I’m So Wet

Got super wet more than once on Monday. It was raining all afternoon and just pouring sometimes. People talk about Seattle being rainy but they misunderstand. In the wet seasons Seattle has almost daily flurries that melt at low altitude. So it’s humid all day, but its closer to fog than rain. And it never storms; if there’s one thunderclap it’s literally a news story. But it was plenty rainy and stormy In Cleveland – and 60 degrees. Followed by snow the next day. So weather is a little intense. I could go for something a little more moderate but I do sort of hope that Dog gets to tromp on the snow before he goes home.

Made progress on insurance and groceries and dog and laundry and dishes and a bunch of other things. Had help from Shanda which was great. A little less on my plate in the household makes the day seem a lot easier sometimes. Not just in the doing but in the deciding what to do and how to do it. They administrative overhead is sometimes worse than the actual work.

E told me that I’m not hurting people by sharing, even when the relevant bits are just a paragraph in a wall of text. Or at least that I didn’t hurt them this time, which is still great success compared to how my brain predicts such interactions will go. I know The Screed mostly doesn’t hurt people but like many other parts of my life it’s easy for me to assume it does.

Told DerbyK about media that made me think of you. It’s also sort of a trick to get you to know things about me. I always want people to talk about me. It’s why I publish this thing. I don’t know why I think you wouldn’t talk about me, since you’re the one who usually does. But again my brain makes bad predictions in this area.

Watched an episode of The Orville S2. Shanda says the show is “great”. I disagree, but I think it has good parts. S1 definitely nailed a lot of the TNG vibe — planets that contain lessons, aliens that all wear the same neutral pallet, described but unresolved social issues, the intersection of violence and “protection” — and it is sometime funny. But I feel like some of the humor is too forced to really play well and sometimes undercuts what could be good writing. Still, the show is fun and I’m glad it’s back for S2.

Still can’t get to bed at a reasonable time, though today I did have some help ratcheting up my anxiety right at bed time. I thought I’d be drafting this The Screed — maybe not even writing it until tomorrow and just throwing up an outline — but at just that moment I got my own wall of text and it was loaded with the feels. So I had to freak out about that for a minute. Or maybe an hour. And then spend a good deal more time putting my own thoughts into order around it so that I could stop freaking out.

The purported topic was a logistical request – one I was prepared for even if I’m a bit sad to finally implement it: M is ready to talk about me leaving. On the logistics front my biggest feels include relief at going from anticipation toward action, from silence to discussion. And some anticipated loss; me leaving is necessary – good even, since I have a lot of life being neglected in Seattle – but still worthy of some grief, like the end of any great thing. I’m also a little worried about how my day job will feel like a bigger focus in my life, and that’s not a thing I’m looking forward to (but also not a thing I have to let happen).

There were other bits that applied not to the logistics but to me more directly, and to the way I imagine I’m interacting with the world – with all of you. It slots into the space space between the actions I’ve taken this past year and what I hoped I might achieve. It’s not a new feeling – it’s a ancient feeling that has long be both terrible and nagging. A feeling that I’m finally starting to address, and feel like I’ve been doing reasonably well with. But it’s still happening, and long established, so it’s easy to trigger with even minor setbacks.

The effort to reward ratio in some of my social contexts feels imbalanced. Which is a thing that historically I would have seen as evidence that I need to try harder or need to be better/smarter/more attractive/more generous/etc. But today, once I worked through it, I see is clearly evidence that I need to improve my strategies so my effort is more productive. Because I am doing a lot and it’s in the right neighborhood, it just isn’t quite engaging the way I hoped.

To wit, some clarifications. I have several goals in sending The Screed:

1. To work out my own shit. In theory I could this by myself but I’ve found it works better when A) I imagine my friends’ reactions to it and B) I worry a little about telling the truth. It’s easier to avoid lying to myself about both my own feelings and my impact on the world – easier to tell when my brain is making bad predictions or lying to me – when I imagine that you are holding me accountable. This part I think is going fairly well. I feel like I’m able to spend time imagining your support to help keep my anxiety and trauma from misguiding me.
2. To provide a setting that encourages people to confide in each other. This is #3 on the list of textbook things people need to form friendships. (The other two are proximity and repeated, unplanned interactions). I hope that by sharing as much of my weird life as I can pack into emails that it helps create a safe environment for other people to share. That by doing the “being vulnerable” bit first I can make it easier for other people to share their own challenges. This part works in some ways — I have obviously built some safety for some of you — but clearly hasn’t in others because that safety is still very narrow. And for others I can’t tell if I’ve built anything at all.
3. Discussion and support. It has always been hope that someone would respond to something that I write here. That if I shared enough parts of my life deeply enough that one of them would be interesting and relatable to one of friends and we’d be able to talk about it. About me and about how we share some feeling or interest or history or fear or joy. About how the bad predictions my brain makes aren’t true and how I’m not hurting people by sharing. About how I can have help when I need it and don’t need to worry about the million ways I am not entirely independent. About how we’re actually friends and it’s not just a thing I imagine and you put up with because I’m sometimes useful. This part is not going well. Not going at all. Literally no one ever acknowledges or discusses anything in The Screed, at least no one other than DerbyK. I make Shanda go through it with me but even that sometimes feels like a thing I’m forcing and not a thing you want to do, and we’re fucking married and (usually) living together.

Somehow — and this happens to me in situations other than The Screed too — I communicate some sort of pressure or demand or expectation at people that they don’t feel up to, or that discourages them from participating. I don’t know understand how this works because usually I’m really good at not communicating any need or even desire at other people. Or maybe I’m too good at hiding my need? Maybe I don’t come across as a real person even when I think I’m sharing? Or maybe what I share is too terrible for anyone else to want to think about. Regardless of the cause it’s happening and I am trying to figure it out so I can stop it, or at least control it to help make it do what I want.

I suspect part of the issue is that there’s a disconnect between real-life Zach as a human you know and what you read here as a wall of Internet text. Like I’m not a broken, lonely old man who needs your help to keep my life together but instead am some sort of nagging reminder of your own challenges. Like The Screed is a carefully planned and composed article about your anxiety and not my unfiltered anxiety leaking out at the people I know. Like I’m prodding you to make some change in your life and not asking for your help in changing mine.

I think The Screed is almost exclusively about me. My brain actually tells me it’s too much about me — that it’s intolerably narcissistic to send to anyone else. There’s an occasional line or paragraph that I do write specifically for one of you, and I do write thinking about how you’ll react. But generally speaking it’s just me ranting about my feels and doings and hopes and defeats. I am desperately hoping that someone will pick any one of those topics on any day and say three words to me about it. I think there could be benefits for both of us in doing so. And I’m almost positive it would help me feel more like a real human and less like a failed Ayn Rand experiment in child rearing who is trying to be useful enough real humans to occasionally get some attention from them. But clearly I haven’t figured out how to make it go yet.

I don’t know how it works yet but I’m trying. I’m going to keep plugging away, looking for the ladder up from this place where I live to the plane of normal human interactions. If you’ve got any suggestions I’d certainly be interested. Honestly I’d be interested in anything. I taught myself long ago to live solely on hope. These days I at least sometimes get tacos. But I think my life would be better if I could figure out how to get actual support and not just the theoretical idea that people might support me if I bothered them the right way.

ZiB