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.]

#30: "I'll Never Be Normal."

Finally, the finale to the Mount Normal Trilogy. I no longer believe I'm fundamentally broken, nor that it's possible to be normal, so we make it to the conclusion and find out that in so many, many ways, I actually am quite normal. Despite my long-standing belief that I would never be normal.

( But, once again, how do you define normal? )

While I might believe that I'll never be normal, that's certainly not the case, and one of the joys of my life is that I keep finding people for whom what I have thought of as strange, weird, or even deviant is perfectly normal to them. By having an expanded perspective on where the boundaries of human interaction and action and all the rest are, it allows me to feel much more in the pocket and the bell curve, even in the wider society. Admittedly, I don't want to lose my weird status completely, because I've built a lot of my identity around being someone who isn't normal in all of my aspects, but I want it to be normal weird rather than the kind of weird that I've been made fun of (or nearly fired for), the kind that's quirky and eccentric, rather than the kind that's toxic or seen as moral failures and unacceptable. I've had enough of being singled out for being weird and being told that I'm not okay behind my back and also to my face. So while I may never summit Mount Normal fully, there's definitely a place for me and a whole bunch of other wonderful weirdos along the way.

[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.]

#28: "My Terrible Relationship Fell Apart Because I Didn't Try Hard Enough To Hold It Together."

When a relationship falls apart, there's often a game of blame and trying to dissect where it went wrong so that it doesn't happen again in the next relationship, and taking information learned in that past relationship to try and make a better future relationship. At least, that's the way it's supposed to go when the parties separate amicably and on decent terms with each other, and there aren't major issues in the way that prevent that amicability. If you've been following along all month, you already know that the separation from the person I call my terrible ex was not amicable.

( And yet, it's so much easier to blame myself for things going wrong than her. )

It's not true, by any objective standard, that I didn't try hard enough to make that relationship work. Several objective standards (meaning, the opinions of the people around me who have watched this whole thing and heard at least my side of it) would tell me that I tried harder than most, and would probably say that I was trying harder than she was to get it to work, since I was trying to adjust and she wasn't. The therapist of the time certainly believed I was trying hard to fit into a situation that wasn't normal or healthy. I kept a journal of things that were unhappy-making, or relationship-harming, just to be sure that I wasn't gaslighting myself into believing things were better (or worse) than they actually were.

The wreckage of the relationship still influences the ones I have now, and it makes me sensitive to the thought of someone else committing themselves so far in that they won't be able to easily get out of it again. They can stay in as far as they want for as long as they want, but I want them to be able to leave, and leave cleanly, if that's what they decide is best. Because I don't want them to have to deal with this same situation that I did, and so that they can leave with many fewer weasels about the effort put in to the relationship. (And so that someone else doesn't decide to weaponize the "well, if you leave, then I'm going to be on the streets homeless with the pets and you're not the kind of person who would do that to someone" idea. She was right, I'm not that kind of person, which is also why I hope that the pets she takes care of live long and happy well cared-for lives.)

I did try in that relationship. A lot. That my own brain believes it wasn't enough is unhelpful. That I'm happier now in my current situation is proof that the relationship was bad and it was a good decision to leave, but there's always that piece that wonders whether it was possible to work it all out, and what it would have taken to actually do that.

[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.]

#26: "I'm Not Attractive To Others."

I mean, when you are constantly being shown pictures of very attractive people, especially those kinds of people who have the benefit of entire departments of hair, makeup, and wardrobe, and who then have the further resources of digital and film retouching, editing, and otherwise ensuring that a person's blemishes are smoothed away, their imperfections are blended, and only their very best selves are presented in the images that the rest of us get to see, what other conclusion can you draw? There's a reason that the trope of Hollywood Homely exists, after all.

( And yet, despite that, I must yield the point because experience says otherwise. )

Which makes it somewhat remarkable that I've had as much success as I have in people telling me that they find me attractive. It seems to be, based on things so far, that people who get to know me through my writing make that decision for themselves along the way and then eventually there is a situation where it comes up and there are statements made. Or people who get to know me in other contexts first get to know who I am and then, similarly, when the context appears, there are statements made. It's certainly not a quick way of finding this out, but at the same time, by the time something like this appears, there's been enough figuring it out so that when someone declares their interest, it's based on having gotten to see inside my head for a while, or at least, to make some good guesses about it, and then, from there, going on and deciding whether what I look like is appealing enough to match what's already been seen coming out of my head. There are certainly worse ways of trying to figure out a relationship, as I have figured out and experienced.

It's not something I've completely discarded. I think the trauma of the bad relationship, and some of the other things that I am coming to know about myself and how I relate, are still telling me that my default is that nobody finds me attractive and it is a very rare few who find me otherwise, and fewer still who say so. This is something where I can work my way into believing quality over quantity, but sometimes I do wonder what it would be like if I were one of the people that others were like "this one's good, we want to make them better with all the tools at our disposal," and what I would look like with all of those things applied to me. What my most glamorous self would look like. (With, hopefully, an appreciation of all the work that it takes to make that happen.)

[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.]

#24: "Perfection Is The Only Way To Avoid Trouble."

We've seen some of the effects of this particular thought all throughout this series. It's still one that's difficult to get out of my head, because it's been such a core part of me from very early on in life, and it kept getting reinforced at many points in my life, so I don't think this is one that I'm going to be able to get rid of fully. I think it's become sufficiently part of my coping mechanisms that unwinding it would involve having to construct entirely new ways of relating to the world and having them stick. That's not impossible, but it's going to take a lot of effort to achieve.

( Being okay with the imperfect is difficult, even when there isn't someone there looking to punish you for it. )

There's still work going on with the systems, in refinement, in getting other people to help me help them by using those systems, and in dismantling some of the systems that I put in place in a misguided attempt to protect myself. I still find it a minor miracle in my own head when things aren't perfect and someone else simply rolls with it, or forgives me for things that aren't perfect. Or even doesn't expect perfection out of me. I wouldn't expect perfection out of anyone else, and I'm pretty flexible about rolling with things and finding solutions to situations, including the ones that make everyone else happy and that I can work through. But in myself, it's still a primary brainweasel, a product of hypervigilance and a belief that the only way to avoid getting hurt for making mistakes was not to make them in the first place. There's enough evidence in place that says that I can be imperfect in my life, and things will be okay. It's not an easy thing to believe, because of my history, but the more that it happens where I can make mistakes and they are treated as mistakes instead of as invitations to hurt, the more I can believe that mistakes are forgivable and can be worked through.

[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.]

#22: "I'm going to panic in a crisis."

It would be nice to have a life where things that require quick thinking just don't happen and someone can go through their life without getting to know cortisol as a very good friend. Unfortunately, the people who are generally able to avoid those kinds of situations are the kind of people who have been rich since birth, maintained that wealth all throughout their lives, and never had to worry that their phenomenal wealth would be taken from them by anyone who might have control over it or obtain it through deceptive or other criminal means. And they have been able to live in places that are not subject to war, upheaval, or the decision of the country next door that your right to exist no longer matters. And unlike the one who would become the Buddha, when confronted with the realities of sickness, old age, and death, they do not decide to put their resources toward enlightenment or trying to make it so others do not suffer so, but usually toward trying to prevent themselves from haing to confront those realities as long as possible.

( It turns out that I'm a problem-solver most of the time, rather than someone who stays in a panic state. )

Knowing you don't panic in a crisis sometimes leads to a fun time, though. Last month, the director of my library system was out to my location to film some marketing material and to do a story time with me so they could get the stuff they wanted. The first thing that went wrong was the clipped microphone was on the jacket, and the director took the jacket off to do the story time, which was no real trouble, if what they had wanted was just the visuals. The slightly more concerning thing that happened was that while in the middle of the story time, the power cut at my location. (A substation had failed.) So I suddenly didn't have my slides or my soundtrack or anything else electronic that I normally use for the program. That would certainly be cause to panic, right? A power outage in a story time while the director of the library system is there.

Not really. One of the rules of web page development is that a site should degrade gracefully, so that it is still functional and usable even if the person coming to the site doesn't have lots of bandwidth, or hasn't turned on JavaScript, or is still trying to access the Web through Lynx or Netscape Navigator 3. Story times are arranged in the same way. The electronic things are nice, but they are not necessary to the experience of the story time, and so when the power cuts out in the middle of something that you were doing, you wait a beat or two to see if the power is coming back on, and then you continue the story time as if nothing had happened. Which I did. And it was fine. The grownups went along with it, the director went along with it, and when we went to the post-story time play session, the lights and the power returned, so we didn't have to make any decisions about closing the library, either. No actual need to panic about any of this at all. (And yet, I gave the director and the cameraperson the kudos for rolling with an odd situation, rather than receiving any such thing from them on their end. Just another one of those situations where "meets expectations" apparently includes continuing to do a program through a power outage.)

So, no, it turns out that I'm not the kind of person who stays panicked in a crisis. I'm going to find solutions, even if they're suboptimal.

[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.]

#20: "Real Men Don't Cry So Easily."

There is a lot to be said (and has been said) about the stilted, stunted acceptable emotional range for boys and men. Anger, rage, and those emotional states that lead themselves to internal and interpersonal violence are generally lauded, especially if that violent response is because the man or boy was protecting something from an external force, whether that threat is real or stylized, in the way that sport is. Sensitive, nurturing, and hurting emotional states are generally supposed to be private, if they are allowed to exist at all, and a man who expressed emotions outside the accepted bounds usually has their masculinity and heterosexuality questioned or challenged, with the expectation that such a challenge will be handled with an appropriately manly amount and form of violence. The process by which boys are fashioned and crafted into weapons and then loosed onto the world.

( So what do you do with a child that has a lot of emotions, not just the acceptable ones? )

Admittedly, my solution to this statement is to point out that what a Real Man is and does is built on sand rather than anything firm, and that it is highly dependent on the acceptance of one's peers rather than any kind of objective anything. Which makes it into one of those problems that follows the idea of "It always seems impossible until it is done." So long as there are enough men who believe in the old model and try to make others do the same, it doesn't look like there's a lot of progress, but once there's a critical mass of men who have decided to abandon that model and do something else, something better, for themselves, and to teach that to other men and boys, then that same shifting sand will work in favor of producing something better, and hopefully, something that's actually built on something firm and not misogynistic, that allows for a greater expression of what it means to be a man. (And maybe when that shift has happened and there's enough of a firm idea in place that's expansive and emotive and not stunted only to a small range of expressions, I might consider whether it's worth seeing if there's now a space in being a man for me.)

[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.]

#18: "I can take criticism well."

No, no I can't.

It's taken me a long time to realize what's going on there, and to work on undoing the things that happen when I get criticized, but there's still plenty of situations where criticism is going to result in Big Feelings. And, as best as I have been able to ascertain, there's no way I have right now of shortcutting the need for Big Feelings. The best I have been able to do so far is to put them on a delay, which will hopefully be long enough of a delay that I can somewhere safe to have my Big Feelings and then be able to grapple with what's being said as a criticism and incorporate it.

( As you know, Bob, RSD is a bitch. )

If the frame of "I take criticism well" stays at a very wide distance and concerns itself with whether or not there's a behavioral change when the criticism is warranted, then it does look like I take criticism well. But as soon as you zoom in even a little bit on the process of how I get there, you'll see that no, I don't actually take criticism well at all, and there's a lot of time, energy, and feelings burnt in the service of getting me to the point where I can determine that it's a warranted criticism and change accordingly, because of the way that my life has gone so far, and some of the wonderful aspects of my own brain chemistry that pull things far out of whack in terms of their impact and how serious they really are, versus how serious the person said they were. There's not really a cure for this other than having situations happen where nothing explodes and where the level of seriousness really was what was said, rather than what I built it up into. Or situations where things do explode because they really needed to. (This is difficult, especially when other people are dealing with their own weasels and pasts and touchpoints where they might react more strongly than they want to or intend to.) So if you offer me a correction or a criticism and I have a lot of emotions about it, or ask for some time to sulk before addressing it, or other such things, I'm sorry, it's almost certainly not you. I'm accepting that what you have to say is legitimate and I'll work on it, but first I have to fight my own weaselbrain to get there.

[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.]

#16: "I'm not Genuinely a Good Person."

There are a few people who will point out that if I'm concerned about being a good person, there's a good chance that I'm not fooling myself about whether I'm a good person. They point out to me that the people who are most often deficient in morals, ethics, or guiding principles are persons who do not interrogate themselves to the point of asking, as the meme goes, "Are we the baddies?" but instead continue on with their behavior, untroubled. They tend to react very poorly when someone points out the problems with their behavior, perhaps uttering some of the classic stock phrases like "But some of my best friends are [Z]" or "I don't have a [Ω] bone in my body!"

( More musings on what constitutes Good, and Genuine, and the rest )

I don't fully believe that I'm not Good, but in this particular case, the not fully believing is because I'm almost certain my calibration of what constitutes being a Good person is skewed heavily toward an unattainable perfection. And there's probably also a real truth that even if it's all relative, I probably am doing better than several people who are regular winners of the Worst Person in the World award. It's not something that would breed complacency, because there's always ways to improve and to make myself better than I was before, but I could let myself believe that, at least for some things (many things?), given the choice, I'm going to make a Good one.

[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.]

#14: "I can't cook."

At this point, I think the pattern is a bit more apparent: if I say some kind of sweeping statement about not being able to do something, the correct response is "What do you mean by that?" By asking that question, you can usually discover that the standards, definitions, or rules that I have created for myself about what actually counts as doing the thing are different than what you might think is a good definition.

( Behold the backstory and the somewhat ridiculous definition I have imposed on myself )

It can sound silly, but sometimes, when the weasels are biting, following a recipe still doesn't show up as cooking, even when it's delicious at the end, because the weasels have kidnapped the goalposts and moved them over to somewhere that says "only things that have been created from your own mind, with the ingredients available, and without following or referring to someone else's recipe counts as cooking." (This, as I come to the realization that I prepared and cooked all of the components of the cornbread and sausage dressing for November Feast, even if the more experienced chef checked to make sure the cornbread had cooked all the way through and helped import knowledge to me about the different uses of the pans and why assume work better than others for certain techniques. So, in a very real sense, I did cook that, end to end, even as my brain protests that I was only sous chef for it.) Even though at least one of my relatives was claimed to be able to burn water, and another once got a sardonic reply from a grandmother about whether he was still listening after saying he'd heard no complaints, it turns out that so long as I know what the techniques are and what's being asked of me to do, I can produce delicious food. Recipes preferred, at least for the first few times, because that way I know what the intended result is and from there, if need be, the tinkering aspect can take over. (Or when I'm staring at a refrigerator full of leftovers, I can clear out several of the containers by going "I'll bet these all go together great, especially with a little seasoning and saucing to accompany the reheating. And cheese." No, that's not cooking, either, weren't you paying attention? That's reheating leftovers. The cooking already happened from someone else.)

Interrogate the premise. You'll discover all sorts of fun things hiding there.

[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.]

#12: "I Can't Draw."

When I think about statements like this one, I often reach for Ira Glass's commentary about the difference between skill and taste, and how people who are exercising a skill have to keep grinding away at it, even if they don't feel like the end results are good. For Ira, it's because we have good taste and we know what's aesthetically pleasing to us, but we don't yet have the skills and practice put in where we can create things that are to our taste with the skills that we have. (Unfortunately for all of us, Ira says there's no real shortcut to getting skills to match taste, so it's better for us to get started on doing things that aren't up to taste now, so that we get them out of the way and build from them and get that much more practice toward creating things that will be to our tastes.)

( And speaking of practice... )

None of this is creation ex nihilo, so it's not "drawing" in the same way that none of the snippeting and tweaking of code and looking up the examples is "coding." It's looking at visual references and trying to figure out how their lines and shapes work so I can do it in a way that makes sense to me and that I believe it will work. Sometimes it works more easily than others. But I'm getting in practice at both doing the thing and letting others see the thing by shifting my mental process about it so that, much like with the video games example, instead of seeing it as some kind of permanent statement of my worth, it's something that I'm doing as a doodle, without any expectation of perfection or having to be an exact replica. It'll be up long enough for the Story Time, and then I can take it into the back and someone else will erase it for when they need that whiteboard space for their own program announcement or design. Watching some of the cartooning talks or other bits that break down the lines that can create things helps, too, or show that "everyone can draw" by putting together some of the smaller constructions into cartoons or caricature types of drawing and producing stick figures that go along with it. I think we've managed to convince myself that, once again, I'm using very specific criteria as to what "counts" that's going to make it as difficult as possible to do something that would "count," rather than taking me where I am and being willing to go through a process that results in a drawing, and therefore, I can draw.