give backlash about that carelessness, and that we have a responsibility to not carelessly lash out, or to believe that nobody will take us to heart when we do (because of our own feelings of inadequacy) because it's generally not a good thing to hurt people intentionally or accidentally. I just…I don't want the responsibility of someone looking up to me or thinking that I am a good person, because I don't want to be responsible for their inevitable disillusionment about me. (Yes, also, I want friends and people to talk to and geek out with and interact with and have positive experiences with, so there's always going to be the risk that this time is the time where I put my foot in it. That's logical, and therefore, entirely inadmissible into brainweasel court. As is the likelihood that the balance of interactions is going to be positive for people who do choose to hang out and interact, because if it weren't, they'd stop hanging out and interacting.)

Brains are weird.