December Days 2022 #21: Comforting
Dec. 21st, 2022 11:58 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.]
Before we begin today, if you are celebrating a holiday or festival of "They tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat," whether the "they" is a specific persecuting group or the growing of the dark or any other thing that tried to do this, in past or present, and you're still here, congratulations, feasts, and celebrations to you.
Which itself asks for a definition of what comfort is, as a noun (Contentment, ease, A consolation; something relieving suffering or worry, A cause of relief or satisfaction) and as a verb (To relieve the distress or suffering of; to provide comfort to, To make comfortable, (obsolete) To make strong; to invigorate; to fortify; to corroborate, (obsolete) To assist or help; to aid.)
With the additional help and definition, the picture becomes clearer, that comforting is meant to say that I am a person who relieves suffering and distress. Which is sometimes I would like to be true, even though I know there are situations where I would need more resources to truly relieve stress or distress, whether my own or another's. There's a Christian comfort story about footprints in the sand and how the companionship of Jesus is sufficiently strong as to carry someone through the most difficult times they could not go through themselves. There's also a story about starfish that's usually expressed as a story about the brilliant insights of children to get to the heart of a matter and to move forward even against an impossibility, simply because it is possible to make a difference to one entity, even if it isn't possible to make a difference to all the others. A quotation from Pirkei Avot (2.21) is often translated as "You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it." as a statement of calibration between burning oneself out completely in trying to make a better world and refusing to help make the world better.
Providing comfort is, surprisingly, also a regular part of work. There's a toxic undercurrent to it, where library workers are expected to provide comfort in inappropriate situations because most library workers are women (or caucus with them), or to disclaim or downplay the seriousness of things that happen to them. But sometimes you are giving comfort to others, when a child is being a child and, as a library worker, you give someone a knowing smile, an understanding nod, and empathy. And possibly ignore the child being a child unless there's a danger of the child getting hurt that has to be stopped. Or you welcome a child back who had to leave last week because they'd had enough or they needed to wander. Or you help someone through their technology issues under the (extremely true) idea that teaching sand to calculate doesn't mean the sand got all that much smarter. It can be comforting to someone that it's not their skill that's lacking when they run into issues, but that someone's designed a thing poorly or expects you to have already learned everything there is to know about using your device/a computer/Internet forms and websites to do a task. Nobody offered to help, of course, because that would take time, but the expectation is that you learned it all the same through using your devices and the Internet. It's comforting to know that sometimes there is still someone there who will be able to help and explain it in a way that makes sense.
Comfort at work might happen here and there without my actual knowing, because I tend to ask questions in specific ways. Things like "is this the correct name to use for you?" when looking at someone's picture. Most people say it is, but I wonder if, for some of them, it might be a mental note of "this one may be safe to say my name to, once I've figured out what it is." And asking that question sometimes gets someone to reveal themselves as unsafe. In explaining as to why I ask, I mentioned that some people use a different name than the one on their identification, and this person tells me "I believe in science, thanks," and we went on. I was only partially thinking about people who might change their name because it aligns correctly with the person they are and any decisions they've made to adjust their presentation. After all, I use a shortened form of the name I sign documents with. And I've had to occasionally find someone by their married name when they no longer are married, or by their unmarried name after they've been married. There was no reason to assume that I was saying anything about trans people, unless, of course, it was because this person wanted to make a remark about trans people. And for as much as I am supposed to not let my personal feelings get in the way of my public service, it seems silly not to treat someone who has identified themselves was dangerous in the same way that I would treat someone who was safe to be around. To some degree, I hope that person was not comforted by my presence and had to deal with at least some of the effects of having one's complacency disturbed by the consequences of someone who should think like you saying completely different things.
For the most part, though, comforting is supposed to be about my life away from work, with the people of my household and you, the people that I have Internet connections with. Comfort is a thing to offer during tough times, sometimes as the only thing that can be offered for lack of other resources available. It is a rough world, we have tough lives, and most of us, I suspect, do not have enough resources available to us that make all of our problems trivial and enough support that the inevitable amount of flak and discrimination that comes our way an annoyance or something that can be safely ignored or squashed. Especially those of us who have decided that living as the entities we are means stepping outside binaries and social rules that have immense pleasure behind them to get everyone to conform. The struggle against those pressures is exhausting, demoralizing, and draining, and anytime who is in the middle of one needs comfort, reassurance, and encouragement to continue being the person they are, assuming there are no other, greater threats that have to be dealt with. It is not something that I can extend to myself as easily as I can to others, even though the root of self-care is extending all of these adjectives like comfort, encouragement, and reassurance to myself because I am a human being, rather than withholding them from myself until I reach a goal or feel that I have sufficiently proven my worth to someone (myself or another.) If my goal is the removal of suffering, there's still much to be done. If my goal is the cessation of suffering and making this the last time around the cycle of reincarnation, there is still much to learn.
And unlearn, because many of these things that are things to do with yourself as well as others seen to have a Zen component to them. Striving to understand them and apply them seems to feed the shame cycle and cause more striving to try and defeat the shame of not getting it. Beating that cycle is not just recognizing the only way to win is not to play, but then catching myself when I'm about to run down the pathway of shame and deciding to do something else. Or to examine the thought when it appears, try to understand it well, and then let it float on past without trying to run it down or let it run me down. To be sufficiently secure in myself to just sit. Or to gain the insight into the paradox that lies at the heart of the riddle.
Perhaps it is comforting to know that there is someone else out here who has the same issues, who struggles with the same struggles, who is used to blaming themselves for everything, even though it's become apparent by now that at least some of the problems come from living in a society that expects you to be normal instead of trying to accommodate the disability they do not see. It feels cheap and ultimately disappointing to say "sometimes it isn't me, it's them," regardless of how true it may be. It is an admission that not all problems can be solved with grit and perseverance and Systems to compensate, and that sometimes, people are just going to be dicks, no matter what. It is an admission that perfection is impossible, no matter how tantalizingly close it always seems to be. The hardest part about giving up perfectionism is that it seems to work a lot of the time for avoiding getting hurt. They can't make fun of me if I'm flawless. They can't hurt me if there's no imperfection to grab on to. People aren't that logical, I've found. They'll always find something. If I was perfect, they'd use that all the same.
For some of you, it may be comforting to set down the burden of trying to be perfect. For me, I think I might have to use one of my Permission Slips. I snagged a couple of them when I went to a big library conference several years ago. They are Very Official Permission Slips, with a space for a signature, and for printing my name, and they say that I give myself permission to [fill in the blank,] and to keep go of [another blank.] I've kept them blank because I haven't had anything big enough to need the permission slip for. (Yes, I hoard all the really important items and never use them unless it's part of the strategy for beating the optional bosses.) We'll see if giving myself permission and writing it down changes anything or helps in the future, but having a Very Official Permission Slip might be a good step in that direction. It might bring some needed comfort.
Before we begin today, if you are celebrating a holiday or festival of "They tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat," whether the "they" is a specific persecuting group or the growing of the dark or any other thing that tried to do this, in past or present, and you're still here, congratulations, feasts, and celebrations to you.
- comforting (comparative more comforting, superlative most comforting)
- Giving comfort.
Which itself asks for a definition of what comfort is, as a noun (Contentment, ease, A consolation; something relieving suffering or worry, A cause of relief or satisfaction) and as a verb (To relieve the distress or suffering of; to provide comfort to, To make comfortable, (obsolete) To make strong; to invigorate; to fortify; to corroborate, (obsolete) To assist or help; to aid.)
With the additional help and definition, the picture becomes clearer, that comforting is meant to say that I am a person who relieves suffering and distress. Which is sometimes I would like to be true, even though I know there are situations where I would need more resources to truly relieve stress or distress, whether my own or another's. There's a Christian comfort story about footprints in the sand and how the companionship of Jesus is sufficiently strong as to carry someone through the most difficult times they could not go through themselves. There's also a story about starfish that's usually expressed as a story about the brilliant insights of children to get to the heart of a matter and to move forward even against an impossibility, simply because it is possible to make a difference to one entity, even if it isn't possible to make a difference to all the others. A quotation from Pirkei Avot (2.21) is often translated as "You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it." as a statement of calibration between burning oneself out completely in trying to make a better world and refusing to help make the world better.
Providing comfort is, surprisingly, also a regular part of work. There's a toxic undercurrent to it, where library workers are expected to provide comfort in inappropriate situations because most library workers are women (or caucus with them), or to disclaim or downplay the seriousness of things that happen to them. But sometimes you are giving comfort to others, when a child is being a child and, as a library worker, you give someone a knowing smile, an understanding nod, and empathy. And possibly ignore the child being a child unless there's a danger of the child getting hurt that has to be stopped. Or you welcome a child back who had to leave last week because they'd had enough or they needed to wander. Or you help someone through their technology issues under the (extremely true) idea that teaching sand to calculate doesn't mean the sand got all that much smarter. It can be comforting to someone that it's not their skill that's lacking when they run into issues, but that someone's designed a thing poorly or expects you to have already learned everything there is to know about using your device/a computer/Internet forms and websites to do a task. Nobody offered to help, of course, because that would take time, but the expectation is that you learned it all the same through using your devices and the Internet. It's comforting to know that sometimes there is still someone there who will be able to help and explain it in a way that makes sense.
Comfort at work might happen here and there without my actual knowing, because I tend to ask questions in specific ways. Things like "is this the correct name to use for you?" when looking at someone's picture. Most people say it is, but I wonder if, for some of them, it might be a mental note of "this one may be safe to say my name to, once I've figured out what it is." And asking that question sometimes gets someone to reveal themselves as unsafe. In explaining as to why I ask, I mentioned that some people use a different name than the one on their identification, and this person tells me "I believe in science, thanks," and we went on. I was only partially thinking about people who might change their name because it aligns correctly with the person they are and any decisions they've made to adjust their presentation. After all, I use a shortened form of the name I sign documents with. And I've had to occasionally find someone by their married name when they no longer are married, or by their unmarried name after they've been married. There was no reason to assume that I was saying anything about trans people, unless, of course, it was because this person wanted to make a remark about trans people. And for as much as I am supposed to not let my personal feelings get in the way of my public service, it seems silly not to treat someone who has identified themselves was dangerous in the same way that I would treat someone who was safe to be around. To some degree, I hope that person was not comforted by my presence and had to deal with at least some of the effects of having one's complacency disturbed by the consequences of someone who should think like you saying completely different things.
For the most part, though, comforting is supposed to be about my life away from work, with the people of my household and you, the people that I have Internet connections with. Comfort is a thing to offer during tough times, sometimes as the only thing that can be offered for lack of other resources available. It is a rough world, we have tough lives, and most of us, I suspect, do not have enough resources available to us that make all of our problems trivial and enough support that the inevitable amount of flak and discrimination that comes our way an annoyance or something that can be safely ignored or squashed. Especially those of us who have decided that living as the entities we are means stepping outside binaries and social rules that have immense pleasure behind them to get everyone to conform. The struggle against those pressures is exhausting, demoralizing, and draining, and anytime who is in the middle of one needs comfort, reassurance, and encouragement to continue being the person they are, assuming there are no other, greater threats that have to be dealt with. It is not something that I can extend to myself as easily as I can to others, even though the root of self-care is extending all of these adjectives like comfort, encouragement, and reassurance to myself because I am a human being, rather than withholding them from myself until I reach a goal or feel that I have sufficiently proven my worth to someone (myself or another.) If my goal is the removal of suffering, there's still much to be done. If my goal is the cessation of suffering and making this the last time around the cycle of reincarnation, there is still much to learn.
And unlearn, because many of these things that are things to do with yourself as well as others seen to have a Zen component to them. Striving to understand them and apply them seems to feed the shame cycle and cause more striving to try and defeat the shame of not getting it. Beating that cycle is not just recognizing the only way to win is not to play, but then catching myself when I'm about to run down the pathway of shame and deciding to do something else. Or to examine the thought when it appears, try to understand it well, and then let it float on past without trying to run it down or let it run me down. To be sufficiently secure in myself to just sit. Or to gain the insight into the paradox that lies at the heart of the riddle.
Perhaps it is comforting to know that there is someone else out here who has the same issues, who struggles with the same struggles, who is used to blaming themselves for everything, even though it's become apparent by now that at least some of the problems come from living in a society that expects you to be normal instead of trying to accommodate the disability they do not see. It feels cheap and ultimately disappointing to say "sometimes it isn't me, it's them," regardless of how true it may be. It is an admission that not all problems can be solved with grit and perseverance and Systems to compensate, and that sometimes, people are just going to be dicks, no matter what. It is an admission that perfection is impossible, no matter how tantalizingly close it always seems to be. The hardest part about giving up perfectionism is that it seems to work a lot of the time for avoiding getting hurt. They can't make fun of me if I'm flawless. They can't hurt me if there's no imperfection to grab on to. People aren't that logical, I've found. They'll always find something. If I was perfect, they'd use that all the same.
For some of you, it may be comforting to set down the burden of trying to be perfect. For me, I think I might have to use one of my Permission Slips. I snagged a couple of them when I went to a big library conference several years ago. They are Very Official Permission Slips, with a space for a signature, and for printing my name, and they say that I give myself permission to [fill in the blank,] and to keep go of [another blank.] I've kept them blank because I haven't had anything big enough to need the permission slip for. (Yes, I hoard all the really important items and never use them unless it's part of the strategy for beating the optional bosses.) We'll see if giving myself permission and writing it down changes anything or helps in the future, but having a Very Official Permission Slip might be a good step in that direction. It might bring some needed comfort.
