December Days 2022 #20: Self-Aware
Dec. 20th, 2022 11:45 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.]
The Holy Grail of adjectives itself, the quest that gets ever closer but never completes. An extremely flattering description for someone to apply to me, to even suggest that I am anywhere near understanding myself and who I am. To be self-aware is to understand myself sufficiently that I can know what my reactions will be to a situation, which will give me at least some degree of control over myself and how I react to the situation.
Control is something I very much crave, even as it is something that I very much also reject. By control, I do not mean solely autonomy, the freedom to exist and make decisions on my own without obvious mechanisms of restricting my choice in play. As we are well aware, there are always systems in play that restrict choices or make the consequences of certain choices more punitive and expensive than the choices themselves, and those systems exert different amounts of restriction of consequences on different audiences. No, control in this case is the power of fiat, the ability to say to a situation "My will be done" and have it happen. Given that kind of power, I believe I could fix so many problems on both small and large scales, just is the way I want it, and everyone will be happier that way.
Except, of course, when it isn't. Control is often rooted in machismo and the cultural assumptions that come with it. It's someone who looks like a man and someone who looks like a woman are in proximity, the society assumes the man is the knowledgeable one, the one with financial resources, and the one in control of the final decision. He may take advice or input from the woman, if he so desires, but the society chooses to give him control over the final decision, even if he has no knowledge, no resources, and no interest beyond supporting the woman's decisions. Those cultural assumptions carry pink taxes with them, and assumptions that women who want things want them for aesthetic and decorative purposes, instead of for the purpose the thing is built and sold to men for. They allow a man to say exactly what a woman just said and be taken seriously, for men to take credit without any outcry, and they guarantee our politics and our boardrooms do not have the best people in them, because even those who do manage to persist pay the structural barriers are expected to behave in ways that complement or come straight from machismo. Control is poisonous to those who have it for too long, and yet, it still seems better than the alternative of having to accept someone's else's control, knowing they're going to fuck it up at least as much, if not more, than I would. I can say least own my mistakes and try to fix them. Many of them have yet to realize their mistakes are mistakes, or worse, think they aren't mistakes.
At the same time, because of the way I've spent so much of my life without explanations or tools to manage variable attention stimulus, I am at least moderately distrustful that I should be allowed to have any kind of control at all, and that it might be easier, cognitively, to shift the entire burden (or some significant portion thereof) of handling the difficult things like scheduling, remembering, keeping in contact, prioritizing and determining when enough has been done for the day, list-making, and so on, to another person. Which is not really any better than trying to micromanage and lean fully into machismo, and would be terrible for whomever it was that I expected to perform all of those duties while I indulged myself in free time and only doing those things that were excitedly set before me. After all, my ex wanted control and I tried to give it to her as much as possible, and it turned out terribly. Why would I assume that anyone else would do better or more responsibly and that anyone else would willingly do such a thing? Long gone are the days where someone might write their paper or their novel and there would be an invisible support network from wives or mothers or girlfriends, expected to take on all of that burden by society. (Only in certain segments any more is this expectation present, and it is harder to keep women in that place and expectation these days, regardless of what maneuvers the dominionists and their lackeys in courts and legislators attempt.)
To be aware of who I am and what I want is useful for more than defeating Vorlons and Shadows, even if it often causes problems rather than solving them, or allowing them to persist in ignorance. The more aware of myself I become, there more complex things seem to get. At some point along the journey, I think it's supposed to get simpler, although that simplicity is not usually of the form of having less of everything that's part of life coming at me. It's that my responses simplify even as they cover larger amounts of the possible problem space. Meditation practices talk about not chasing thoughts and being gentle with yourself if you find you have been chasing them. Noticing that it has happened is a good thing, apparently. Not beating yourself up about it, but accepting that it happened and it's likely to continue happening is even better. What would things look like if self-worth wasn't conditional? I suspect it would look a lot more meditative, with less chasing and more examining, because there wouldn't be such a need to define myself in terms of others and what they think of me.
Here comes a thought,
That might alarm me.
What someone said,
And how it harmed me.
Something I did /
That failed to be charming.
Things that I said are /
Suddenly swarming.
And oh, I'm losing sight, I'm losing touch.
All these little things seem to matter so much.
That they confuse me:
That I might lose me.
[…]
Take a moment and think of just:
Flexibility, Love, and Trust.
- self-aware (comparative more self-aware, superlative most self-aware)
- Aware of oneself as an individual that exists in the real world.
- Cognizant of one's appearances, shortcomings, etc.
The Holy Grail of adjectives itself, the quest that gets ever closer but never completes. An extremely flattering description for someone to apply to me, to even suggest that I am anywhere near understanding myself and who I am. To be self-aware is to understand myself sufficiently that I can know what my reactions will be to a situation, which will give me at least some degree of control over myself and how I react to the situation.
Control is something I very much crave, even as it is something that I very much also reject. By control, I do not mean solely autonomy, the freedom to exist and make decisions on my own without obvious mechanisms of restricting my choice in play. As we are well aware, there are always systems in play that restrict choices or make the consequences of certain choices more punitive and expensive than the choices themselves, and those systems exert different amounts of restriction of consequences on different audiences. No, control in this case is the power of fiat, the ability to say to a situation "My will be done" and have it happen. Given that kind of power, I believe I could fix so many problems on both small and large scales, just is the way I want it, and everyone will be happier that way.
Except, of course, when it isn't. Control is often rooted in machismo and the cultural assumptions that come with it. It's someone who looks like a man and someone who looks like a woman are in proximity, the society assumes the man is the knowledgeable one, the one with financial resources, and the one in control of the final decision. He may take advice or input from the woman, if he so desires, but the society chooses to give him control over the final decision, even if he has no knowledge, no resources, and no interest beyond supporting the woman's decisions. Those cultural assumptions carry pink taxes with them, and assumptions that women who want things want them for aesthetic and decorative purposes, instead of for the purpose the thing is built and sold to men for. They allow a man to say exactly what a woman just said and be taken seriously, for men to take credit without any outcry, and they guarantee our politics and our boardrooms do not have the best people in them, because even those who do manage to persist pay the structural barriers are expected to behave in ways that complement or come straight from machismo. Control is poisonous to those who have it for too long, and yet, it still seems better than the alternative of having to accept someone's else's control, knowing they're going to fuck it up at least as much, if not more, than I would. I can say least own my mistakes and try to fix them. Many of them have yet to realize their mistakes are mistakes, or worse, think they aren't mistakes.
At the same time, because of the way I've spent so much of my life without explanations or tools to manage variable attention stimulus, I am at least moderately distrustful that I should be allowed to have any kind of control at all, and that it might be easier, cognitively, to shift the entire burden (or some significant portion thereof) of handling the difficult things like scheduling, remembering, keeping in contact, prioritizing and determining when enough has been done for the day, list-making, and so on, to another person. Which is not really any better than trying to micromanage and lean fully into machismo, and would be terrible for whomever it was that I expected to perform all of those duties while I indulged myself in free time and only doing those things that were excitedly set before me. After all, my ex wanted control and I tried to give it to her as much as possible, and it turned out terribly. Why would I assume that anyone else would do better or more responsibly and that anyone else would willingly do such a thing? Long gone are the days where someone might write their paper or their novel and there would be an invisible support network from wives or mothers or girlfriends, expected to take on all of that burden by society. (Only in certain segments any more is this expectation present, and it is harder to keep women in that place and expectation these days, regardless of what maneuvers the dominionists and their lackeys in courts and legislators attempt.)
To be aware of who I am and what I want is useful for more than defeating Vorlons and Shadows, even if it often causes problems rather than solving them, or allowing them to persist in ignorance. The more aware of myself I become, there more complex things seem to get. At some point along the journey, I think it's supposed to get simpler, although that simplicity is not usually of the form of having less of everything that's part of life coming at me. It's that my responses simplify even as they cover larger amounts of the possible problem space. Meditation practices talk about not chasing thoughts and being gentle with yourself if you find you have been chasing them. Noticing that it has happened is a good thing, apparently. Not beating yourself up about it, but accepting that it happened and it's likely to continue happening is even better. What would things look like if self-worth wasn't conditional? I suspect it would look a lot more meditative, with less chasing and more examining, because there wouldn't be such a need to define myself in terms of others and what they think of me.
Here comes a thought,
That might alarm me.
What someone said,
And how it harmed me.
Something I did /
That failed to be charming.
Things that I said are /
Suddenly swarming.
And oh, I'm losing sight, I'm losing touch.
All these little things seem to matter so much.
That they confuse me:
That I might lose me.
[…]
Take a moment and think of just:
Flexibility, Love, and Trust.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-21 08:48 am (UTC)" please make it stop "
no subject
Date: 2022-12-21 03:05 pm (UTC)