Don’t. She’ll ruin it.

Lots of you worry about being “taken seriously”. Which is easy to understand – when someone with power is dismissive of you it’s often very bad, and if sustained can feel hopeless. Being taken seriously is often a way to gain power and hope and control. @BPS was recently reading The Queer Art of Failure (Jack Halberstam) ¹near the end of https://youtu.be/REd2dmkbL9w, which I read on your recommendation last year, and which has lots of things to say about being taken seriously. For example: “The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production, around which I would like to map a few detours. Indeed terms like ‘serious’ and ‘rigorous’ tend to be codewords in academia as well as other contexts for disciplinary correctness. They signal signal a form of learning and training that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy.”

As you likely can guess, I am rarely a fan of being taken seriously. I know that’s easy to say as a rich old white dude, but it’s was also the way I felt when I was a poor young single mother. It’s not for me. Sometimes I like to fake it, to claim power in situations where I otherwise could not have it, but I have always imagined it as a trick – I’m still not being serious, by whatever standard they expect, even if I make other people take me seriously. Which I feel is fair, because the way they want me to be serious is merely an effort to enforce the status quo and preserve their power to exclude people who would disrupt it. The Queer Art of Failure is a big fan of disruption, and well worth reading if you feel like you’ve been stuck in a place where you can’t be taken seriously.

To be clear, I’m not trying to handwave away privilege or power structures. They’re real things with real impact. It’s definitely easier for me to be “taken seriously” with a bunch of degrees and a suit and a penis and a handful of decades and money and the right sort of job or house or car or family. Some of those I lucked into and many I obtained (or at least appeared to obtain) specifically so I could fake being serious. Getting past gatekeepers is always a challenge and I’m all for doing the necessary prep work to bypass their restrictions.

But it’s important not to get sucked into it – you’re playing their game to get what you need, not to become them. Your needs and desires were valid without being taken seriously, and their rules denying that fact are the problem, not the solution. Faking seriousness is one of my favorite heists, and I’d love to help you with your version. I’d love to lend you my degrees or my years or my ability to make old men afraid so you can be taken just seriously enough to get what you want. I’d love to help you plan how to get it without restricting yourself to compliance. You deserve a life that’s not limited to other people’s checklists, and I want to help you have it.

Here’s a RBN story that about the way that “help” is often forced on people who are stuck not being taken seriously, while actual help for their visible problems is denied in favor of the lie that things are fine: https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/comments/f8jq3a/

It’s also a story about how the rituals that people in safe lives promote are often used to hurt people who don’t share that life. Ritual can be very powerful in terms of motivating a group, just like routine can be powerful for motivating an individual. So it’s shameful that we let any petty tyrant insist that their exclusionary (and often self-serving) version is the one we must use. Ritual can be a way to affirm community and build connection, but it’s often used as a way to double down on exclusion and to perpetuate harm. And for some reason we’ve decided to just give it a pass, on the basis of “tradition” or “religion” or other code words for “existing power structures”.

I’ve been reading His Majesty’s Dragon (Naomi Novik) wherein the protagonist – an established naval officer – is worried about his new assignment and the way people discuss it secretively and fearfully. He fears that there will be expectations to comply with some form of tradition or ritual that is harmful and is only tolerated because the people it is usually applied to cannot resist, and that is only repeated because those in power had to suffer it themselves. And he’s right to worry, because the world is full of that bullshit. You should too, and you should keep it off you when you can. Or at least be sure not to pass it on to the next victims.

I made good progress on day job things yesterday. Knocked out 3 SRs and touched the other 2. I got my password changed (which is more work than you’d expect, particularly when the office is closed) and got 2 release checklist done. I even told my boss about how I wasn’t working in the morning and asked for help getting an AD KDC setup for testing, both of which are pretty unusual for me. If I can get another few hours in on SRs over the next two days I should be able to go into next week pretty clean. Which is good, because I’ve got 2 full days of training next week, and won’t be able to do SRs and all the other bits people expect (and likely will be wiped out after two days full of meetings where I don’t even speak).

I mostly got a gamepad emulator working yesterday, including some circuitry to make it easy to interface with our existing arm hardware. Somehow I can’t make the analog axises report as I expect, even with hard-coded data, but they work with random data so I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually. Part of my problem is just the lack of documentation – it wants a 16-bit number, but doesn’t describe how the value should be encoded in those bits. I’ll have to write something that lets me see the shape over the whole range, so I can figure out what it’s doing.

What’s today’s topic for therapy? I continue to be frustrated that I can’t get help or reassurance on the bits I actually ask about, and we instead spend a lot of time trying to get my therapist up to speed on fractionally tiny parts of my life. In the past it was easier to tolerate that sort of interaction on the theory that it would lead to more productive discussions in the future, but it’s difficult to maintain that hope. I understand that I will often need to train people to help me, and that I can’t expect anyone to lead me to new insight every time we speak, but I sure wish my therapist had any other ideas as useful as LI was. We’ve talked about this a bunch but it hasn’t really lead to any changes, or even any support in me finding something else. It’s at least cheap – I do it from home and it’s in-network so I only pay $0.25/minute – and like writing just the interactive communication can useful in letting me make new connections. But there are probably other things that would fit that bill.

So what’s the topic? Last week (and in several other weeks) I tried to talk about the unavoidable influence we have on each other, and when it is and is not acceptable to exploit this. Or about the pain of watching people who are stuck in a way of thinking that keeps them from what they want. What I got was a non-committal response about letting people discover what they want, and inconsistent, somewhat overwhelmed responses about influencing others. So perhaps something less abstract? They pay pretty good attention if I describe my reactions to recent events in my life – that’s often not very useful to me in a direct sense, but can provoke frustration that leads me to later insight. Or maybe I can lead them toward a plan about better education, starting with a discussion of how to understand diagnostic criteria that are stated in self-relative terms?

Shanda is still at full busy, and is resentful and/or sad when I ask for your participation with small tasks. It makes me want to do them without you, so I can meet my own goals, but you insist that you “want” to do them with me so I am still waiting. I know you’re going to feel guilty when you read this, and I’m sorry you feel guilty. Maybe as a response to that guilt you could either make time to do the things you want to do with me or decide that you’re going to sit this round out so I can proceed on my own. Either option would likely help you feel better, and probably less busy too. You’ve gone great with lots of things both this week and in general. We made lots of progress on hard things like budget and LS and writing and Dog. It’s okay if that’s all you can handle this week. Whatever priorities you choose are fine. But not choosing is really hard, and I’d like that part to stop ASAP.

Maybe that’s today’s topic – the thing I keep putting off, despite my promises to the contrary: a GFM page. I’ve made progress on the plan but it’s still not done, and it still feels very hard. I’m reluctant to talk about it because I fear getting bogged down in whatever preliminary step my therapist notices and thus wasting an hour waiting for them to catch up with me, and making me feel misunderstood. But I could test the waters and track the time, to give myself an option to abandon it early.

Dog is in pain and super lazy. It’s almost impossible to get him excited about anything that isn’t going out, but going out is the thing that’s worst for his pain. So we ordered a wagon, so we can get him to the park for snuffling without the intermediate walk. I suspect he’ll need a little training to tolerate it, and in particular to get into it initially while he’s leashed and excited to go out, but hopefully we can train him to sit still for a few minutes and ride. It should be adorable if we can.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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