December Days 2022 #17: Ebullient
Dec. 17th, 2022 11:46 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.]
This is not a wrong adjective for me, as such, but apart from those of you that have seen me at my most animated, usually during programming, how could you possibly tell what kind of spirits I am in from my text? Do my choices of words bounce along at a relatively quick tempo, suggesting I am trying to maintain interest and get my information across before you get bored with me and click the back button? Do I use enough descriptive words to convey my emotional state while I write, so you know for certain when I'm feeling weighted, anhedonic, or depressed and when I am in the mood to let fly with fire and flame, to call for my fighting trousers, or experiencing one of the moments of joy in my life that well be good for as long as it lasts, until inevitably the joy is crushed by sometime I've failed to remember or take into consideration?
There was a Tumblr post of screenshoted tweets of someone talking about how people with neurodivergence, and very much so for autism or variable attention stimulus, learn to distrust the presence of joy and happiness specifically because joy and happiness are strong indicators that something is not okay and we are unaware of it until it crashes down on us through memory finally kicking in or someone being unhappy with us for not doing something we promised or being unhappy with us because we are expressing happiness in ways that are socially undesirable or unacceptable. Or because our happiness is seen as threatening to them or something to be crushed or dumped on as a power trip or in revenge because they're not having a good day and therefore we shouldn't, either. After enough time where we thought everything was okay and everyone around us believes it "should have been obvious" that it wasn't okay, we stop trusting our own senses and perceptions of the world, and so the feeling of joy comes with an undercurrent, or it flees quickly to be replaced by shame or embarrassment about what was left undone or unnoticed while indulging ourselves in things that made us happy. In my case, as with so many other manifestations of my variable attention stimulus traits, I built Systems. The kind that specifically push enjoyable, engaging, time-taking things to the bottom of the list of things to do, after every other possible thing that might need doing today, because starting a thing that might trigger hyperfocus is risky, and because the amount of shame generated from missing something I wanted to do, or losing too much time to an activity, or having a partner be unhappy with me because things didn't get done outstrips any happy feelings from participating in things like playing games. That, and there's always the possibility of interruption, which can interfere with enjoyment as well. I don't blame anyone for them, nor do I think the inevitable interruptions are done deliberately to sabotage my enjoyment, but they do happen. I sometimes don't do the more involved things I would like to do, so that when the inevitable interruption happens, I can be interrupted to resolve the situation. This situation plays out at both work and home, and the constant interruptions and disruptions making it hard to do focused work is shared across all of my employer's workplaces.
My choice of a public-facing position at work also requires a certain amount of ebullience, as part of the customer service paradigm. Regardless of my actual emotional state, I'm expected to project an aura of approachability, friendliness, and interest in whatever task or question the library user has for me, every time. Even if this is the third time in two minutes that I've been told the answer I looked up from the official source must be wrong, or the person at the computer station is clicking willy-nilly or powering past error messages and dialog boxes in their frustration or belief that the computers are out to get them. Or when someone is using a reading level system as a prison for a reader rather than as a measurement of what skills they possess and what skills they need additional practice on. I may have a little bit more leeway to disappoint or be direct rather than having to subscribe to the entirely toxic principle that "the customer is always right," but I gain that privilege by suffering the curse of a couple of different, equally toxic principles. From customers, it's "My taxes pay your salary." (The truthful but snarky response we don't get to use: "Here's your nickel back.") From administration and professional organizations, it's "We have to collect all points of view," especially as it applies to how we spend those tax dollars on collections and services. At the merest hint that there might be more than one side to something, and that someone, somewhere, considers those sides to have a political element to them, then all sides must be collected and presented to the public without any wisp of whether or not the library and its staff believes that one of more of these sides has more merit than any other. That lack of judgment supposedly undergirds why people trust library workers as authoritative, but Anastasia Chiu, Fobazi M. Ettarh, and Jennifer A. Ferretti suggest that trust is based on a foundation of seeing library work as sacred and pure and a sometimes-tacit agreement the library will always replicate the biases of the society around them and thus appear unbiased. Once the second part of that premise is obviously no longer true, the first is shed without a second thought, and the same people who beatified library workers when they were in line now demonize them as "groomers," in complete contravention of facts and the statistics about who is most likely to engage in child abuse (and child sexual abuse.) They can feel control slipping away and the old agreements no longer holding, so they escalate immediately to accusations of conduct meant to evoke immediate and emotional condemnation and fear. And because the first attack is almost always the rhetorical equivalent of detonating a dirty bomb, professional organizations and administrators alike have withdrawn their public support for staff so accused for fear the fallout will contaminate them as well.
Which brings us back to the adjective. To say that things have to change, and that those who start doing the work now will make it easier on the transition later, is fairly trite and had been said by many others before me with even more reasons to want an accelerated and well-directed movement for change. After all, to want something to change and to explain to people how they can change is a sign that you believe someone is capable of changing, and even desires to do so. I came into this profession full of energy and ideas and rather than try to help me get those ideas implemented or slow me around house to submit proposals, I was mostly told to go away from the complete lack of interest others had in those ideas. Even when they became wildly successful programs in their own right. I have spent significant time in this organization, and I have yet to see any of the meaningful suggestions made by myself or from teams I was in charge of get any serious system-w8de attention or implementation. I have yet to see suggestions made by btaver folk than I get implemented on recruitment, retention, and possibly even doing something about that intentional silence that appears any time someone makes it clear and obvious that our tools are working exactly as they are supposed to, but we keep feeding them racist and conspiracy theory-peddling inputs and claiming we have to or that it's actually good, because viewpoint diversity and because we can't actually back up any of those statements with action or even declining to buy something because the author and the work will espouse racism, sexism, or conspiracy theories as of they were real things. If we do that, it's "censorship." And yet, I still believe that it's possible to change, and I try to put all of that energy that goes into helping the difficult and into making programming fun, all of the ebullience, into finding whatever way works best toward bringing that change into existence, or, barring that, finding somewhere to show others not to do what we're doing, so that even if we can't lead, we can eventually figure it out from everyone else who is. Despite all the time that has been spent here and the effort of into trying to make me into a person who only really cares about themselves and perhaps their own specific location, I have Big Plans for anyone who will take us seriously, and the enthusiasm to encourage change all the way through the system.
It's also nice not having a person in your life who was actively resentful of the idea that you might want to have a life of your own that want firmly attached to her and that might want to do things separately from her. That really helps any kind of ebullience come out.
- ebullient (comparative more ebullient, superlative most ebullient)
- Enthusiastic; high-spirited.
- (literally, of a liquid) Boiling or agitated as if boiling.
This is not a wrong adjective for me, as such, but apart from those of you that have seen me at my most animated, usually during programming, how could you possibly tell what kind of spirits I am in from my text? Do my choices of words bounce along at a relatively quick tempo, suggesting I am trying to maintain interest and get my information across before you get bored with me and click the back button? Do I use enough descriptive words to convey my emotional state while I write, so you know for certain when I'm feeling weighted, anhedonic, or depressed and when I am in the mood to let fly with fire and flame, to call for my fighting trousers, or experiencing one of the moments of joy in my life that well be good for as long as it lasts, until inevitably the joy is crushed by sometime I've failed to remember or take into consideration?
There was a Tumblr post of screenshoted tweets of someone talking about how people with neurodivergence, and very much so for autism or variable attention stimulus, learn to distrust the presence of joy and happiness specifically because joy and happiness are strong indicators that something is not okay and we are unaware of it until it crashes down on us through memory finally kicking in or someone being unhappy with us for not doing something we promised or being unhappy with us because we are expressing happiness in ways that are socially undesirable or unacceptable. Or because our happiness is seen as threatening to them or something to be crushed or dumped on as a power trip or in revenge because they're not having a good day and therefore we shouldn't, either. After enough time where we thought everything was okay and everyone around us believes it "should have been obvious" that it wasn't okay, we stop trusting our own senses and perceptions of the world, and so the feeling of joy comes with an undercurrent, or it flees quickly to be replaced by shame or embarrassment about what was left undone or unnoticed while indulging ourselves in things that made us happy. In my case, as with so many other manifestations of my variable attention stimulus traits, I built Systems. The kind that specifically push enjoyable, engaging, time-taking things to the bottom of the list of things to do, after every other possible thing that might need doing today, because starting a thing that might trigger hyperfocus is risky, and because the amount of shame generated from missing something I wanted to do, or losing too much time to an activity, or having a partner be unhappy with me because things didn't get done outstrips any happy feelings from participating in things like playing games. That, and there's always the possibility of interruption, which can interfere with enjoyment as well. I don't blame anyone for them, nor do I think the inevitable interruptions are done deliberately to sabotage my enjoyment, but they do happen. I sometimes don't do the more involved things I would like to do, so that when the inevitable interruption happens, I can be interrupted to resolve the situation. This situation plays out at both work and home, and the constant interruptions and disruptions making it hard to do focused work is shared across all of my employer's workplaces.
My choice of a public-facing position at work also requires a certain amount of ebullience, as part of the customer service paradigm. Regardless of my actual emotional state, I'm expected to project an aura of approachability, friendliness, and interest in whatever task or question the library user has for me, every time. Even if this is the third time in two minutes that I've been told the answer I looked up from the official source must be wrong, or the person at the computer station is clicking willy-nilly or powering past error messages and dialog boxes in their frustration or belief that the computers are out to get them. Or when someone is using a reading level system as a prison for a reader rather than as a measurement of what skills they possess and what skills they need additional practice on. I may have a little bit more leeway to disappoint or be direct rather than having to subscribe to the entirely toxic principle that "the customer is always right," but I gain that privilege by suffering the curse of a couple of different, equally toxic principles. From customers, it's "My taxes pay your salary." (The truthful but snarky response we don't get to use: "Here's your nickel back.") From administration and professional organizations, it's "We have to collect all points of view," especially as it applies to how we spend those tax dollars on collections and services. At the merest hint that there might be more than one side to something, and that someone, somewhere, considers those sides to have a political element to them, then all sides must be collected and presented to the public without any wisp of whether or not the library and its staff believes that one of more of these sides has more merit than any other. That lack of judgment supposedly undergirds why people trust library workers as authoritative, but Anastasia Chiu, Fobazi M. Ettarh, and Jennifer A. Ferretti suggest that trust is based on a foundation of seeing library work as sacred and pure and a sometimes-tacit agreement the library will always replicate the biases of the society around them and thus appear unbiased. Once the second part of that premise is obviously no longer true, the first is shed without a second thought, and the same people who beatified library workers when they were in line now demonize them as "groomers," in complete contravention of facts and the statistics about who is most likely to engage in child abuse (and child sexual abuse.) They can feel control slipping away and the old agreements no longer holding, so they escalate immediately to accusations of conduct meant to evoke immediate and emotional condemnation and fear. And because the first attack is almost always the rhetorical equivalent of detonating a dirty bomb, professional organizations and administrators alike have withdrawn their public support for staff so accused for fear the fallout will contaminate them as well.
Which brings us back to the adjective. To say that things have to change, and that those who start doing the work now will make it easier on the transition later, is fairly trite and had been said by many others before me with even more reasons to want an accelerated and well-directed movement for change. After all, to want something to change and to explain to people how they can change is a sign that you believe someone is capable of changing, and even desires to do so. I came into this profession full of energy and ideas and rather than try to help me get those ideas implemented or slow me around house to submit proposals, I was mostly told to go away from the complete lack of interest others had in those ideas. Even when they became wildly successful programs in their own right. I have spent significant time in this organization, and I have yet to see any of the meaningful suggestions made by myself or from teams I was in charge of get any serious system-w8de attention or implementation. I have yet to see suggestions made by btaver folk than I get implemented on recruitment, retention, and possibly even doing something about that intentional silence that appears any time someone makes it clear and obvious that our tools are working exactly as they are supposed to, but we keep feeding them racist and conspiracy theory-peddling inputs and claiming we have to or that it's actually good, because viewpoint diversity and because we can't actually back up any of those statements with action or even declining to buy something because the author and the work will espouse racism, sexism, or conspiracy theories as of they were real things. If we do that, it's "censorship." And yet, I still believe that it's possible to change, and I try to put all of that energy that goes into helping the difficult and into making programming fun, all of the ebullience, into finding whatever way works best toward bringing that change into existence, or, barring that, finding somewhere to show others not to do what we're doing, so that even if we can't lead, we can eventually figure it out from everyone else who is. Despite all the time that has been spent here and the effort of into trying to make me into a person who only really cares about themselves and perhaps their own specific location, I have Big Plans for anyone who will take us seriously, and the enthusiasm to encourage change all the way through the system.
It's also nice not having a person in your life who was actively resentful of the idea that you might want to have a life of your own that want firmly attached to her and that might want to do things separately from her. That really helps any kind of ebullience come out.
