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sunshine_challenge prompt, another flower, and more virtues to talk about,
I am less inclined to go along with the "pioneering spirit" association of the goldenrod, but I think that's because a fair amount of my adult life has been finding out just how much those "pioneers" are products of a hagiography designed to erase the presence and history of the first nations of the Americas and treat them as little more then set dressing or adversaries against the march of "civilization" through those spaces, the same kind of "civilization" that brought rampant unregulated capitalism, exploitation, and slavery of black people as a way of life to the country. It may not have had much anything outside of the library world, but inside the library world, there's been an entire fight about whether or not it's appropriate for us to carry the Little House on the Prairie series, given how much of it is about reinforcing the hagiography of pioneering white men, their dutiful wives, and their pleasant children against the Indigenous peoples, Black peoples, and the oppression of government infringing on their freedom to do whatever they want with the land and their neighbors. The Children's Literature Legacy Award from the Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC, a division of the American Library Association) was, up until recently, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, but because of the rampant racism in Wilder's work, ALSC decided to change the name of the award. Because they're still ALA and library folk, the statement about the name change goes to great lengths to assure us that they're not suggesting that anyone change their relationship to Wilder's work because of this name change, because that would be having an unacceptably political opinion in public. Even though it's pretty clear that the name change was specifically so that an award that is supposed to be about lasting contributions to children's literature doesn't bear the name of someone whose works are incompatible with the values of today. (Ana Mardoll's Prairie Fires livetweets and reads are there so you don't necessarily have to read the things yourself, if you don't want to dive into that world and its mindset. And all the fabrication, gaslighting, and lies involved in trying to prop up the idea of the pioneer homestead and the pioneer spirit.)
Goldenrod can be a hardy plant that grows in all kinds of environments, and I'm cool with that, but there's a lot of romanticization of colonialism and The Past That Never Was that gets wrapped up in white people's recollections (and official hagiographies) of the "Wild" West, Manifest Destiny, the Discovery Doctrine, and their belief that they could survive and thrive in such rugged conditions and play out their libertarian fantasies (or their plantation fantasies) rather than admitting to the truth off what happened, and how much subsistence farming is hard work for very small yields and those who believe they don't need their community to sustain themselves and their neighbors are fools or people who have money enough that they can run a hobby farm and not actually care about whether it makes enough.
The other aspects of goldenrod are much more happy and less potentially fraught: good fortune, growth, and encouragement. Which gives me an excuse to talk about the differences between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, since that's something I still struggle with, as someone whose signs of neurodivergence were pretty well telegraphed by being a "gifted" child. The "fixed" mindset, in gross simplification, believes that everyone has a stat sheet with values that don't change over time, or only change in very specific and extraordinary circumstances, and that the task of life is for someone to find the contours of their stat sheet and organize their life and activities in a way that gives them the best opportunities to use their good stats and minimizes the situations where they have to use their dump stats. In a fixed mindset, people are naturally talented at some things and should be encouraged to develop those, and naturally untalented at others and no amount of study or practice will allow them to improve themselves past a certain level of competence accompanied by intense frustration at those things. Correspondingly, things that go well are ascribed to talent or luck, and things that go poorly are similarly ascribed to talent or luck, and effort doesn't really enter into the equation all that much, because effort is really either aided or hindered by your talent score.
Growth mindsets take the idea that while might have stat sheets that might make certain things easier or harder to do well at, there's no intrinsic barrier to someone learning how to do something, and that practice and effort are much more likely to be indicative of the success that someone has at learning and practicing any given skill. (So, Final Fantasy II's methods of increasing the skills that get practiced, rather than the more common "stats increase with level-ups" systems of other Final Fantasies and RPGs.) The growth mindset is also more forgiving of imperfections and bad results than the fixed mindset is, because the fixed mindset encourages thinking "Well, I must not be any good at this," while the growth mindset encourages "So I'm GLaD I got burned / Think of all the things we learned." Growth mindsets also tend to encourage things like process thinking and structuring opportunities so that someone goes through the process of doing a thing, rather than trying to adhere to a fixed set of steps that replicate an already-perfect model.
If it wasn't obvious, I am not great at being able to replicate models of art, whether in drawing, folding, felting, sculpting, coloring, or anything else, for that matter. This is mostly because I haven't done serious amounts of practice at trying to replicate these things. At the moment, something-ish is good enough for me, and I can do a fair amount of something-ish things. But I can still hear the fixed mindset in the back of my head saying "well, it's not exactly like the picture in my head, or exactly like what's in front of me, so it's worthless and there's nothing to be proud of from it." If you've been following the Adventures In Home Automation, AO3 Output, or any of the December Days series here, you can see a certain amount of that fixed mindset creeping back in, even as I'm talking about things I have successfully done and posted, and that sometimes garner really nice comments or other people expressing wonder at what is going on there. To them, what I'm doing seems wildly incomprehensible, or is something that's really good and they would like more of it and definitely don't think they could have done anything like it. To me, it's something that I can do, or it's something that I have an idea of, and I can trial-and-error it, with the assistance of the official documentation and other people who have posted snippets of code for their own projects, until it works the way I want to, and then I have to fix an edge case that shows up. Or it's a work that comes out and it really relies on the fact that I've been writing things for several decades at this point, and while I may not have gotten any formal instruction on writing other than informative essays, and maybe a little bit in persuasive or other kinds of opinion writing, the truth is still that I have all of that time and all of those words as a backstop of practice supporting me and helping me make decisions about what words to use, what plotlines to pursue, what dialogue to include, and all the rest. Or I can listen to someone describe what they want, and sift a search result or interpret a list to zero in on the thing that is the most important bit for them and send them on their way. These are all things that I can do because of long amounts of practice at doing those things.
Perhaps my stat sheets mean that I'll have better and easier successes at them than other things (like trying to do a pull-up), but the fixed mindset robs me of the ability to go "yeah, that was pretty cool, and it was because of all the effort and practice that I've put into this thing." Because things that are easy, in a fixed mindset, aren't laudable, and successes are due to luck and talent, and failures that happen for things that should be "easy" are because I'm not actually as talented as I foolishly and egoistically believed I was. Sometimes because of bad luck. The fixed mindset doesn't encourage keeping trying at things, even when they're failures, because it assumes that all failures will always continue to be failures, and any progress will be slow and grudging, or a lucky breakthrough.
Fixed mindsets also encourage "I am $Z," as the statement, relating everything to someone's core identity, rather than "I tried $Z," or "I did $Q" or other things that separate the actions that people take from their core identities. It's very hard to change who you are, and people who try often end up miserable, because most of the people trying to encourage us to change who we are are doing so because they want us to diminish ourselves or hide elements of ourselves that the other entity doesn't want to see, hear about, or acknowledge the existence of. Someone who wants to deny a part of you for their own purposes is asking a lot of you. Someone who wants you to change a behavior of yours, even habitual behaviors, is asking a lot less of you. Even when talking about implicit biases and less socially-acceptable attitudes, the focus should be on the actions that stem from those attitudes and biases and the consequences of the actions that come from it. Asking someone not to be a racist is difficult, especially if they've been raised in and continue to be saturated with racist messages as an unacknowledged part of their society. Asking someone not to do racist things is easier, because it avoids the situation where someone believes what's being asked of them is to avoid having even the possibility of racist thoughts in their own heads. (That's tough, especially when you're in a situation where you don't even know that a thought of yours was a racist one.) Focusing on behaviors and the repercussions and consequences of those behaviors keeps the discussion in the realm of growth and change and encouragement for people to grow and change the things they do, rather than asking them to change things that they are. (The secret being that if you consistently do things in ways that avoid harms, and that once you know something is harmful, you add that to the things you try to avoid doing, at some point you will have incorporated the necessary changes to who you are that allow you to act consistently in ways that try to avoid or minimize harms. With the understanding that it's never a completed or perfected process, but that you can look back at your track record and see that you have grown and changed the actions you do now compared to the actions that you did before.)
Trying to have a growth mindset about myself, especially as I get older, is still difficult. There's brainweasels that tell me that if I haven't figured out something by now (at my ripe middle age), then there's no longer enough time in my life for me to figure it out and I should abandon it. Or that if I haven't managed to purge all of the bad things about myself at this point, to become a shining perfect person who does nothing wrong and makes no mistakes, then there's nothing worthwhile or good about me and the bad things about me are the only important things. Some of the things of my past, though, that I thought of as critical character failures can be attributed to something like ADHD/Variable Attention Stimulus Trait and some of its accompanying friends, like Rejection Sensitivity. Which I didn't have anyone telling me about, or telling me to seriously consider, until well after I'd managed to discard my evil ex and start rebuilding my life after her. With time and perspective of the now, I can see how my signs and signals for VAST weren't considered problems, because I did well academically at all levels, including university, and developed a fairly rigid set of coping mechanisms for the things that I knew were problems for myself. (Hilariously, I was tested in the second grade for a learning disability because I had already done the worksheet while the teacher was explaining the concepts and was therefore doing the thing that I was supposed ot do when I had finished the work. All my teacher saw was me reading all the time, and while the work was getting done, she worried that I might not be picking things up in class. The tests came back fine, of course, and that the weakness that I had was that I was "only" a few grade levels above where I was supposed to be in some subjects. As Agent 86 was fond of saying, "Missed it by that much." If we had known then what we knew now…well, I probably still would have been missed, because they would have been looking for a disruptive boy in class, instead of wondering whether or not the criteria that they were supposed to be looking for in girls might have applied to some boys, too.) With no framework to work with, when those issues started making trouble for me in my work life, I still saw them as character flaws and tried my hardest to find even more compensation methods, reminders, and other ways of trying to corral my wayward brain and not let it get away from me. Because I couldn't control how other people were seeing what I was doing, nor their gossiping about me, nor could I get them to ask me about what I was doing before complaining to my supervisor. And my supervisor chose to see them as character flaws rather than as things that might need additional support and scaffolding, or possibly even accommodation, so they could be dealt with appropriately. (I have no idea if my supervisor could have conceived of them as something else. She might not have had the knowledge or the understanding to look for some other cause than a personal failing.) Which mostly left me in a situation where I was looking at myself through a deficit lens, because all of my talents and abilities and stat scores weren't able to overcome these obstacles, and I kept finding new and exciting failure modes for my external tools, or new situations that they hadn't accounted for that they needed to account for. And so I was always going to be chasing whatever the last problem was, until there were more problems to have to account for than I had memory capacity for in the moment, even with the external memory helping me. And, as you might guess, in an environment where you have mostly neurotypical people, things don't end great when all everyone thinks you need is more willpower or more desire. (And that included me.) Trust me, I didn't want to almost get fired because i didn't know what was wrong with me and nobody else had a fucking clue, either. It wasn't a problem that a fixed mindset could defeat, and if I'm having a bad day about these traits of mine acting up again, I might still make categorical, sweeping, and unkind statements about myself that come from that fixed mindset and the deficit thinking.
So, trying to maintain a growth mindset about myself is a matter of survival, in addition to not having a meltdown when kids a quarter to half my age thrash me at a game that I have apparently wrapped some of my identity in. It's the way I have to get past the brainweasels that tell me there's no point in trying if you can't execute perfectly, because there's an entire horde of people waiting to criticize you or take joy in your failure. To try new things without the expectation that if they don't go perfectly, that someone is going to tell my supervisor about them and I'm going to deal with disciplinary measures because I tried to do something outside their perception of what my work is. To try and persist with something, even through the frustrations of failure and setbacks and the constant problem of needles and threads being so small and my hands not being well-suited to small and delicate operations yet. And to do things enjoyably, rather than perfectly, and to be willing to show people my imperfections and see what they think about them. I'm still pretty fast on the self-deprecating humor, because it's easier for me to make fun of myself before anyone else gets the chance to. And so that I don't get disappointed when something I'm genuinely proud of and happy for isn't as well-received as I hoped it would be. And, y'know, for the hope somewhere, somewhen, that I might be accepting of the person I am at this very moment, even though they are imperfect and there is still things that will need to be worked upon.
Which is a long way to come back around to, even though I'm kind of "eh" about the plant, I like at least some of the meanings behind it, because they are the things that I still need in my life: good fortune, growth, and encouragement.
sunshine_challenge prompt, another flower, and more virtues to talk about,Prompt 5: GoldenrodAdmittedly, I know goldenrod more as a crayon than as a flower, because so many creation boxes of my childhood did not have colors such as red, yellow, and blue, which are specific shades to color with, apparently, but instead would get crimson, goldenrod, and cerulean, along with burnt sienna and several other flower names and shades that were lighter or darker than the colors I had assumed would be part of every box of crayons but definitely were not. Which, as a child, was different to have to work with these wrong shades that I was pretending were much more primary colors. The art parts were fine, anyway, since I was likely coloring in sheets or doing other things that didn't involve any kind of needing to draw my own lines and create something from those spaces. It would have been much more frustrating to me in that regard, mostly because art was one of those things that was very much about "you're talented or you're not" in my childhood, rather than something that's more "art is a process, and for some people, that process comes easier than others, but we can still scaffold someone into something that's uniquely themselves, rather than something that's being compared to a perfect example."
Historically, Goldenrod has been used as a symbol of good fortune, growth, and encouragement. Because of its ability to survive in diverse, harsh environments, Goldenrod represents good luck and a pioneering spirit (pretty fitting given its origins in the meadows and pastures of North America).
Bonus Prompt: Orange Rose
I am less inclined to go along with the "pioneering spirit" association of the goldenrod, but I think that's because a fair amount of my adult life has been finding out just how much those "pioneers" are products of a hagiography designed to erase the presence and history of the first nations of the Americas and treat them as little more then set dressing or adversaries against the march of "civilization" through those spaces, the same kind of "civilization" that brought rampant unregulated capitalism, exploitation, and slavery of black people as a way of life to the country. It may not have had much anything outside of the library world, but inside the library world, there's been an entire fight about whether or not it's appropriate for us to carry the Little House on the Prairie series, given how much of it is about reinforcing the hagiography of pioneering white men, their dutiful wives, and their pleasant children against the Indigenous peoples, Black peoples, and the oppression of government infringing on their freedom to do whatever they want with the land and their neighbors. The Children's Literature Legacy Award from the Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC, a division of the American Library Association) was, up until recently, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, but because of the rampant racism in Wilder's work, ALSC decided to change the name of the award. Because they're still ALA and library folk, the statement about the name change goes to great lengths to assure us that they're not suggesting that anyone change their relationship to Wilder's work because of this name change, because that would be having an unacceptably political opinion in public. Even though it's pretty clear that the name change was specifically so that an award that is supposed to be about lasting contributions to children's literature doesn't bear the name of someone whose works are incompatible with the values of today. (Ana Mardoll's Prairie Fires livetweets and reads are there so you don't necessarily have to read the things yourself, if you don't want to dive into that world and its mindset. And all the fabrication, gaslighting, and lies involved in trying to prop up the idea of the pioneer homestead and the pioneer spirit.)
Goldenrod can be a hardy plant that grows in all kinds of environments, and I'm cool with that, but there's a lot of romanticization of colonialism and The Past That Never Was that gets wrapped up in white people's recollections (and official hagiographies) of the "Wild" West, Manifest Destiny, the Discovery Doctrine, and their belief that they could survive and thrive in such rugged conditions and play out their libertarian fantasies (or their plantation fantasies) rather than admitting to the truth off what happened, and how much subsistence farming is hard work for very small yields and those who believe they don't need their community to sustain themselves and their neighbors are fools or people who have money enough that they can run a hobby farm and not actually care about whether it makes enough.
The other aspects of goldenrod are much more happy and less potentially fraught: good fortune, growth, and encouragement. Which gives me an excuse to talk about the differences between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, since that's something I still struggle with, as someone whose signs of neurodivergence were pretty well telegraphed by being a "gifted" child. The "fixed" mindset, in gross simplification, believes that everyone has a stat sheet with values that don't change over time, or only change in very specific and extraordinary circumstances, and that the task of life is for someone to find the contours of their stat sheet and organize their life and activities in a way that gives them the best opportunities to use their good stats and minimizes the situations where they have to use their dump stats. In a fixed mindset, people are naturally talented at some things and should be encouraged to develop those, and naturally untalented at others and no amount of study or practice will allow them to improve themselves past a certain level of competence accompanied by intense frustration at those things. Correspondingly, things that go well are ascribed to talent or luck, and things that go poorly are similarly ascribed to talent or luck, and effort doesn't really enter into the equation all that much, because effort is really either aided or hindered by your talent score.
Growth mindsets take the idea that while might have stat sheets that might make certain things easier or harder to do well at, there's no intrinsic barrier to someone learning how to do something, and that practice and effort are much more likely to be indicative of the success that someone has at learning and practicing any given skill. (So, Final Fantasy II's methods of increasing the skills that get practiced, rather than the more common "stats increase with level-ups" systems of other Final Fantasies and RPGs.) The growth mindset is also more forgiving of imperfections and bad results than the fixed mindset is, because the fixed mindset encourages thinking "Well, I must not be any good at this," while the growth mindset encourages "So I'm GLaD I got burned / Think of all the things we learned." Growth mindsets also tend to encourage things like process thinking and structuring opportunities so that someone goes through the process of doing a thing, rather than trying to adhere to a fixed set of steps that replicate an already-perfect model.
If it wasn't obvious, I am not great at being able to replicate models of art, whether in drawing, folding, felting, sculpting, coloring, or anything else, for that matter. This is mostly because I haven't done serious amounts of practice at trying to replicate these things. At the moment, something-ish is good enough for me, and I can do a fair amount of something-ish things. But I can still hear the fixed mindset in the back of my head saying "well, it's not exactly like the picture in my head, or exactly like what's in front of me, so it's worthless and there's nothing to be proud of from it." If you've been following the Adventures In Home Automation, AO3 Output, or any of the December Days series here, you can see a certain amount of that fixed mindset creeping back in, even as I'm talking about things I have successfully done and posted, and that sometimes garner really nice comments or other people expressing wonder at what is going on there. To them, what I'm doing seems wildly incomprehensible, or is something that's really good and they would like more of it and definitely don't think they could have done anything like it. To me, it's something that I can do, or it's something that I have an idea of, and I can trial-and-error it, with the assistance of the official documentation and other people who have posted snippets of code for their own projects, until it works the way I want to, and then I have to fix an edge case that shows up. Or it's a work that comes out and it really relies on the fact that I've been writing things for several decades at this point, and while I may not have gotten any formal instruction on writing other than informative essays, and maybe a little bit in persuasive or other kinds of opinion writing, the truth is still that I have all of that time and all of those words as a backstop of practice supporting me and helping me make decisions about what words to use, what plotlines to pursue, what dialogue to include, and all the rest. Or I can listen to someone describe what they want, and sift a search result or interpret a list to zero in on the thing that is the most important bit for them and send them on their way. These are all things that I can do because of long amounts of practice at doing those things.
Perhaps my stat sheets mean that I'll have better and easier successes at them than other things (like trying to do a pull-up), but the fixed mindset robs me of the ability to go "yeah, that was pretty cool, and it was because of all the effort and practice that I've put into this thing." Because things that are easy, in a fixed mindset, aren't laudable, and successes are due to luck and talent, and failures that happen for things that should be "easy" are because I'm not actually as talented as I foolishly and egoistically believed I was. Sometimes because of bad luck. The fixed mindset doesn't encourage keeping trying at things, even when they're failures, because it assumes that all failures will always continue to be failures, and any progress will be slow and grudging, or a lucky breakthrough.
Fixed mindsets also encourage "I am $Z," as the statement, relating everything to someone's core identity, rather than "I tried $Z," or "I did $Q" or other things that separate the actions that people take from their core identities. It's very hard to change who you are, and people who try often end up miserable, because most of the people trying to encourage us to change who we are are doing so because they want us to diminish ourselves or hide elements of ourselves that the other entity doesn't want to see, hear about, or acknowledge the existence of. Someone who wants to deny a part of you for their own purposes is asking a lot of you. Someone who wants you to change a behavior of yours, even habitual behaviors, is asking a lot less of you. Even when talking about implicit biases and less socially-acceptable attitudes, the focus should be on the actions that stem from those attitudes and biases and the consequences of the actions that come from it. Asking someone not to be a racist is difficult, especially if they've been raised in and continue to be saturated with racist messages as an unacknowledged part of their society. Asking someone not to do racist things is easier, because it avoids the situation where someone believes what's being asked of them is to avoid having even the possibility of racist thoughts in their own heads. (That's tough, especially when you're in a situation where you don't even know that a thought of yours was a racist one.) Focusing on behaviors and the repercussions and consequences of those behaviors keeps the discussion in the realm of growth and change and encouragement for people to grow and change the things they do, rather than asking them to change things that they are. (The secret being that if you consistently do things in ways that avoid harms, and that once you know something is harmful, you add that to the things you try to avoid doing, at some point you will have incorporated the necessary changes to who you are that allow you to act consistently in ways that try to avoid or minimize harms. With the understanding that it's never a completed or perfected process, but that you can look back at your track record and see that you have grown and changed the actions you do now compared to the actions that you did before.)
Trying to have a growth mindset about myself, especially as I get older, is still difficult. There's brainweasels that tell me that if I haven't figured out something by now (at my ripe middle age), then there's no longer enough time in my life for me to figure it out and I should abandon it. Or that if I haven't managed to purge all of the bad things about myself at this point, to become a shining perfect person who does nothing wrong and makes no mistakes, then there's nothing worthwhile or good about me and the bad things about me are the only important things. Some of the things of my past, though, that I thought of as critical character failures can be attributed to something like ADHD/Variable Attention Stimulus Trait and some of its accompanying friends, like Rejection Sensitivity. Which I didn't have anyone telling me about, or telling me to seriously consider, until well after I'd managed to discard my evil ex and start rebuilding my life after her. With time and perspective of the now, I can see how my signs and signals for VAST weren't considered problems, because I did well academically at all levels, including university, and developed a fairly rigid set of coping mechanisms for the things that I knew were problems for myself. (Hilariously, I was tested in the second grade for a learning disability because I had already done the worksheet while the teacher was explaining the concepts and was therefore doing the thing that I was supposed ot do when I had finished the work. All my teacher saw was me reading all the time, and while the work was getting done, she worried that I might not be picking things up in class. The tests came back fine, of course, and that the weakness that I had was that I was "only" a few grade levels above where I was supposed to be in some subjects. As Agent 86 was fond of saying, "Missed it by that much." If we had known then what we knew now…well, I probably still would have been missed, because they would have been looking for a disruptive boy in class, instead of wondering whether or not the criteria that they were supposed to be looking for in girls might have applied to some boys, too.) With no framework to work with, when those issues started making trouble for me in my work life, I still saw them as character flaws and tried my hardest to find even more compensation methods, reminders, and other ways of trying to corral my wayward brain and not let it get away from me. Because I couldn't control how other people were seeing what I was doing, nor their gossiping about me, nor could I get them to ask me about what I was doing before complaining to my supervisor. And my supervisor chose to see them as character flaws rather than as things that might need additional support and scaffolding, or possibly even accommodation, so they could be dealt with appropriately. (I have no idea if my supervisor could have conceived of them as something else. She might not have had the knowledge or the understanding to look for some other cause than a personal failing.) Which mostly left me in a situation where I was looking at myself through a deficit lens, because all of my talents and abilities and stat scores weren't able to overcome these obstacles, and I kept finding new and exciting failure modes for my external tools, or new situations that they hadn't accounted for that they needed to account for. And so I was always going to be chasing whatever the last problem was, until there were more problems to have to account for than I had memory capacity for in the moment, even with the external memory helping me. And, as you might guess, in an environment where you have mostly neurotypical people, things don't end great when all everyone thinks you need is more willpower or more desire. (And that included me.) Trust me, I didn't want to almost get fired because i didn't know what was wrong with me and nobody else had a fucking clue, either. It wasn't a problem that a fixed mindset could defeat, and if I'm having a bad day about these traits of mine acting up again, I might still make categorical, sweeping, and unkind statements about myself that come from that fixed mindset and the deficit thinking.
So, trying to maintain a growth mindset about myself is a matter of survival, in addition to not having a meltdown when kids a quarter to half my age thrash me at a game that I have apparently wrapped some of my identity in. It's the way I have to get past the brainweasels that tell me there's no point in trying if you can't execute perfectly, because there's an entire horde of people waiting to criticize you or take joy in your failure. To try new things without the expectation that if they don't go perfectly, that someone is going to tell my supervisor about them and I'm going to deal with disciplinary measures because I tried to do something outside their perception of what my work is. To try and persist with something, even through the frustrations of failure and setbacks and the constant problem of needles and threads being so small and my hands not being well-suited to small and delicate operations yet. And to do things enjoyably, rather than perfectly, and to be willing to show people my imperfections and see what they think about them. I'm still pretty fast on the self-deprecating humor, because it's easier for me to make fun of myself before anyone else gets the chance to. And so that I don't get disappointed when something I'm genuinely proud of and happy for isn't as well-received as I hoped it would be. And, y'know, for the hope somewhere, somewhen, that I might be accepting of the person I am at this very moment, even though they are imperfect and there is still things that will need to be worked upon.
Which is a long way to come back around to, even though I'm kind of "eh" about the plant, I like at least some of the meanings behind it, because they are the things that I still need in my life: good fortune, growth, and encouragement.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-19 10:51 pm (UTC)I think there's a lot of power to be found in a symbol like this, and a personal meaning ascribed to it. Even - especially - when it's aspirational.
Wishing you all the persistence of a goldenrod that will not be rooted out.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-20 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-20 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-20 04:42 pm (UTC)