Snowflake Challenge 02026 #7: Be Nice.
Jan. 13th, 2026 06:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptThe dreaded "say nice things about yourself" challenge has appeared at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge!
I exaggerate for dramatic effect when I call this a "dreaded" challenge, but it is absolutely the case that because I see myself from the inside, and everyone else from the outside, I have a much harder time saying unqualified good things about myself than I do others. I strongly suspect I am not alone in this, and I know many of the reasons why, both social and otherwise.
Several times, when December Days rolls around, or the Snowflake or Sunshine challenges appear, the stories that I tell are about good things about myself, with as little temporizing, minimizing, or dismissal as possible. Others have more of those things in them. Still others are about the situations that give rise to an unwillingness to say good things about myself without heavy contextualization, temporization, or minimization.
You can boil a lot of those stories down to an essence that is "I learned early on in life that others do not actually want your full and authentic self, because your full and authentic self is too much on at least one axis for them." mixed with "very few children and adults in this world have been taught how to evaluate the correct course of action when someone is Too Much in their presence, nor how to properly ask someone to adjust or to find another person to be Much around." Nor, necessarily, to evaluate whether or not the Much around them is Much they need to care about. As we get older and have more options available to us about how to deal with Muchness, we often get better at working through, around, or avoiding Muchness that we don't want to be around or that we think isn't helpful to us, but by then, the damage is usually done, and it's been instilled in everyone that Muchness is a thing to be tamped down, if you discover it in yourself, and to be stomped down if you discover it in others. Outside of very specific spaces, anyway, all of whom invoke, directly or indirectly, the idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, where the usual rules of "outside" are suspended and the rules of the TAZ take precedence over all others. Fandom is supposed to be one of those spaces that operates on the TAZ, but there's a certain amount of pushback about fandom's TAZ spilling out from conventions, websites, and places that are explicitly declared fandom-friendly. Because fandom is a place of Muchness, often concentrated and refined Muchness, and those who express their Muchness in fandom spaces are often doing so out of abundance and a lack of other places to express it. That it's moving in toward the mainstream is producing concerns about crossing the streams, to be sure, but also there are people who resist the idea that fandom, and squee, and other such things can just be a regular topic of conversation between people, rather than being restricted solely to the TAZ.
(This is not just a story about fandom. There are all kinds of other Muchnesses that are being shunned and shunted away from "typical" and "normal" spaces because the people who believe themselves "typical" and "normal" don't have those Muchnesses, they have other ones, and those are perfectly acceptable, since they are "typical" and "normal." Despite the ever-increasing body of knowledge and study we have about humans and the ways we express ourselves that laughs at the concept of "normal" and "typical" outside of statistics and other mathematical calculations that mostly predicate "normal" based on the highest incidence of something. And the ever-increasing amount of people who have their Muchnesses and have decided they're finished trying to contort themselves into shapes and spaces that are still unacceptable to the "typical" and the "normal," because the effort shows, instead of being "natural.")
The act of showing your Muchness, or saying unqualified good things about yourself, is an act of vulnerability, because you are making a bet that the threshers, the tall-flower cutters, and the people whose voices still ring in our heads long after we've physically parted ways with them will not re-appear to laugh at you, to call you Weird, or to otherwise indicate that you are showing your Muchness to them and they believe that it is your responsibility to stop showing your Muchness, instead of their responsibility to evaluate whether there is a need to stop or constrain the Muchness on display. (As I said in one of the December Days posts, there is a running theme that if you are perceived to be a wiz-ard (one showing or having too much wiz), people will start calling you a bast-ard (someone with too much bast in them, or too much tomcat in their ancestry, I guess).) For people who have not had that particular kind of weasel attack, or never been the person being told they're Too Much, or asked "why can't you just be normal," it is somewhat incomprehensible to consider how much courage and bravery it requires to be vulnerable in this way. (Text softens the blow somewhat, because you only receive text in commentary, so someone has to make an active effort to do any of those things, instead of passively choosing not to engage, or clicking the back button and vanishing without a trace of having been there.)
With the idea of the skill-taste gap firmly in mind as well, then, here we go, some moments of vulnerability, in no particular order or theme:
Feel free to add more things in the comments, if you think I've overlooked something that's obvious to you, or if you have been looking for an excuse to say something nice about someone, or if the Muses finally drop inspiration and you can get out all the things that you've wanted to say for some time but haven't managed to do it to the people who you want to hear it. (If that's for someone else, though, go say it to them, not to me.) Or if, after reading this, you've figured out your own things, then now is the time to put it into your own challenge entry, before the doubts and the weasels come back and start looking for vulnerable spots to bite.
snowflake_challenge!While we’re busy celebrating fandom, it’s good to remember to celebrate ourselves, too. Fandom is all of us! I know it’s often easier to talk about what we like about other people than it is to talk nicely about ourselves, but challenge yourself here --
Challenge #7
LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.
I exaggerate for dramatic effect when I call this a "dreaded" challenge, but it is absolutely the case that because I see myself from the inside, and everyone else from the outside, I have a much harder time saying unqualified good things about myself than I do others. I strongly suspect I am not alone in this, and I know many of the reasons why, both social and otherwise.
Several times, when December Days rolls around, or the Snowflake or Sunshine challenges appear, the stories that I tell are about good things about myself, with as little temporizing, minimizing, or dismissal as possible. Others have more of those things in them. Still others are about the situations that give rise to an unwillingness to say good things about myself without heavy contextualization, temporization, or minimization.
You can boil a lot of those stories down to an essence that is "I learned early on in life that others do not actually want your full and authentic self, because your full and authentic self is too much on at least one axis for them." mixed with "very few children and adults in this world have been taught how to evaluate the correct course of action when someone is Too Much in their presence, nor how to properly ask someone to adjust or to find another person to be Much around." Nor, necessarily, to evaluate whether or not the Much around them is Much they need to care about. As we get older and have more options available to us about how to deal with Muchness, we often get better at working through, around, or avoiding Muchness that we don't want to be around or that we think isn't helpful to us, but by then, the damage is usually done, and it's been instilled in everyone that Muchness is a thing to be tamped down, if you discover it in yourself, and to be stomped down if you discover it in others. Outside of very specific spaces, anyway, all of whom invoke, directly or indirectly, the idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, where the usual rules of "outside" are suspended and the rules of the TAZ take precedence over all others. Fandom is supposed to be one of those spaces that operates on the TAZ, but there's a certain amount of pushback about fandom's TAZ spilling out from conventions, websites, and places that are explicitly declared fandom-friendly. Because fandom is a place of Muchness, often concentrated and refined Muchness, and those who express their Muchness in fandom spaces are often doing so out of abundance and a lack of other places to express it. That it's moving in toward the mainstream is producing concerns about crossing the streams, to be sure, but also there are people who resist the idea that fandom, and squee, and other such things can just be a regular topic of conversation between people, rather than being restricted solely to the TAZ.
(This is not just a story about fandom. There are all kinds of other Muchnesses that are being shunned and shunted away from "typical" and "normal" spaces because the people who believe themselves "typical" and "normal" don't have those Muchnesses, they have other ones, and those are perfectly acceptable, since they are "typical" and "normal." Despite the ever-increasing body of knowledge and study we have about humans and the ways we express ourselves that laughs at the concept of "normal" and "typical" outside of statistics and other mathematical calculations that mostly predicate "normal" based on the highest incidence of something. And the ever-increasing amount of people who have their Muchnesses and have decided they're finished trying to contort themselves into shapes and spaces that are still unacceptable to the "typical" and the "normal," because the effort shows, instead of being "natural.")
The act of showing your Muchness, or saying unqualified good things about yourself, is an act of vulnerability, because you are making a bet that the threshers, the tall-flower cutters, and the people whose voices still ring in our heads long after we've physically parted ways with them will not re-appear to laugh at you, to call you Weird, or to otherwise indicate that you are showing your Muchness to them and they believe that it is your responsibility to stop showing your Muchness, instead of their responsibility to evaluate whether there is a need to stop or constrain the Muchness on display. (As I said in one of the December Days posts, there is a running theme that if you are perceived to be a wiz-ard (one showing or having too much wiz), people will start calling you a bast-ard (someone with too much bast in them, or too much tomcat in their ancestry, I guess).) For people who have not had that particular kind of weasel attack, or never been the person being told they're Too Much, or asked "why can't you just be normal," it is somewhat incomprehensible to consider how much courage and bravery it requires to be vulnerable in this way. (Text softens the blow somewhat, because you only receive text in commentary, so someone has to make an active effort to do any of those things, instead of passively choosing not to engage, or clicking the back button and vanishing without a trace of having been there.)
With the idea of the skill-taste gap firmly in mind as well, then, here we go, some moments of vulnerability, in no particular order or theme:
- I'm getting more patient with myself. My childhood, and a lot of my adulthood, has been characterized by intense frustration at not being able to master concepts or actions easily, and that some of them require effort and struggle and failure before they decide to get in gear. When I was younger, because so many of the things I was encountering were within my abilities, discovering things that weren't was not the easiest. (And also tended to result in those situations where people were making fun of me, which did not encourage persistence or resilience at the setbacks.) Adulthood, and being free from people who seize upon any moment of weakness as a means to make someone feel bad for the Muchness they have, has made it easier to accept frustrations and limitations
- I have genuine expertise in my field. That expertise gets applied in ways to make people feel better about the ways that technology is misbehaving, or to make children and their caregivers listen to a story and do a rhyme. And occasionally to make materials appear where they seemed hidden. And while there's no way I'll end up as some kind of Mover and Shaker, or a Library Luminary, or any of the other laurels that get put on people who are doing impressively large projects, or who are riding the zeitgeist of whatever library management is most obsessed with at that particular moment, I have been paid for my work, I do keep getting published in various places, and I have had several presentations at conferences and gatherings. I usually downplay them as having had the confidence of the mediocre white man and submitting when others might have had better material, but it turns out, when I'm not looking, there are people there who are genuinely interested in what I have to say, or in my expertise to help solve problems that have cropped up for them.
- I am at least a one-hit wonder in a fandom. Which sounds like a backhanded compliment to myself, but it's the reality that I have created one 1000+ kudos work of the nearly 300 works I have listed on AO3, and just recently have had one other work top the 500 kudos mark. (They're both in the Miraculous Ladybug fandom, so I have a larger volume of fans to capture whatever percentage of them will be leaving kudos.) That is, most likely, going to be my only claim to fame out of everything I create. It will be a small claim of fame, much like the fractional Hugo, and that's okay. The thing I like about myself and the works I've put together is that I keep turning out works that I would enjoy reading, and so on the occasional miss or lack of comment from a recipient or others about how they enjoyed it, the blow is softened, because I still like going back to the thing and reading it again.
- (Okay, fine, those are things about what you do. The prompt is "things you like about yourself." So what about some intrinsic quality that you like about yourself?) Creativity. Sometimes somewhat unhinged creativity, to be sure, but there's a lot of "how can I make this work" that I bring to the table when I'm trying to solve problems, get around writer's block, make old technology work for new purposes, and otherwise try to apply lateral thinking and see if I can come up with a good way of (re)purposing something to the task that needs doing. This manifests as trying to work around limitations at work (when those limitations aren't important ones, like not practicing accounting, law, or medicine) and trying to find software that can get devices, even aging ones, to continue being useful contributors to my household. But it can also show up as the realization that I have all I need to go forward with a scene I've been stuck on because I've envisioned a later scene where the problem is solved, and the characters explain to me how they solved it. Or that I can sneak in puns and references to other things that won't impede the story, but will be good for the reader to discover and recognize, if they have the same experiences that would prompt them to remember where that thing comes from. (It also manifests in the presence of "smart people problems," because sometimes you know just enough to be dangerous, and you can create a much worse situation trying to fix something because you think you know how to do it, or the tutorial seemed straightforward, and creativity takes over, trying to get things back to working, or to make something work again, and continues to foul things up even worse than if you'd stopped at the first sign of trouble. Like trying to rehabilitate a dying car battery and killing it fully dead instead.)
- (Better. What else?) A high INT stat. There's an argument as to whether CHA or WIS is my dump stat, based on how my life has gone, but it's clear to me that I rolled high on INT, so book learning, exercises of the mind, and the manipulation of symbols in language (and a little bit in mathematics) are all things in my wheelhouse. It's what lets me shift registers to match the amount of formality a telling-off needs, it propels me when I get on my High Librarian soapbox, and it contributes to a lot of synthesis and linkage-drawing that having a significant amount of input and materials to read and organize produces. Putting like next to like within a framework is something that I try to do well in the linkspam, and to explain why like is next to like when it doesn't seem immediately obvious. Having high INT also helps me diagnose and understand problems and error messages when they appear (and when someone has deigned to provide something useful in their error messages), and then to explain to others what's going on and how to fix it or sidestep the problem and continue. It's never a perfect system, but I think a fair amount of what I have done so far about keeping systems up and running comes from having enough INT to apply to the system to understand it and to remember to run the update commands on the regular and fix whatever conflicts happen. (And also, high INT helps me bend search engines to my will and have them return more useful results.)
- A sense of humor. Which is very specifically in the things I like about me, because I know my sense of humor doesn't always go over with others. Or the jokes don't go over, and they need explaining. Or the humor is actually being very sharply self-deprecating of myself, as a protective measure against other people choosing to make fun of me, or disclaiming expertise or wiz that I definitely have, because people don't always like having Muchness around them, and I get in response "Don't talk about my friend that way." (Next thing you know, you're going to tell me that my worth as a being isn't conditional on whether the people around me are happy with me and find me useful. Pull the other one, why don't you?) But when I am on my humor game, I find a lot of things funny, from broad jokes to blue ones to puns and wordplay. It sometimes makes me groan and curse when I figure out the solution to a cryptic, because so many cryptics are so literal. There are plenty of them where I've said aloud "That's terrible," because once again, the solution was to do exactly as you were told in the clue. Making other people laugh is both a genuine interest and desire of mine, and because making people laugh means they're much less likely to be angry at you or otherwise blame you for when things go sideways. (For that, I have a standing policy that if I can blame the computer for the issue, I will.)
Feel free to add more things in the comments, if you think I've overlooked something that's obvious to you, or if you have been looking for an excuse to say something nice about someone, or if the Muses finally drop inspiration and you can get out all the things that you've wanted to say for some time but haven't managed to do it to the people who you want to hear it. (If that's for someone else, though, go say it to them, not to me.) Or if, after reading this, you've figured out your own things, then now is the time to put it into your own challenge entry, before the doubts and the weasels come back and start looking for vulnerable spots to bite.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-14 10:28 am (UTC)Though I haven't had as much censure for being Too Much (and am too secure in myself to care all that much now), I can still quite understand why it's so difficult to make yourself so vulnerable, so good on you for doing so! (For myself, I'd be wary enough of making myself sound better than I am that it would make this difficult, too... so maybe I also have some trouble with being vulnerable like this?)
As for your compliments, I quite agree that those are all positive qualities, and I like to see you display them. Your humour, as specific to you as it may be, is foremost among them, as it really connects quite well with me! For the rest, I think that being a one-hit wonder could be better than having multiple hit works; I, for one, wouldn't want the extra expectations that come with that, and now you can just write what you want (while knowing that people do like what you write). Further, I'd say from my interactions with you that you do have some charisma.
Well, I've already given you some more compliments, so I hope that'll be enough! (I unfortunately have quite some trouble expressing myself in comments like these, so this is about all I can manage for now.)
no subject
Date: 2026-01-14 11:26 pm (UTC)("Sounding better than I am" is one of the signs that Muchness has been disapproved of. That's the wiz-ard situation, where people get annoyed at you for being good at things.)
no subject
Date: 2026-01-15 08:54 am (UTC)That's good to hear! (And now that you say it, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a part of it... especially since I can't come up with any other reason why.)