Tag: Life

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 280 and Scooping

I first started blogging in college because a friend of mine pointed out that I needed to own my digital identity. I had written something about designer jeans in the lesser school newspaper and another student was dunking on me in her personal blog.

Unless I acted swiftly, Google results would be tainted forever he assured me. So I started blogging. Not because I necessarily felt like I was meant to be a writer but because I didn’t want this other girl to scoop my life story. I didn’t want to get “Bad Art Friended” by letting someone else tell my story.

I’m pretty grateful to both my friend James and the “mean girl” Phoebe for launching my social media habits. Every big break I’ve ever had has come from the connections I made on the Internet. If I hadn’t been petty enough to want to own my own digital identity I might have missed out.

Rather like the “Bad Art Friend” piece where one writer uses details from another’s life for her art, whoever is able to own the narrative is the default winner. It’s not terribly fair but it could have been someone else telling my story had I not chosen to write. If the victors write history then there is an incentive to be the one whose narrative wins. And the only way to win in our social media saturated works is to be sure you’ve got the scoop on your own life.

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Emotional Work

Day 278 and Overshooting

I have been feeling terrific. That means I’ve been able to do a lot more. But it’s also one of my tendencies to overshoot my capacity. Workaholism, like any addiction, is something I’ll have for the rest of my life. Being in recovery for it means recognizing I could relapse.

I feel a bit of that overextended twitchy feeling at the moment. That jittery adrenaline fueled vibe that proceeds a crash isn’t something I’ve allowed myself to feel for several years as frankly I was worried I’d go on a bender. A bender for me is perceived as societally approved. Look at that work ethic!

So this is me recognizing that I feel like I could go over the edge and I’m not going to do it. The temptation I had to find something to prolong the adrenaline of my winning work streak is heavy. I have a number of topics I’d like to write about today. I’ve got to do lists with tempting targets. But I’m not going to overshoot. I’ve written my paragraphs. I’ll tag it. I’ll send it out into social media and then I’m going to watch some trashy tv. Hold

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Emotional Work

Day 259 and Easing into Habits

Considering I’ve been writing every single day for two hundred and fifty nine straight days you’d think I’d have encountered more writer’s block. But I generally find myself capable of putting the proverbial pen to paper. Well in this case it is thumbs to mobile application layer but that doesn’t sound as evocative.

Even today when I had no discernible topic at the ready I am finding that words will spill out so long as I make the effort to form a thought and codify it to written form. While I had the notion that I had little to say today I am still able to say something. I am saying something about having nothing to say but it’s the act that counts.

It’s not that it’s necessarily a worthy entry, but rather a reminder to myself that the act of doing forces it’s own discipline. It’s practice. I am learning that doing something can be easy as long as I let myself relax into the momentum of doing it without expectations or pressure. This must be what all those sports speeches about practice are on about.

Seeing writing as a habit rather than an inspiration or performance likely helps. I’ve come to view the activity as similar to exercise, taking vitamins or brushing my teeth. Perhaps it’s more cognitively demanding but it’s no less part of the daily rhythm.

I’d like that to be true of more of the activities in my life. Being able to view professional necessities as habits is a sure way to see them not as exhausting “to do” lists but rather enjoyable easy daily practices. Sure it will start out harder but eventually it will become easier.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 258 and Snacks

I’ve never been much of a snacker. I eat at mealtimes, and for many years that only included lunch and dinner as I practiced intermittent fasting. I like to eat bigger portions and a bunch of different things in one sitting. For whatever reason, I am a meal person.

My husband on the other hand is dedicated to grazing. Unless I specifically tell him to leave food for me it will disappear. Not because he sneaks my food, but rather I just don’t get to things fast enough. I’ll ask what happened to some treat and Alex will sigh and say “you bought that six weeks ago!” If I don’t plan to eat something it gets forfeit.

But occasionally I’ll get it into my head that I should buy some snacks. I tell myself it would be nice to have something salty in the house. Or I think I’d enjoy some fruit snacks (the one item I truly coveted as a child but was not allowed to eat). So today when I went to pick up my weekly vegetable allotment from the community farm share I decided I’d stop by Trader Joe’s on the way home. Man cannot live on lettuce and fancy tomatoes alone!

I instantly felt overwhelmed as I set foot in the store. The shelves were packed with all kinds of items I had no idea what to do with. Pumpkin spice products galore! I wandered the isles trying to imagine what would be helpful to have on hand. Maybe I could pick up some items that would make cooking easier or a few ready made meals. That’s a thing people do right?

I couldn’t bring myself to actually get anything. I felt myself panicking as the minutes ticked on. I didn’t want to be inside around a bunch of people for very long but I couldn’t figure out what kind of prepackaged foods seemed appealing. I had fantasies about grabbing a frozen meal or a prepared lunch but nothing seemed particularly good. Eventually I found myself panicking and saying “fuck it” and I just grabbed a bunch of novelty items.

Salted macadamia nuts, chocolate wafer cookies, yogurt pretzels, and three packages of licorice. I’ve got no idea I’d I will actually eat any of these snacks but at least I can rely on Alex. Chances are good that I’ll forget about the snacks and in October I’ll go foraging for only to discover that “hon you bought those six weeks ago.” So somebody please remind me to open up the snack drawer before then alright?

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 248 and Trusting Nothing

I am learning to appreciate the value of doing nothing. I have always struggled with the human “being” part of the equation. I would prefer if we had been called human doings. But I’m slowly being convinced that’s just ego talking.

I feel terrific if I do nothing. I don’t even mean doing things you might consider recreation. I mean I don’t do a damn thing but still in bed flat on my back. I let my mind wander. I’ve learned that leisure isn’t my style. I can’t do something and experience it as nothing.

Maybe I’ve got some kind of struggle with getting and staying in a parasympathetic state. Maybe I prefer the fight or flight. But it is in the rest and digest state of laying down that I finally feel at ease. It’s from where I bring myself back. It would be nice if I fully relaxed when doing my nails or hanging out with other people.

But as the only thing that truly gets me into parasympathetic is stillness I will trust that nothing. I’ll remind myself I need to do it. Maybe I’ll even be on of those people that calendar it. Sorry I’m out of office as I need to lay flat for the day. Come back tomorrow!

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 229 and Under the Anger

They teach you in various therapy and 12 step programs that anger isn’t a real emotion. Anger is steam rising from true emotions like hurt and sadness. It’s easier to feel anger than to plumb the depths of our deeper vulnerabilities. It takes courage to admit we’ve been hurt.

I’ve experienced anger over the entire covid pandemic as it turns endemic. I’ve avoided looking too closely at what is underneath the anger all year. It turns out it was hurt. I feel abandoned by my fellow Americans. I’m hurt you didn’t make the choices to protect me. I’m hurt you chose you over me. Even though I recognize and believe in your God given right to do so. I’m still hurt.

Reconciling my hurt with my belief in freedom has been an exercise in faith. I’m a Calvinist. I basically believe that God is the set of all sets. I do believe in predestination, in that there exists the possibility that something, we can call it God, can and does know all possible outcomes. The infinity of choices is knowable to God.

A number of people find this fatalist. We have no free will if all possible outcomes have been seen. I don’t see it that way. We chose every moment in our infinite outcomes. It only looks fatalistic because humans live forward in linear time. God does not. God lives in all instants all at once. I alas and living each choice forward in time. I experience causality. God does not. Time isn’t real, it just feels real to humans.

Let me try to explain. I ate a ham and cheese croissant instead of yogurt this morning. I had a latte instead of an espresso. I’ll never know what the other me who had a different breakfast got up to but it’s possible to know. That’s God to me. Knower of all outcomes.

We literally have infinite choices and are ever in the process of refining our paths. This does not contradict that God has already seen every version of me. It is my responsibility to make the version I want. I believe we can make better choices. Turn ourselves into the person we wish.

Or we can hate ourselves for poor choices. We can chose to be victims to ourselves. At any moment we can make a new choice and branch into infinity again. That’s free will to me. Calvinism accepts that we live in linear time but God does not.

I’m also a libertarian because I believe each of those choices to be a sacred individual responsibility. It’s up to us to make a good choice. We own our failures. We own our successes. But that isn’t the narcissism of a childhood ego assuming everything is our fault (or our doing) but rather everything is our responsibility. We don’t chose the forces that act on us, but we do chose our response to it. We make every choice in freedom even if we perceive ourselves to be bound by forces outside our control.

The moment we lose sight that we own all our actions and decisions, we give up our free will. We abandon the project of becoming our infinite selves. This is why I am reticent to have prescriptive rules for our behavior.

Legislating behavior is fucking Old Testament nonsense. Jesus did not die for our sins so we could continue to feel guilt over a rule book about hygiene and how to prepare pork. He freed us to own how disgusting and sinful we are and how we can continually chose to overcome it.

As a Calvinist and a libertarian, I think we must chose to do the right things. We’ve been freed from rules, which in turn makes the freedom to chose better all the more crucial. Every mandate from an outside authority is just an excuse for us to victimize ourselves and abdicate the freedom we’ve been given to pursue infinity. We don’t need rules to behave well.

This means I get fucking pissed when societies need laws and mandates for basics civility be enforced. American shouldn’t be a Hobbesian war of all against all. I think shit like vaccine mandates and masking rules shouldn’t need to exist. You should be capable of choosing how you want to balance your responsibilities to the community and your freedom to make infinitely bad choices. Our society has given you the freedom to make those choices yourself. Our civilization is meant to be an experiment in free will and democratic society.

I’m not saying law isn’t important nor that humans won’t fail to live up to our higher selves. We fail at this every second of every day. We are sinners after all. It is easier to be a victim than to cope with the burden of freedom and responsibility. So sometimes we grasp at burden of free will and become nihilist. It becomes too much.

Fuck Jesus for freeing us. Fuck God for knowing that we could chose to toss back our free will. Fuck everyone for seeing our frailty. We have a God given right to be a an indulgent irresponsible baby that takes no responsibility. A lot of us are spending time coping with our freedom to make an infinity of bad choices. We’ve all got coping mechanisms. But we’ve got to stop acting like free will means there are no consequences.

You want to know what happens when you fail to live in civilization? Your neighbors lose faith in you. I feel abandoned by society. And I have abandoned society too. We offered ourselves complete freedom in liberal society, we left behind Old Testament thinking of rules & regulations and now we are struggling with that freedom. Instead of rising up to our freedom from rules we are sinking. And maybe that is our karma for this lifetime. To discover the full extent of our frailty. To live as a sinner. Only God can judge. But we all have a right to our feelings about how the bad choices of others impact us. And I am sometimes hurt by it.

I’m struggling to see how many of us have choices and don’t live up to that freedom. How shameful of us. How human. To be human is to hurt. I know that is the cost of freedom. That is salvation.

But I’m having a hard time forgiving my fellow citizens for making bad choices. I know we are all sinners. I am too. But good fucking Christ I want you to own that. Be truthful that you chose yourself over me. We gave each other that freedom. In the balancing act of human being versus citizen we chose the individual. What progress we’ve made that this was a choice. But own your fucking choice.

And even though this all sounds very philosophical. I’ve laid out my entire theology and political foundation which I’m sure will be handy in the future. But it’s important to note that this is all my stuff. I’m reactive because it’s my trauma. The feelings of hurt are grounded in my own childhood. I only explored this philosophy of freedom as my inner child remains angry my father chose his individual path over the community of his family. I wanted him to chose me.

And when he didn’t, I felt abandoned. Because even if he had chosen me, my little child knew he didn’t want to chose me in freedom. He chose himself over the family.

I’ll forever carry that wound to my inner child. In his infinite choices, my father needed to chose the individual over the community of his family. And that was his call. And I am not a victim to his freedom. I forgive him. I chose to believe there is a reason he was my father and I needed the lesson that sometimes others chose themselves over you.

I want you to chose the better infinity for us. But I cannot prescribe it or mandate it. You must choose it in freedom. The grace of God has given us that right. Anything less isn’t human. Anything less is making us a victim to infinity.

This is why I don’t believe that a flourishing human society should mandate our choices. It stunts our branching to infinite Godhead. It throws away the freedom to chose to be better even though at every single turn we could chose to be worse and that God has seen that we have. But we don’t. Even in the face of predestination of all possible choices we don’t give up on our responsibility. We continually, in every moment, work to own every choice we make, good or bad.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 215 and Leisure

I’ve got a bad relationship with work. Since I was a teenager I’ve been compulsive about the idea of hard work. I don’t know how I got to have a problem with the Protestant Work Ethic but it seems likely I developed it long before I read Max Weber and found it’s comforting rationalizations about work’s inherent morality.

I’m fascinated by things like commodity aesthetics, the history of consumption, and theories of leisure & status. Partially because I got a kick out of supposing I was a better person than those wretched lazy types. I wasn’t so sophisticated to sneer “rentier” class as kid but I was well on my way to veneration of hard work and productive capital. An economics degree finished the job.

This was compounded by growing up in a family that worshipped the culture of Silicon Valley. The innovation of computers and the people that worked all hours to bring their creativity to the world were the most important people on the planet. They hadn’t quite crossed the cultural rubicon of power that the tech industry has now, but the power of making the future was hard work and heady stuff even before it captured the mainstream. I wanted to change the world like the people my father admired

There was a time when computing and automation raised questions of a new era of leisure. If we could move all of the work we’d previously done manually to automated systems perhaps humans could ascend to The Culture of Ian M Bank’s novels. In a distant future of abundance, sentient AIs run industry and production, so humanity can do, well, whatever it likes.

But we haven’t achieved a post scarcity world. If anything accumulating resources and showing you’ve done it by the rules of the meritocracy makes hard work even more crucial. You’ve got to play and win two games. You’ve got to make the money and show you’ve demonstrated the proper status while doing it. It seems like leisure is losing the battle quite soundly.

I’ve been pushing all year to get back to hard work. I’ve worked hard at my health. I’ve committed myself to biohacking. But really what if the obsession with working myself to the bone is killing me? I’ve been completely relaxed as I prepared for a medical procedure this week. I’ve never felt better. Which forced me to ask myself if maybe I better come to live leisure like the way I have loved work. It might be a much better life for me. The future sentient AIs might approve as well.

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture

Day 208 and Boundaries

It’s fairly common to struggle with boundaries. The desire to come through for everyone is strong, but not half so strong as the fear that if you set a firm boundary, then no one will accept you for where you are and what you want. What if love is only ever available on someone else’s term? This is a terrible fear straight from our inner child.

We’ve turned loyalty into a obligation test. But how perverse is that? “If you love them, set it free” is a culturally touchstone for a reason. We want the freedom of choosing our the loyalty that works for us. And we know each demonstration of loyalty means nothing if it wasn’t in consideration of the other person’s boundaries, needs and desires.

I suppose this hit me today because I’ve been astonished to see athletes like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles holding their boundaries firm. They loyalty to sports, their countries and to us as fans only matters if it’s given freely and with joy. They owe us nothing, so when they do perform as their most elite selves, it’s what’s most beautiful and courageous thing. It’s a feat without ego. Those victories come in freedom.

Prioritizing one’s boundaries and well-being doesn’t need any apology or explanations or attempts to change yourself to fit another, if someone requires obligation on their terms it’s natural to feel invaded.

It’s the most loving thing in the world to set out what you actually want and need. It’s always the right thing to do. We don’t own each other. We each get to choose what’s best for us. And that fear we won’t be loved if we stand firm? Let it go. We always feel safest and most cared for when we know what we are offering is genuinely wanted.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 204 and Saying Hard Things

I’ve had to have a number of emotional conversations with people I care about recently. We’ve had miscommunications, failures, admissions, and changes in relationships both personal and professional.

Initially I was worried once it became clear I had to have “that conversation” where unsaid or unspoken truths couldn’t remain that way. I suppose it’s natural to fear sharing hard things with those we love. But avoiding the temptation to “not hurt their feelings” is not right path. It is always more hurtful to obfuscate or be avoidant.

In each of these conversations, I felt utterly unprepared. I cycled through shame, regret, sadness, fear, hurt, embarrassment until I had said my piece. Even if was crying in a few instances, once I got over the fear, the relief washed over me. I felt loving and joyful. Peaceful and lighter in my soul that I had owned the range of feelings & failures with honesty.

We know in our hearts before our minds what needs to be said. If you are struggling with a hard conversation or a relationship that needs truth to be spoken, summon you the courage to do it. Facing our self limiting beliefs and the mental blockers that keep us from having the life we want is always worth it. You can do it.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 195 and Waiting on Hand & Foot

I’m embarrassed that I need help with minor physical tasks. I’ve got an infection of the self sufficient Americana myth that seems to have taken root right in my very marrow. If you need something done you’d better do it yourself right?

When I was much sicker and undiagnosed two years ago, it felt easier to accept help because surely it must be temporary. There is no harm in needing help if you know you can pay it back tenfold? There is no harm in being unproductive for a time if you can pay it it back with interest.

But what will if can’t pay it back? What if I must rely on the kindness of others forever? Early on I struggled with little things like needing to use a wheelchair in the airport. I told myself stories like“I could walk if I just tried harder and accepted more pain” as I went through the concourse on the way to a hospital stay. I couldn’t pay back fellow travelers for slowing them down. And maybe no one minded that I was sparing myself pain for little inconvenience on their end. Perhaps I could accept small types of kindness.

But what if it’s not temporary? And what if it’s a significant amount of help! What if I do need help with basics for the rest of my life? Thanks to a recent trip my husband took I learned his running of the household increases my capacity by a full 30%. I could do everything just fine on my own but it would make my life much smaller. And it doesn’t seem to make his life any less enjoyable. On the contrary he shines when showing off his excellence in operational matters. It’s possible what I see as an undue burden is something he quite enjoys.

But I can’t quite convince myself it’s a good thing. The self audience myth has a deep hole on me. But if a third of my capacity disapates into tasks like cooking, cleaning, errands, and logistics but I’m enriched and energized by work like writing or working with the media then shouldn’t the choice be obvious?

And yet I still find myself embarrassed and angry about my limitations. . Why did it exhaust me so much to stand and wash lettuce? Or require so much rest to recover from a short run to the pharmacy. Those are small, albeit physical, tasks. My soul feels broken and my body a traitor with these small physical limits.

Whereas other pursuits can be done from bed. And even though it sometimes makes me sad it’s not always my choice, I don’t mind that my world is often limited to lying flat for hours on a mattress. I don’t resent it. In fact, it makes me rather happy. I’ve got the whole world available to me thanks to the internet. I can invest as easily in bed as from a fancy office. Twitter is just as good a connection to the networks of ideas and power as conferences or clubs. Better often.

The only part I resent is feeling like I’m a burden. Like I need to be waited on head and foot like some aristocrat or an ailing relative. Well not like an ailing relative. I am ailing. That part is the. But I can thrive in it with help. I just hope I’m not to embarrassed to take it.