Foreground Forks and the Security of Supper
I missed robots today. My 2:30 got pushed to 3:30 – which already makes me an hour late – and I got assigned new work in that meeting that I needed done before 10 tomorrow morning, so I didn’t get out of the office until after 5. I did get my errands done before I went home, but I’m annoyed to have done more work and less robots today.
Tried to clarify my thinking in discussion with DerbyK. You saw me feeling guilty, which is true though something I’d prefer not to make other people deal with. The bit was trying to peel apart though, past the guilt (earned and otherwise), is the way I feel trapped between the crisis I can see and my perception of the actual I can actually do. The responsibility I feel to act when I noticesomething I know other people are ignoring or misattributing, while at the same time protecting anyone from the harm of having me notice or respond.
I do okay letting the weight of the larger world balance across my braced position
– bearing it not in whole but trying to keep it slanted in the right direction while it shifts around me. But it’s hard for me find that same stance when it comes to individuals. To keep my pain and theirs the right amount of separate, or at least the amount if separate that I’ve been told is right. To protect them from the harm that my involvement in their life will inevitably cause but still address the pain I see that no one is doing anything about.
It’s the interplay between my lack of self-compassion, society’s insistence that institutions – rather than individuals – will ensure justice and care, and my unwavering belief that exposure to my person or even my ideas will inevitably be harmful. I shouldn’t recieve care because if I were a better person I wouldn’t need it. I shouldn’t want care – or to provide it – because it “ought” to be handled by someone else. And if I insit on asking for, accepting, or providing care that selfish action can only make the world worse.
Historically my plan has been to only ever help by enduring the things others find impossible and trying to nudge people into a life where they can find the support they need from others, or in themselves. To do the research and prep work and logistical support they need to have a better life somewhere I’m not.
More recently I’ve decided I can be better at that by providing a feeling of safety, and so I’m using gestures of attention and vulnerability to try to earn a secure attachment over time. My feelings are still pretty sure that’s an intolerable imposition – that it will expose people to the danger that is me – but I’m doing it anyway.
I’m trying to sort out what I need to do that without merely enduring that internal conflict indefinitely. Without feeling terrible about doing what I think will help. To be able to accept help as part of the same system I use to provide it. To imagine that I don’t hurt people merely by noticing their pain, or by letting them know that I share it.
Part of what I need is the ability to recognize a healthy amount of narcissism, because currently I feel like the acceptable amount from me is none. I don’t feel like none is the right answer for other people, but when I even get close I fear that I’m inches away from becoming history’s next great monster. Even here I write in the context of helping others, fearing that the next thing I say will be the last you ever care to read, once you finally notice how terrible I have been. Once I finally help you become good enough to leave me.
But that’s unkind to you, in service of nothing more than a plausible narrative to fit my lack of self-compassion and my pattern of self-adandonment. And that’s actually the kind of narcissism I want to avoid. So perhaps I can construct a narrative wherein I don’t dimish my friends merely for knowing me. Where I don’t fear attachment as a sign of my failure to keep the right distance.
Where I can myself feel entitled to seek my own security without fearing that I have become DJ Trump*.
ZiB
*Vote, if you can and haven’t. It’s dumb and archaic and often meaningless but it’s also a way you can exert your privilege against the people and institutions that are trying to kill you. When Hitler hand you a gun, you shoot.
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Sent from a phone.
