Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

[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.]

#11: "I'm Not Allowed To Get Angry."

You know, fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering, and all that. Although a fair amount of that suffering comes from having damaged something or someone in a fit of Big Feelings. And those tend to come much more out of frustration than anger, because sometimes you're a person who has big hands and is being asked to do a fiddly operation with parts that need a precise amount of force applied to them so they'll come apart or they'll go together. Too much force, and they break, too little, and they stay improperly joined. But there are also other frustrations in my life that generally I can't do anything about, either, and they're good for a vent here and there, or commiseration with co-workers.

( This is actually mostly about frustration, rather than proper anger, but the two of them are linked enough. )

It's still a work in progress. I no longer believe that I'm forbidden from having frustration and anger, except when the weasels are biting hard or I'm in a shame spiral about having expressed that frustration and someone else reacting to it. There's a solution out there that will work and doesn't insist that harmony is fully dependent on me to never express an emotional that doesn't fall into the pleasant category. It will take time, effort, and probably many more stumbles than have already happened in trying to find this solution. It is, after all, frustrating.

[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.]

#9: "I can make changes in my organization."

One of the worst things that happens to anyone who has finished their library school training is while they have the tools and the perspective to see their organizations from outside angles and to bring useful solutions and new ways of thinking to new problems and intractable ones, their organizations insist on wasting that potential by hammering all of that outside perspective and new knowledge out of them so they can instead learn how the organization has always done things, will continue to do things, and how things get done in the bureaucracy, so you know whose permission you have to obtain before even beginning the legwork toward doing something and how likely it is that someone in one of the managerial level above you will decide to crush it. (If you're lucky, they might even explain why.)

( And it happened to me, too. )

This is not a happy story, because it's basically a story of failure and blockading and a neurodivergent person looking at things, having a possible solution, asking if we can implement it, and being told "no" for reasons that don't always end up in the "okay, that's fair" column. And that's with things that I've been trying to do that are ultimately on the less important end, because there are other possible ways of obtaining technology or putting in programming. For the people who have been trying to get the organization to change their culture to be better at providing good working environments for non-white colleagues, for non-cis colleagues, they not only have to deal with the fundamental conservatism, but all of the additional problems that come from dealing with a profession that is primarily white women, and with a lot of white women in positions of leadership. They probably have long since stopped believing in the statement that they can make change entirely. Yet nobody seems to think of that as the major condemnation that it is.

[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.]

#7: "It Is Possible To Be Normal."

Apparently, the RNG likes themes, even though I've been putting those themes well away from each other on the list just to try and avoid this situation.

We covered one of the prongs of Mount Normal in the last post. Admittedly, that one is the despair route, the one that encourages giving up, not just on trying to ascend Mount Normal, but on everything else, as well. The Broken route says that self-improvement is impossible and the issues that are present are insurmountable. This route is more hopeful, in that it at least takes the idea that Mount Normal can be summited and there's a way to do so.

( At what cost? )

This one is no longer a believed-fully item because, as you can see, it has an extremely faulty premise. The mere belief that there is such a thing as "normal" to achieve creates a laundry list of problems by itself, and those problems then make the question of whether "normal" is desirable or achievable important, because if there's a shared definition of what normal is (not always guaranteed), there's a lot of "normal" that's actively harmful to the people who are trying to either achieve it or impose it on others.

And yet, even if I am not the sun or the air, I am human and I would like to be loved, just like everybody else does. To have the frame moved sufficiently, expanded sufficiently, that there no longer exists the ability for any one group to capture it, declare themselves "normal" and have the power to impose their definition on others. That, instead, we have to negotiate our own morals and the morals and ethics that make a functional society composed of millions of definitions of what's normal and where those millions can find common ground, compromises, and a shared desire to take care of each other and make sure everyone is happy, safe, and fulfilled in what they do.

So I suppose whether or not this is one that's fully-believed depends on what your definition of normal is.

[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.]

#5: "My Needs Are The Lowest Priority."

I do have opinions on things. You can see them here and elsewhere. And while I often take the joke from Whad'Ya Know about how all of my opinions are well-reasoned and insightful (needless to say, they are not the opinions of my employer, partners, or the general society), for a lot of the quotidian things in life, or the things that marketing departments want to convince us we should all have specific brand loyalty about, I don't have an opinion, or it's not a strong enough one that I want to put it in contention with someone else's opinion. (Or their allergies and/or dietary requirements.)

( This often makes me pretty easy to be around )

This statement I don't believe fully any more, but it's taken a lot of help to get to that point, from professionals and others. I still am pretty flexible on a lot of things, and I'm still okay with doing 4 happiness things that bring others 10 happiness. It can still be a struggle, though, to look at something, do the research on it, think about what uses I could put it to (or where it would look great as a decoration), decide the price is okay for it, and then actually hit the purchase button for myself. Even for things that I know I'm going to enjoy, because I still have a very tuned sense that my needs and wants go to the bottom of the pile, as the most able, most flexible, generally most privileged person in the situation and because of the possibility that such resources could be used in the future for some other, more worthy, more helpful and selfless thing. Because someone else could use those resources more now, as well. But I've also been able to make progress on recognizing my own states of mind and body and when those need breaks or rest, and I have people around me who recognize and respect the indirect no, and who will put things on lists for the future, or who will explain the severity of the situation up front so I can make better decisions about now or soon. And, occasionally, who put their feet down and tell me that I have to take time for myself as well and shove on me hard to go do enjoyable things because they've seen me do a lot of self-sacrificing for the good of everyone. It's been helpful to have them for climbing out of the wreckage of the bad relationship, and for reframing (and reminding me of the reframing of) the habits and beliefs that I had acquired as survival mechanisms in that relationship. It is still a work in progress, but progress has been made.

[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.]

#3: "I'm Barely Above The Bar Of Acceptable Behavior."

Apparently, the RNG wants me to keep talking about toxic masculinity for the early part of this year's series. (As a sidebar, it's weird to look at a "this is how you generate a random number in a range in bash" command and go 'Shit, I understand every component of what's going on here." Not just the modulo math operation, but the the reason why you add a number to the result of the modulo to establish the bounds of the range. Maybe I'm better at some of these math things than I thought.)

I appreciate the work that's been done into seeding into our conversations and our brains the idea that behavior is the thing that needs addressing, that can change, rather than allowing the conflation of behavior and innate disposition. What a person believes may make them more likely to do certain behaviors, but it is absolutely possible to get someone to behave in specific ways, even if those behaviors don't align with their core beliefs. Even more so if changing their behavior avoids bad consequences and/or courts good ones. It's a very useful frame for when people behave in -ist manners, because you can sidestep the entire derail about how they believe in their heart of hearts that they're not a bad person and keep the focus on the concrete thing that can be changed and needs to be changed.

So, if you've never seen me in person, or a photograph of me, the important part to know about this is that I look like a tall cis white man. I expect people who don't know me well enough to know which of those descriptors above are false to treat me as a tall cis white man, and that means I have to try and keep in mind how the things I am doing and saying come across as if it were a tall cis white man doing and saying them. Sometimes I succeed, but as someone raised as a cis white man, I don't always know all the things that I need to be aware of, or how the privileges that I have with that appearance can distort my view of reality such that I fail to properly understand things. (And thus might suggest solutions that seem straightforward to me, but that would be snarly or impossible for the person who actually tried to implement them. Or do behaviors that I think are harmless that aren't necessarily harmless.) Because of the difference between belief and behavior, I can believe I'm a good person who wants to do well around others and hold healthy suspicion about whether or not my behaviors are helpful and good to others and myself. I don't know what I don't know, so it seems safest to assume that my privileges cloud my understanding sufficiently that I'm not part of the advanced class, or possibly even the basic one. It's above the line of acceptable behavior, but it seems foolish to attribute anything more than "barely over the line" to those behaviors, on the assumption that there are so many other things that I don't even know I don't know that keep me from believing that I might be doing okay.

( Presenting the evidence against this dim view of myself )

This is one of the phrases that I don't believe fully, rather than I don't believe at all, because of my developed sensitivities. There's been enough evidence put in front of me to make the case that I'm not barely above the bar, and that where I think the bar is often is above where other people think the bar is. But I have to consciously think about those pieces of evidence to get to that conclusion, or so that I have a chance at smacking brainweasels off of me when they're swarming and biting. Self-forgiveness is not easy for me, as we'll explore later on in the series, and I'm still not great at untangling "what you did" from "who you are." With time and practice, perhaps, it will become easier.

[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.]

#1: "Nerdery Precludes Sex and Intimaacy"

Let's start with something from my farther past, in the middle of my provincial (rustic, not Canadian) upbringing, at the point in time where the things that I have enjoyed for my life have run into, essentially, unflattering media portrayals. In media that is supposed to appeal to nerds, the brilliant brainy ones are saving the day, but it's a bit of a toss-up between whether they're also beloved by all, including incredibly sexy women that want to throw themselves at the nerd, or whether their world-saving heroism means they will not ever have the distraction or the detriment of being attractive to women. Outside of that specific media, in patterns that continue to this day, nerds are almost all supposed to be laughed at and condescended to, and no conventionally attractive woman would ever give them anything more than a scornful laugh.

( The Situation As It Was, And How I Avoided Becoming A Gamergater )

I no longer believe that being a nerd means no sex and no intimate relationships, and I'm much better and happier for it.