To the Disco Room

I’ve been thinking about my fear that actual me is too much if I let it all show. That I will necessarily overwhelm the people around me if not outright disgust or even harm them. And about my response of trying to be less and show less, to make sure that situation doesn’t occur. If I set aside the part I logically know is wrong¹This is of course a part I still need to deal with, because knowing a thing doesn’t magically make my brain believe it. But any bit I can peel off of the isolation ball and throw into the pile of parts I can have help with is bound to make my life easier. — the part where my existence or the observation thereof is itself problematic — I can see this thing from a different angle.

I can see how this is close to the fears that make sharing hard for many of you.

I can see how some of you are empathic enough to see my pain even when I don’t announce it, and you worry that saying the wrong thing will tigger some past trauma. I am going to be triggered sometimes²Though I’d guess much less often than you fear. The part of my trauma that I find hard to deal with is the isolation, and sharing often negates that even if the topic is sensitive. Even what you might perceive as negative feedback gives me the hope of improvement, which is much better than feeling like a lonely monster., but I’d much rather it was with someone who cares about me than when I’m alone. I don’t need someone to help me avoid my trauma, I need someone who can help me identify and recover from it. Someone who is sensitive enough to see and care when when I have this problem and help me figure out how to manage it.

You worry that sharing your stress will add to mine; that your anxiety will feed my own. But I already see your emotion and talking about it would be a great relief from the way my brain is yelling about it. I already know that you’re anxious and I don’t want you to suffer it alone. I want to see the hard bits of your life so I can learn how to share some of the compassion I have for you with myself. So I can learn that my hard bits don’t have to isolate me.

Imagine that the work you put into sharing — the fears you have to overcome, the avoidance, the pain of touching those sore spots in your feels — isn’t just a thing that might help you, but a thing that will help me. That has helped me when you’ve done it before. Imagine not that I’m trying to manage your emotions³I am often accused of trying to manage other people’s emotions. Of failing to accept their current emotions. But I at least attempt to carefully acknowledge those emotions without any demand for control. I never feel like you’re having the “bad” or “wrong” emotions or that you need to change them. My intent is for you and I to agree on … Continue reading but that I want you to help me manage mine. You can do that by being someone who can see me and who believes that I can relate to you. I hope that letting me know you will help you know yourself, but I know for sure it will let me be a better person⁴I’m pretty sure the same reasoning applies to other people you know, even if they aren’t broken quite like me. We all have hard bits and triggers and we all feel isolated. And you are caring enough to spot those bits in others and brave enough to talk about your own.. It lets me see the person you imagine I could be, that I maybe can be with your help.

I can see how some of you have been trained as I was, with repeated non-supportive interactions — things that are not necessarily rejection but that still create isolation when other people are overwhelmed or distressed about some topic that is associated with you. Something that you have to teach them to do right before you can have support, and even then feels like too little too late. You worry that sharing with anyone will inevitably hurt you or them or both and so you choose to suffer alone. I don’t yet know how to make that feel safe, but I do know what it is like. And I have pretty decent eyebrow discipline, so it’s likely I can avoid many of the parts that make you feel distanced if you want to try on me.

I can see that I’m hypervigilant about other people’s emotional states.

This might be obvious from another perspective, but it’s a symptom that predates my episodic memory. It’s been happening to me since forever and until I was finally free from my abuse I thought it was a disability. When I was young I hoped it was something I would eventually grow out of — having empathy. Today it doesn’t feel a lot different than they way I understood myself already — more new taxonomy than revelation — but it is definitely a new perspective on how I got here.

A couple of weeks ago my therapist talked about how it must be a lot of work to always be trying to infer other people’s feelings. Which is sometimes true but it doesn’t really feel like work to me because it’s just what’s happening all day every day in my brain whether or not I am trying. The brain power is requires, though, is the reason I can’t get anything done when the household mood is too tense and communication is low. It’s why a room full of people is so draining. It’s part of the reason travel is so hard, because I’m forced into proximity with 300 other people who are all at least moderately stressed (and why it gets worse when the aggregate mood of the body of passengers gets worse).

I do lots of good things with this obsession, but it’s definitely a survival skill I learned at age 3 (or earlier) so it has all sorts of sharp edges. It makes it hard for me to deal with people “leaking” emotions at me all the time, and it’s part of why Ben lives alone in the woods and doesn’t have comms. It’s why I appreciate the careful eyebrow discipline many of you offer. It’s why your distress is so hard for me to ignore⁵It’s not impossible to ignore, but it often requires me to significantly disengage. I have a hard time keeping my brain from screaming if I have to watch you hold back your stress without accepting it. To see you push it away with distraction or productivity while it continues to gnaw at your soul., and why your avoidance is so dangerous for me. Because I’m right there in your feeling, even if you aren’t engaged with it yourself. My brain is screaming about it even if you haven’t noticed it’s happening yet. And every time I can’t see through your sunglasses my brain spins its tires trying to guess from the smallest scraps⁶This is how I can spot some things at 3000 yards, which is sometimes amazing. But it’s also something I can find very anxious, trying to construct a whole person out of a trickle of information. Trying to assure myself that things are fine even when I am blind..

There are lots of bits to recontextualize and I suspect I’ll have spurts of that in the near future here. To start with, I should imagine that this is one of the ways I participated in my own oppression. I could see how knowing about my life was a burden to others, and so I learned to hide the parts that upset them. It “worked” in that I didn’t have to deal with the (sometimes terrible) consequences of them being upset. And it worked in a different way with Mother, helping my navigate her mood so I could survive. But it’s also a thing that made me less visible to some of the people who might have been able to help, a thing that required me to forgo help even when it was technically available, and a thing that reinforced the idea that my need was itself a problem.

My household recovers a bit over the past couple days. Shanda is less stressed after here CASA conference, and now that her shoulder hurts less. I’m feeling well (at least by the limited standards that I can self-assess) as is Dog. I’m feeling a little behind on SRs and I still need to get my bug tested, but I think I’m feeling okay about the day job overall. Well enough that I’ll be able to use and enjoy my time off without resorting to distraction or other forms of avoidance.

Had a one of the players from D&D over today with this wife, in a non-game context. It’s a thing Shanda told me about a while ago but I sort of just ignored until I was reminded yesterday. It went okay. We watched Mystery Men (1999). I knew it was a bit Batman but it is both more Tim Burton and more Austen Powers than I recall. It suffers in all the ways you imagine a 90s film⁷This movie gave us end-credits All Star (Smash Mouth) 2 years before Shrek, and the McG music video is the same superhero audition story that happens in the movie during the song, and has cameos from the cast. The tight tie-in makes it a weird choice to use in the marketing and opening and end credits of another movie shortly thereafter, but it … Continue reading does but Garofalo and Macy are both great in it and I think the style works. The day could have used a little drinking, which was in the plan but I failed to execute. But for a thing that could have left me super stressed out or left Shanda super disconnected I think it was a minor success just to get to evening and still feel like the day was under control. Shanda wants to sign up for more right away; I think that’s probably fine so long as future versions improve the ratio of comfortable to uncomfortable moments.

I wanted to mention this @BPS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPc7P8vA_MU It’s one that made me think about why I feel like they and I are having similar reactions to the world on a weird cluster of topics even though our paths are not closely aligned. I find it reassuring to see them value ADs in a way that’s about incremental improvement. To see that they worry about the way narcissism impacts the ADs, and the potential for conflict between the value to present self and the value to others after production. I don’t imagine that The Screed is art as they do with ADs but I do imagine we both throw our emotions at the world in an uncommon way, communicating with someone who can’t ask questions about things we don’t currently understand.

Anni is my Taliesin today [fig 1], with her jacket and her spatula and her glasses and the whiteboard of Finnish education. And I’m always a fan of her bright red blunt-edged hair. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=851F2N1Qg-o

ZiB

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