![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#23: "I Will Achieve Nothing With My Life."
Here's the obverse of #17, because I have swung between the two extremes of that space in my life, powered either by overconfidence in myself and the clear benefits that could be gained by simply listening to me and doing what I say, or the despair that comes from facing the understanding that nobody has any reason at all to listen to me, including the people that really should, and therefore I will be unable to do anything with my life. Based on previous entries in the series, you can likely guess at which points in my life I have had the strongest feelings of despair and uselessness, and you can argue amongst yourselves how much of that really has anything to do with me and what I was doing (or failing to do).
But there's a lot of space in between "I will become rich and famous and powerful, and I will achieve great things with my life" and "I will achieve nothing with my life, such that I will have passed through history without having left any impact on it at all." As in the earlier post, if the goal is to become a household name for the encyclopedia (or possibly a Wikipedia article that there are edit wars over, but that nobody questions the notoriety), there are a number of conditions present at one's birth that make this far easier, and those who are outside of that set of conditions only join the ranks of history very rarely. But I did go into a profession that says, at its most optimistic, that it changes people's lives on a daily basis. Which is probably true in a law of large numbers kind of way. And if it is, then there's also the likelihood that doing it enough means that eventually the RNG is going to roll my number for the opportunity to have some "making an impact on someone's life." Even if it never gets back to me that I did the thing.
Sometimes it does.
There's also the site that I maintain for all the times where I've ended up published somewhere, or the spaces where I've done talks, recorded or no, as a way of both archiving what I did and building it into a showcase of the achievements that I've done as the professional that I am even if not all that many of them are platforms where there will be millions of people breathlessly waiting for the next update. I haven't actually had the "thank you for coming to my TED talk" part of it yet (although with all the TEDx events, that's easier than we might think) but I definitely have done talks. And written articles. (Some of which I was paid for, even.) Whether that qualifies as achieving something with my life is probably up to whether the brainweasels are biting very hard that day, but those things are there as things to remind me that it's not just a memory hole or the undifferentiated past. And, possibly, that to do the profession that I have been doing successfully for the years I have so far, it required two university qualifications, so that, too, is enough to say that I have achieved something with my life.
But there's more to this than just the professional aspects of my life, as well. Because I am not my job, nor do I want to be doing my job all the time. There's the stuff that I end up doing outside of my job that has the potential to affect other people. Those are the kinds of things that are even less likely to end up getting back to me as the closure of the loop. Because I've encountered a lot of people and lost contact with many of them, and have no idea whether or not anything that I said or did helped them, unless they tell me about it. Which some of them have, to be clear. Yes, that includes the person who is now my ex. It might be that the premise of this particular bit about accomplishment has been well and thoroughly detonated simply through the fact that I have an independent existence and was able to successfully wind down that relationship. (Paying it off is still going to take a few more years, of course.) That I'm back on a stable footing and that there are cats and housemates in my life is probably an accomplishment by itself, as well.
Or, if we want to go even simpler and sillier, there's the fact that my video gaming profiles still showcase all of the achievements that I've made happen in games. So each of those is a little something that says that I did…something with my life. Acquired skills, found tactics, solved puzzles. Left a record, however ephemeral that is. Or all of these posts that detail the progress that has happened and how I've changed from the person that I was. The changes that I acknowledge, and the ones that I don't, but that are clearly present for people who have been reading for a long time. Or all the kudos and comments on my fic efforts (and the meta that I've also archived.) Does all of that count as having achieved something with my life? It certainly can, since there are quantifiable numbers and I can point at a "numbers go up" kind of situation. Or that the single sole story that I made with four numbers in the kudos count is the objective proof needed to say that I did something with my life. Or the comments count, or the bookmarks count, or the words count. There is an endless number of possible quantifications that I can use as my justification that I have done something with me life. Of course, none of them are necessarily the objective quantification of my life, because there is no singular objective quantification that is universally accepted. We have no Whuffie numbers, and even the things that we use as proxy for Whuffie numbers, like bank accounts, are still not universally accepted as the most objective quantification of value. There are even those "weird" (by Western capitalist definitions) people who insist that there is no way to quantify someone's value, and that "numbers go up" is a pretty silly way of ordering your life. (And sillier still that corporations are, to some degree, legally obligated to do "numbers go up" as their measure of success and that you have to do things in a very specific way if you want to have your goals and measures of success be something else.)
So there's quantitative ways of shouting that I exist and I have had an impact into the void, even though that potentially invites the "someone will always have better numbers" comparison, regardless of what numbers I use as my proof. There's also qualitative ways of measuring the impact of self. Like small comments about "you know that this person doesn't always come around when there are visitors, but does when you're here?" If we want to, I can say that I have made an achievement with my life by managing to avoid all of the pitfalls that were waiting for me and that I would have been particularly vulnerable to in the early parts of my life. Or that (even if I still don't fully believe it, because I was never socialized to believe it) multiple people in my life have told me that I look attractive to them and they like the look of me. (Multiple people have even told me this while I didn't have the benefits of flattering camera angles or clothing meant to project a specific kind of image.) The people who have told me that they bring their little ones to my story times because I say explicitly what my expectations are and what behaviors I allow that others might see as distracting or wrong to what they want to achieve in their story times. Or the managed crises from the previous post, the ones where other people were able to take actions that improved their physical health (and possibly mental health, too) or that helped others do the same. It's a bit of a struggle to conceptualize the idea that I might have helped save a life. Or several. Because of the things that I did and said and typed. Some of which I have not said nor did nor typed with the specific intent of saving a life. (And how much does it count if the life I saved may have been my own?) There's so, so much there in the qualitative department that could count as a singular achievement of a life to this point, or many of them that all add up to an impact. And much like the quantitative department, there's no specific universally-acknowledged rubric to evaluate the qualitative parts to determine if they have been objectively impactful, moral, or otherwise could count as an achievement of life. It is, frustratingly, up to the individual to decide what qualifies as their achievements and goals.
To say that I have achieved nothing with my life is a lie. To say that I haven't achieved everything I want to with my life is closer to the truth, but that, too, bears interrogating to see what kinds of assumptions I have and what kinds of unreasonable goals I think are still achievable. If the ultimate goal of the situation is not to be grasping at things that will not happen and being disappointed that I cannot fulfill them (or did not fulfill them), but to be satisfied with what I have done and to live in the moment, neither yearning for the nostalgia of the past nor striving to the expectations of the future, then, well, there's still a lot of awareness to cultivate. And more things to stop believing in, first by not believing them fully, and then for some of them, to stop believing in them at all.
#23: "I Will Achieve Nothing With My Life."
Here's the obverse of #17, because I have swung between the two extremes of that space in my life, powered either by overconfidence in myself and the clear benefits that could be gained by simply listening to me and doing what I say, or the despair that comes from facing the understanding that nobody has any reason at all to listen to me, including the people that really should, and therefore I will be unable to do anything with my life. Based on previous entries in the series, you can likely guess at which points in my life I have had the strongest feelings of despair and uselessness, and you can argue amongst yourselves how much of that really has anything to do with me and what I was doing (or failing to do).
But there's a lot of space in between "I will become rich and famous and powerful, and I will achieve great things with my life" and "I will achieve nothing with my life, such that I will have passed through history without having left any impact on it at all." As in the earlier post, if the goal is to become a household name for the encyclopedia (or possibly a Wikipedia article that there are edit wars over, but that nobody questions the notoriety), there are a number of conditions present at one's birth that make this far easier, and those who are outside of that set of conditions only join the ranks of history very rarely. But I did go into a profession that says, at its most optimistic, that it changes people's lives on a daily basis. Which is probably true in a law of large numbers kind of way. And if it is, then there's also the likelihood that doing it enough means that eventually the RNG is going to roll my number for the opportunity to have some "making an impact on someone's life." Even if it never gets back to me that I did the thing.
Sometimes it does.
There's also the site that I maintain for all the times where I've ended up published somewhere, or the spaces where I've done talks, recorded or no, as a way of both archiving what I did and building it into a showcase of the achievements that I've done as the professional that I am even if not all that many of them are platforms where there will be millions of people breathlessly waiting for the next update. I haven't actually had the "thank you for coming to my TED talk" part of it yet (although with all the TEDx events, that's easier than we might think) but I definitely have done talks. And written articles. (Some of which I was paid for, even.) Whether that qualifies as achieving something with my life is probably up to whether the brainweasels are biting very hard that day, but those things are there as things to remind me that it's not just a memory hole or the undifferentiated past. And, possibly, that to do the profession that I have been doing successfully for the years I have so far, it required two university qualifications, so that, too, is enough to say that I have achieved something with my life.
But there's more to this than just the professional aspects of my life, as well. Because I am not my job, nor do I want to be doing my job all the time. There's the stuff that I end up doing outside of my job that has the potential to affect other people. Those are the kinds of things that are even less likely to end up getting back to me as the closure of the loop. Because I've encountered a lot of people and lost contact with many of them, and have no idea whether or not anything that I said or did helped them, unless they tell me about it. Which some of them have, to be clear. Yes, that includes the person who is now my ex. It might be that the premise of this particular bit about accomplishment has been well and thoroughly detonated simply through the fact that I have an independent existence and was able to successfully wind down that relationship. (Paying it off is still going to take a few more years, of course.) That I'm back on a stable footing and that there are cats and housemates in my life is probably an accomplishment by itself, as well.
Or, if we want to go even simpler and sillier, there's the fact that my video gaming profiles still showcase all of the achievements that I've made happen in games. So each of those is a little something that says that I did…something with my life. Acquired skills, found tactics, solved puzzles. Left a record, however ephemeral that is. Or all of these posts that detail the progress that has happened and how I've changed from the person that I was. The changes that I acknowledge, and the ones that I don't, but that are clearly present for people who have been reading for a long time. Or all the kudos and comments on my fic efforts (and the meta that I've also archived.) Does all of that count as having achieved something with my life? It certainly can, since there are quantifiable numbers and I can point at a "numbers go up" kind of situation. Or that the single sole story that I made with four numbers in the kudos count is the objective proof needed to say that I did something with my life. Or the comments count, or the bookmarks count, or the words count. There is an endless number of possible quantifications that I can use as my justification that I have done something with me life. Of course, none of them are necessarily the objective quantification of my life, because there is no singular objective quantification that is universally accepted. We have no Whuffie numbers, and even the things that we use as proxy for Whuffie numbers, like bank accounts, are still not universally accepted as the most objective quantification of value. There are even those "weird" (by Western capitalist definitions) people who insist that there is no way to quantify someone's value, and that "numbers go up" is a pretty silly way of ordering your life. (And sillier still that corporations are, to some degree, legally obligated to do "numbers go up" as their measure of success and that you have to do things in a very specific way if you want to have your goals and measures of success be something else.)
So there's quantitative ways of shouting that I exist and I have had an impact into the void, even though that potentially invites the "someone will always have better numbers" comparison, regardless of what numbers I use as my proof. There's also qualitative ways of measuring the impact of self. Like small comments about "you know that this person doesn't always come around when there are visitors, but does when you're here?" If we want to, I can say that I have made an achievement with my life by managing to avoid all of the pitfalls that were waiting for me and that I would have been particularly vulnerable to in the early parts of my life. Or that (even if I still don't fully believe it, because I was never socialized to believe it) multiple people in my life have told me that I look attractive to them and they like the look of me. (Multiple people have even told me this while I didn't have the benefits of flattering camera angles or clothing meant to project a specific kind of image.) The people who have told me that they bring their little ones to my story times because I say explicitly what my expectations are and what behaviors I allow that others might see as distracting or wrong to what they want to achieve in their story times. Or the managed crises from the previous post, the ones where other people were able to take actions that improved their physical health (and possibly mental health, too) or that helped others do the same. It's a bit of a struggle to conceptualize the idea that I might have helped save a life. Or several. Because of the things that I did and said and typed. Some of which I have not said nor did nor typed with the specific intent of saving a life. (And how much does it count if the life I saved may have been my own?) There's so, so much there in the qualitative department that could count as a singular achievement of a life to this point, or many of them that all add up to an impact. And much like the quantitative department, there's no specific universally-acknowledged rubric to evaluate the qualitative parts to determine if they have been objectively impactful, moral, or otherwise could count as an achievement of life. It is, frustratingly, up to the individual to decide what qualifies as their achievements and goals.
To say that I have achieved nothing with my life is a lie. To say that I haven't achieved everything I want to with my life is closer to the truth, but that, too, bears interrogating to see what kinds of assumptions I have and what kinds of unreasonable goals I think are still achievable. If the ultimate goal of the situation is not to be grasping at things that will not happen and being disappointed that I cannot fulfill them (or did not fulfill them), but to be satisfied with what I have done and to live in the moment, neither yearning for the nostalgia of the past nor striving to the expectations of the future, then, well, there's still a lot of awareness to cultivate. And more things to stop believing in, first by not believing them fully, and then for some of them, to stop believing in them at all.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-24 01:11 am (UTC)That's my goal in life (or one of them, anyway). To make the small differences where I can, that occasionally end up being big differences in the long run.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-24 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-24 11:43 am (UTC)It didn't work out that way! :o)
no subject
Date: 2023-12-24 05:43 pm (UTC)