December Days 2022 #19: Encouraging
Dec. 20th, 2022 12:23 am![[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 an adjective I'm more comfortable with. Encouragement is, at least in the contexts I'm familiar with, more straightforward. Effective reassurance involves a fair amount of delicate operations, navigations, and making sure you're actually delivering what someone would find reassuring in the moment. Encouragement is generally a cheer, a support, a pep talk. Encouragement tends to take the form of "go out and crush the evils that oppose you," which is pretty universal as a sentiment to give to someone. Where reassurance might be a hug, encouragement is a butt slap. Not that I've given a whole lot of those on my life, either. Mostly shoulder pats, really, for those years that I played sport of some sort, or back slaps, maybe.
It's not surprising that I see encouragement this way, and that it's an easier accessible for me to navigate. I was socialized as a boy, and then as a man, and men are supposed to be better with the emotional states associated with sports, conquest, domination, and the ever-shifting definition of what it means to be a man. Reassurances, delicate emotions, tears, and the like are the province of women, and no self-respecting man would perform emotional intimacy with anyone who isn't their romantic / sexual partner, and even then, it would need to only be in a private space where other men couldn't observe it. Machismo is a thing that's taught to men and boys, regardless of their background. "Be a man," after all, is pretty cross-cultural, regardless of whether the man you are supposed to be is a macho. And even if you know that machismo is a thing that's being sold, it's disheartening to see how many people still buy into it wholeheartedly. Enough that politicians and techbros alike still see it as something that will get them customers or votes.
Encouragement fits into machismo more easily, since it's often more about action than feelings. It's about getting someone to do a thing, rather than staying in their feelings or letting their feelings overwhelm them. It's easier and requires less investment to get someone who has already decided on their course of action to go forward with it and to keep them on the pathway in pursuit of the rewards of that action. Men are supposed to be creatures of action, encouraged to take risks and fail, sometimes encouraged to keep failing without stopping for introspection, and often times, they are encouraged to see failures as the fault of others rather than themselves.
It probably says something about me that I've felt like I could be the person who stays home and raises kids and takes care of those things. With time and experience, I suspect that's mostly "if I don't have to go to work, then nobody will be putting me under time pressure to do work and have responsibilities on their schedule." Except, of course, there would be. But it would be a fairly regimented schedule that would end up working in my favor if I never understood my brain chemistry and its unique challenges toward time. Or I would have a situation where I would have time to spend in idle pursuits after maintaining the house and all the people in it. And, as a child, possibly because of tha variable attention stimulus trait, I had a full set of possible emotions available to me, and parents who, at least to my memory, never insisted upon specific gender roles or their associated limited emotional palettes, only right actions to come from those emotional states. It was everyone else who seemed to have ideas about properly masculine behavior and their pursuits. The kind of thing where a high school friend of mine once mentioned that he found it outside the norm when I was very upset that I'd accidentally hit someone with the baseball as a baseball pitcher. (They weren't hurt.) So. I guess I have been encouraged and supported for much of my life in my avoidance of machismo from all kinds of people around me. And yet, same of the things I still cling to are products of machismo, about providing for a household effortlessly and succeeding as a luminary in my profession. It's a work in progress.
To some degree, knowing that I'm a work in progress helps with trying to encourage others, but I think some of it might also have to do with wanting others to succeed, even if I don't. (Or have trouble counting my successes as successes, because they don't have the requisite amount of effort and struggle attached to them, or my perfectionism is getting in the way of seeing them as successes because they weren't flawless.) It seems logical enough to be able to both sulk at my own misfortunes and setbacks and to want others not to suffer them. It would be petty to be unhappy at the successes of other people who are not the heads of amoral corporations. I genuinely want people to succeed, but also, being part of the cheering section is yet another way of making myself useful if I can't provide anything more substantive as actual help. And that's another of the ways that "be useful" comes back and it's another way of making my self-worth conditional on the friendship of others or the service I can give to them or the use that I provide. For as much as I encourage others not to take the path of measuring their self-worth by their productivity or by other subjective factors, I have real trouble imagining it for myself in that core way that I'm going to need to if I want the idea to stick and persist against the brainweasels. It is, to some degree, anti-machismo, to admit there's a problem and trip try and work on it, but also, the whole "not letting others see when you need help or disclaiming that you're all right when you're not" clearly is in tune with machismo. Even if I am seeing professionals about aspects of my care and well being instead of trying to simply tough it out and avoid the topic.
I'm sitting on the drafts of two of other pieces of professional writing, and I'm unsure they'll be accepted, even though I've published with the place in considering sending them to. There's always this hesitation, the question of whether they're actually good enough. If they aren't, I'll get a rejection and likely some suggestions on improvement. Summoning the confidence of a medicare white man is a conscious effort, and it always takes time and effort and agonizing and then eventually deciding to go forward when encouraged. The process should probably be shorter than this, but it's what I have.
I try to be encouraging to others because they're able to admit they need it and I can at least provide a little bit of cheer or something helpful. I am less good at admitting that I need encouragement or talking about things where I might need encouragement. And I spend thousands of words writing and thinking and crafting and perfecting and explaining so that all of you have an entire post to wade through before you understand what I might need and what might be a good way of encouraging or offering commentary, or even a "Shit, that sucks. Solidarity." I feel like I might be contributing to that problem of "Dreamwidth is wordy and I feel weird about shitposting or doing short posts, because there's all those long form writing that happens on Dreamwidth, and I'm intimidated." (I could do the kudos polls, I guess, or remind everyone about the sticky post and that I really do mean it when it comes to small comments or incident ones or incomplete ones.) I write fic, and I write posts, and I like the interactions that come from comments, even as I understand the kudos and the other things. They're a way of reassuring myself that there are people out there and they do so by and want to say hello or talk about things. With a better sense of self-worth, I might not crave the comments quite so much, or see them as a nice addition to the point, which was getting the post or the fic out and to my satisfaction.
Encouragement is something to give and to receive, and while I'd like to believe I'm pretty good at the giving part, the asking part is still pretty rough. I didn't participate in the love meme for the season. I have hang-ups about asking for help and teens to believe that things I asked for are less genuine or less indications of what people think about me, because surely the greatest sign that people actually like you is that they simply know, through clairvoyance or precognition, when I am feeling bad and could use encouragement and they provide it. Spontaneous, unrequested praise and encouragement is the thing that I want, because I see it as the truest form and the weasels can't get to it, because I never asked for it or hinted that I might want it.
And in between, I'll try to keep encouraging all the rest of you as you go through your lives and your successes and your troubles.
- encouraging (comparative more encouraging, superlative most encouraging)
- giving courage, confidence or hope
- supporting by giving encouragement
- auspicious, or bringing good luck
This is an adjective I'm more comfortable with. Encouragement is, at least in the contexts I'm familiar with, more straightforward. Effective reassurance involves a fair amount of delicate operations, navigations, and making sure you're actually delivering what someone would find reassuring in the moment. Encouragement is generally a cheer, a support, a pep talk. Encouragement tends to take the form of "go out and crush the evils that oppose you," which is pretty universal as a sentiment to give to someone. Where reassurance might be a hug, encouragement is a butt slap. Not that I've given a whole lot of those on my life, either. Mostly shoulder pats, really, for those years that I played sport of some sort, or back slaps, maybe.
It's not surprising that I see encouragement this way, and that it's an easier accessible for me to navigate. I was socialized as a boy, and then as a man, and men are supposed to be better with the emotional states associated with sports, conquest, domination, and the ever-shifting definition of what it means to be a man. Reassurances, delicate emotions, tears, and the like are the province of women, and no self-respecting man would perform emotional intimacy with anyone who isn't their romantic / sexual partner, and even then, it would need to only be in a private space where other men couldn't observe it. Machismo is a thing that's taught to men and boys, regardless of their background. "Be a man," after all, is pretty cross-cultural, regardless of whether the man you are supposed to be is a macho. And even if you know that machismo is a thing that's being sold, it's disheartening to see how many people still buy into it wholeheartedly. Enough that politicians and techbros alike still see it as something that will get them customers or votes.
Encouragement fits into machismo more easily, since it's often more about action than feelings. It's about getting someone to do a thing, rather than staying in their feelings or letting their feelings overwhelm them. It's easier and requires less investment to get someone who has already decided on their course of action to go forward with it and to keep them on the pathway in pursuit of the rewards of that action. Men are supposed to be creatures of action, encouraged to take risks and fail, sometimes encouraged to keep failing without stopping for introspection, and often times, they are encouraged to see failures as the fault of others rather than themselves.
It probably says something about me that I've felt like I could be the person who stays home and raises kids and takes care of those things. With time and experience, I suspect that's mostly "if I don't have to go to work, then nobody will be putting me under time pressure to do work and have responsibilities on their schedule." Except, of course, there would be. But it would be a fairly regimented schedule that would end up working in my favor if I never understood my brain chemistry and its unique challenges toward time. Or I would have a situation where I would have time to spend in idle pursuits after maintaining the house and all the people in it. And, as a child, possibly because of tha variable attention stimulus trait, I had a full set of possible emotions available to me, and parents who, at least to my memory, never insisted upon specific gender roles or their associated limited emotional palettes, only right actions to come from those emotional states. It was everyone else who seemed to have ideas about properly masculine behavior and their pursuits. The kind of thing where a high school friend of mine once mentioned that he found it outside the norm when I was very upset that I'd accidentally hit someone with the baseball as a baseball pitcher. (They weren't hurt.) So. I guess I have been encouraged and supported for much of my life in my avoidance of machismo from all kinds of people around me. And yet, same of the things I still cling to are products of machismo, about providing for a household effortlessly and succeeding as a luminary in my profession. It's a work in progress.
To some degree, knowing that I'm a work in progress helps with trying to encourage others, but I think some of it might also have to do with wanting others to succeed, even if I don't. (Or have trouble counting my successes as successes, because they don't have the requisite amount of effort and struggle attached to them, or my perfectionism is getting in the way of seeing them as successes because they weren't flawless.) It seems logical enough to be able to both sulk at my own misfortunes and setbacks and to want others not to suffer them. It would be petty to be unhappy at the successes of other people who are not the heads of amoral corporations. I genuinely want people to succeed, but also, being part of the cheering section is yet another way of making myself useful if I can't provide anything more substantive as actual help. And that's another of the ways that "be useful" comes back and it's another way of making my self-worth conditional on the friendship of others or the service I can give to them or the use that I provide. For as much as I encourage others not to take the path of measuring their self-worth by their productivity or by other subjective factors, I have real trouble imagining it for myself in that core way that I'm going to need to if I want the idea to stick and persist against the brainweasels. It is, to some degree, anti-machismo, to admit there's a problem and trip try and work on it, but also, the whole "not letting others see when you need help or disclaiming that you're all right when you're not" clearly is in tune with machismo. Even if I am seeing professionals about aspects of my care and well being instead of trying to simply tough it out and avoid the topic.
I'm sitting on the drafts of two of other pieces of professional writing, and I'm unsure they'll be accepted, even though I've published with the place in considering sending them to. There's always this hesitation, the question of whether they're actually good enough. If they aren't, I'll get a rejection and likely some suggestions on improvement. Summoning the confidence of a medicare white man is a conscious effort, and it always takes time and effort and agonizing and then eventually deciding to go forward when encouraged. The process should probably be shorter than this, but it's what I have.
I try to be encouraging to others because they're able to admit they need it and I can at least provide a little bit of cheer or something helpful. I am less good at admitting that I need encouragement or talking about things where I might need encouragement. And I spend thousands of words writing and thinking and crafting and perfecting and explaining so that all of you have an entire post to wade through before you understand what I might need and what might be a good way of encouraging or offering commentary, or even a "Shit, that sucks. Solidarity." I feel like I might be contributing to that problem of "Dreamwidth is wordy and I feel weird about shitposting or doing short posts, because there's all those long form writing that happens on Dreamwidth, and I'm intimidated." (I could do the kudos polls, I guess, or remind everyone about the sticky post and that I really do mean it when it comes to small comments or incident ones or incomplete ones.) I write fic, and I write posts, and I like the interactions that come from comments, even as I understand the kudos and the other things. They're a way of reassuring myself that there are people out there and they do so by and want to say hello or talk about things. With a better sense of self-worth, I might not crave the comments quite so much, or see them as a nice addition to the point, which was getting the post or the fic out and to my satisfaction.
Encouragement is something to give and to receive, and while I'd like to believe I'm pretty good at the giving part, the asking part is still pretty rough. I didn't participate in the love meme for the season. I have hang-ups about asking for help and teens to believe that things I asked for are less genuine or less indications of what people think about me, because surely the greatest sign that people actually like you is that they simply know, through clairvoyance or precognition, when I am feeling bad and could use encouragement and they provide it. Spontaneous, unrequested praise and encouragement is the thing that I want, because I see it as the truest form and the weasels can't get to it, because I never asked for it or hinted that I might want it.
And in between, I'll try to keep encouraging all the rest of you as you go through your lives and your successes and your troubles.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-21 05:05 am (UTC)