December Days 2022 #9: Analytical
Dec. 9th, 2022 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]
Today I am one of the lucky 10,000 in learning that analysis and synthesis are antonyms, as analysis involves breaking things down into their component parts and synthesis is about putting component parts together into a greater whole. After the initial laugh, because I usually describe myself as a synthesist rather than an analyst when it comes to writing posts and building worldviews, I realize that analysis and synthesis are much more the poles of an alternator for me than separate things entirely. Complex things often need analyzing into their component parts and interactions to explain how the overarching system can go disastrously wrong (or, more often these days, terribly and inhumanely right), and possible solutions or other ideas often need synthesizing from their component and disparate parts into a more unified whole or direction that makes it clearer how the components are supposed to work together to achieve their outputs.
The analytical part of me comes from a couple of impulses, "words mean things" and "if I understand causes, I can better anticipate their effects." Or avoid them, redirect them, brace for them, accept them, or (the one I want to do most and probably don't) solve them. But words first. I really appreciate the wide variety of ways that language works. The gradations of meaning present in choosing one word over another so as to express myself more fully to someone. It doesn't always work, and in some places, dropping silver-dollar words is a signifier that you are an Other, an outsider, an acceptable target, because "real people don't talk like that." That was one of the biggest complaints about the Black president that racist white people felt they could articulate without being immediately branded as a racist. He didn't sound like them, and he didn't sound like someone from their conception of the hood, so there had to be something suspicious about him. But words and their shades of meaning are important to me, and so there are times where I will start searching my mental lexicon for a word or phrase while trying to describe it in relation to other words and phrases. Or I will insist on using a more specific word to describe a thing rather than the more widely known and more generic word because I want the specific nuances of meaning from the word I chose to be part of the conversation. Sometimes it's a way of throwing shade without being obvious about it, sometimes it's a way of specifically praising something in the middle of a lot of shade-throwing. To do language things like that so specifically, I have to be able to classify and link, analyze what makes something different from other, similar words.
The other part of analysis is about trying to solve problems. Part of trying to adjust my mental landscape and dial down my baseline anxiety is trying to shift my perception of self-worth away from making my validation conditional and chasing fulfillment of the conditions into the idea that, as an existing being, I have already fulfilled the necessary conditions for love and validation. This is not an easy job, not least because there needs to be some separation between meeting valid conditions for things like a job description and not digging myself underneath the lowest bars of acceptable behavior and the unhelpful conditions that provide only a sense of not failing when they are achieved and a massive surge of guilt and shame when they are not achieved. While some of these conditions are externally imposed, the grand majority of them, valid and unhelpful alike, come from the inside. I am setting conditions for myself, and doing a bad job of distributing between "these things are the core of my being" and "these are challenges and expectations I have, but they are not core."
Earlier-me, the one that is about the age of high school and undergraduate, carried a belief as "core" about being good at games, and especially video games. Undergraduate really have that one a regular beating, considering how many other people in my friend group has spent much more time practicing and playing games than I had. A reasonable entity would point out that much of my game play time was spent on console and PC RPGs, and the games I was playing were usually action games, fighting games, and other things that I was familiar with, but did not have a group of players to practice my skills with for significant amounts of time. So, you know, I was never a good-tier player (much less a god-tier one), but I had set the condition such that my worth to the group was in my skill rather than in having a good time with friends. Undiagnosed VAST and sleep apnea likely didn't help, but it took me nearly ten years to find a working solution of how to set the conditions away from what I had internalized as "core" (because I couldn't really perceive all the other parts of me at the time, even with others pointing out that I was pretty cool to them) and solve the problem of bad emotional dysregulation and overinvestment in skill being the only thing that mattered. Once I had to be the responsible adult in the room, as it were, I figured out that I had a pathway out if I stopped trying to play my "good" character that would get trounced (core damage!) and just started playing whatever character came up at random. If I got dealt a character I wasn't great at, oh well. The condition became "how long can I stay in and what feats can I perform" rather than "I have to win this because I'm good at games." Surprising perhaps nobody, it worked and continues to work in most of my gaming settings. With more practice, I might be able to keep the chart of Pokemon types in my head, but I know there are bits and pieces of it there that I can recall for favorable matchups. With more time and practice at performing combinations, I could get better at action and fighting games, but it turns out I dislike most matching systems for their inability to accurately pair up players of similar skill levels to create a good bout. Most of the responses I would get to that complaint would be "git gud" or other implications that the systems are fine, it's just my n00b-scrub nature getting in the way of powering through my thousand losses, absorbing how to be good from getting thrashed soundly, and learning how to do frame-perfect inputs on the fly from complete memorization of the moveset before my first win.
The solution to that problem is "I have better things to do with my time at the moment," combined with "I can support other games that don't encourage this kind of system." So I get decent at Smash Brothers and okay enough at Kingdom Hearts to beat Sephiroth and look with envy at the people who do flawless no-hit combos while recognizing there's a lot of practice that went into that run. And into the people who do speedruns, too. And occasionally, I get to show off a little for the next generation when I'm on systems that I did have time to spend and learn tricks and practice and get good at, or at least okay at. It really is a question if whether I've set the condition at "Good" or at "Fun."
Some conditions aren't quite so easily budged or subverted. The condition of "success in life is in having sufficient excesses of money that all unexpected situations can be covered without worry about how much it will cost," for example. My evil ex expected me to cover everything and that she could live the life she had become accustomed to, even though that life was running out of money, if slowly, before she met me. And rather than take a certain amount of pride that I have been able to keep the plates spinning and continue to keep the plates spinning, it still feels like not meeting perfectly reasonable conditions rather than recognizing them as unreasonable and setting goals that are reasonable and achievable and likely already achieved. Thankfully, when poking at things that are close to core or that have trauma armor around them, I'm not doing it by myself, but with the assistance of a trained and licensed professional who keeps giving me alternative possibilities of looking at the world and different frames to use for looking at the same thing. Many of those alternatives get a side eye or an "okay, maybe" with them, but I'm still trying to see if I can incorporate them, or at the very least, find out what the specific objections are so that I can let the professional help craft defenses or attacks to help them move toward more helpful things.
Analysis to understand the components, synthesis to create new batteries and systems that are healthier. One step at a time.
- analytical (comparative more analytical, superlative most analytical)
- Of or pertaining to analysis; resolving into elements or constituent parts
- Using analytic reasoning as opposed to synthetic.
Today I am one of the lucky 10,000 in learning that analysis and synthesis are antonyms, as analysis involves breaking things down into their component parts and synthesis is about putting component parts together into a greater whole. After the initial laugh, because I usually describe myself as a synthesist rather than an analyst when it comes to writing posts and building worldviews, I realize that analysis and synthesis are much more the poles of an alternator for me than separate things entirely. Complex things often need analyzing into their component parts and interactions to explain how the overarching system can go disastrously wrong (or, more often these days, terribly and inhumanely right), and possible solutions or other ideas often need synthesizing from their component and disparate parts into a more unified whole or direction that makes it clearer how the components are supposed to work together to achieve their outputs.
The analytical part of me comes from a couple of impulses, "words mean things" and "if I understand causes, I can better anticipate their effects." Or avoid them, redirect them, brace for them, accept them, or (the one I want to do most and probably don't) solve them. But words first. I really appreciate the wide variety of ways that language works. The gradations of meaning present in choosing one word over another so as to express myself more fully to someone. It doesn't always work, and in some places, dropping silver-dollar words is a signifier that you are an Other, an outsider, an acceptable target, because "real people don't talk like that." That was one of the biggest complaints about the Black president that racist white people felt they could articulate without being immediately branded as a racist. He didn't sound like them, and he didn't sound like someone from their conception of the hood, so there had to be something suspicious about him. But words and their shades of meaning are important to me, and so there are times where I will start searching my mental lexicon for a word or phrase while trying to describe it in relation to other words and phrases. Or I will insist on using a more specific word to describe a thing rather than the more widely known and more generic word because I want the specific nuances of meaning from the word I chose to be part of the conversation. Sometimes it's a way of throwing shade without being obvious about it, sometimes it's a way of specifically praising something in the middle of a lot of shade-throwing. To do language things like that so specifically, I have to be able to classify and link, analyze what makes something different from other, similar words.
The other part of analysis is about trying to solve problems. Part of trying to adjust my mental landscape and dial down my baseline anxiety is trying to shift my perception of self-worth away from making my validation conditional and chasing fulfillment of the conditions into the idea that, as an existing being, I have already fulfilled the necessary conditions for love and validation. This is not an easy job, not least because there needs to be some separation between meeting valid conditions for things like a job description and not digging myself underneath the lowest bars of acceptable behavior and the unhelpful conditions that provide only a sense of not failing when they are achieved and a massive surge of guilt and shame when they are not achieved. While some of these conditions are externally imposed, the grand majority of them, valid and unhelpful alike, come from the inside. I am setting conditions for myself, and doing a bad job of distributing between "these things are the core of my being" and "these are challenges and expectations I have, but they are not core."
Earlier-me, the one that is about the age of high school and undergraduate, carried a belief as "core" about being good at games, and especially video games. Undergraduate really have that one a regular beating, considering how many other people in my friend group has spent much more time practicing and playing games than I had. A reasonable entity would point out that much of my game play time was spent on console and PC RPGs, and the games I was playing were usually action games, fighting games, and other things that I was familiar with, but did not have a group of players to practice my skills with for significant amounts of time. So, you know, I was never a good-tier player (much less a god-tier one), but I had set the condition such that my worth to the group was in my skill rather than in having a good time with friends. Undiagnosed VAST and sleep apnea likely didn't help, but it took me nearly ten years to find a working solution of how to set the conditions away from what I had internalized as "core" (because I couldn't really perceive all the other parts of me at the time, even with others pointing out that I was pretty cool to them) and solve the problem of bad emotional dysregulation and overinvestment in skill being the only thing that mattered. Once I had to be the responsible adult in the room, as it were, I figured out that I had a pathway out if I stopped trying to play my "good" character that would get trounced (core damage!) and just started playing whatever character came up at random. If I got dealt a character I wasn't great at, oh well. The condition became "how long can I stay in and what feats can I perform" rather than "I have to win this because I'm good at games." Surprising perhaps nobody, it worked and continues to work in most of my gaming settings. With more practice, I might be able to keep the chart of Pokemon types in my head, but I know there are bits and pieces of it there that I can recall for favorable matchups. With more time and practice at performing combinations, I could get better at action and fighting games, but it turns out I dislike most matching systems for their inability to accurately pair up players of similar skill levels to create a good bout. Most of the responses I would get to that complaint would be "git gud" or other implications that the systems are fine, it's just my n00b-scrub nature getting in the way of powering through my thousand losses, absorbing how to be good from getting thrashed soundly, and learning how to do frame-perfect inputs on the fly from complete memorization of the moveset before my first win.
The solution to that problem is "I have better things to do with my time at the moment," combined with "I can support other games that don't encourage this kind of system." So I get decent at Smash Brothers and okay enough at Kingdom Hearts to beat Sephiroth and look with envy at the people who do flawless no-hit combos while recognizing there's a lot of practice that went into that run. And into the people who do speedruns, too. And occasionally, I get to show off a little for the next generation when I'm on systems that I did have time to spend and learn tricks and practice and get good at, or at least okay at. It really is a question if whether I've set the condition at "Good" or at "Fun."
Some conditions aren't quite so easily budged or subverted. The condition of "success in life is in having sufficient excesses of money that all unexpected situations can be covered without worry about how much it will cost," for example. My evil ex expected me to cover everything and that she could live the life she had become accustomed to, even though that life was running out of money, if slowly, before she met me. And rather than take a certain amount of pride that I have been able to keep the plates spinning and continue to keep the plates spinning, it still feels like not meeting perfectly reasonable conditions rather than recognizing them as unreasonable and setting goals that are reasonable and achievable and likely already achieved. Thankfully, when poking at things that are close to core or that have trauma armor around them, I'm not doing it by myself, but with the assistance of a trained and licensed professional who keeps giving me alternative possibilities of looking at the world and different frames to use for looking at the same thing. Many of those alternatives get a side eye or an "okay, maybe" with them, but I'm still trying to see if I can incorporate them, or at the very least, find out what the specific objections are so that I can let the professional help craft defenses or attacks to help them move toward more helpful things.
Analysis to understand the components, synthesis to create new batteries and systems that are healthier. One step at a time.
