Is it secret? Is it safe?

Here’s a thing some of you know but I wanted to state explicitly for everyone – you are welcome to share anything I tell you. Obviously some discretion is probably useful for both of us, but don’t ever feel like I’m burdening you with secrets. I well know the cost of secrets – they almost killed me when I was young, and kept me alone for years after. I have studied secrets both first hand and academically. I literally have a grad degree in secrets, their uses, and their costs*. And I am not in the business of creating them.

That comes in part as an attempt to reassure you that The Screed need not being something that’s overwhelming, or that you need to experience alone if and when you do find it difficult to process. Obviously I’m happy to discuss any of it, but also feel free to share with your own social support network to the extent it helps you or them. I’m writing to you, but not to you in isolation – I’m writing to you integrated into your whole life.

And it comes in part because DerbyK asked about subscribing one of your friends to The Screed – told me in fact that I was requested. That’s not exactly how I envisioned adding people, but I think it’s probably okay. I don’t want to be in the publishing business – I don’t want to write to the void more than I already do – but I think I can imagine you sharing your friends with me. And in any case it’s very reassuring to know that other people want to participate. I’m not great with recognition but this feels close enough to utility that my brain doesn’t freak out too much.

Perfection is a topic that comes up often in my life. It used to be a big problem for me, the need to be perfect. Getting 3 questions wrong on the ACT and scoring 35 instead of 36 was sort of a problem for me, even though the real-world impact was very small. I used to imagine that being perfect would allow me to avoid pain, or at least to minimize it, particularly in the context of Mother. A couple of decades of experience failed to teach me otherwise, despite the obvious lack of correlation between my approximation of perfection and my exposure to pain.

But that’s the thing with perfection – because it’s technically unachievable it’s easy to understand any even marginally undesirable outcome as a failure to be sufficiently perfect (whatever that nonsense phrase means). It’s easy to see things entirely outside of your control, or things with no bearing on your life as vital missing elements in your plan for a perfect, disappointment-free** life.

When things were very bad I found a new understanding of perfection. It started out exclusively cynical and self-defeating – the realization that I could never be “perfect enough” to achieve my goals and therefore it did not matter whether or not I tried. Abject fatalism. Which also isn’t a great way to live your life but it does offer an different perspective on the value of perfection. Specifically that there isn’t any, and so it’s worth exactly zero fucks to achieve.

Eventually though, as I got better – as a necessary step in me getting better – I evolved that view. I still think fatalism is right in the way it values perfection: not at all. But I think you can keep that valuation and apply it in another framework. One that understand the value of improvement as fundamental to contentment. Because perfection is, if it were ever achieved, necessarily static. It’s unchanging because by definition /any/ change would be worse. And while maybe that’s a dream of the past that never was for the patriarchy to wish upon, for the rest of us that is not a dream but a nightmare. I can be content with what is happening now not because it is perfect and without disappointment but because I know it can always be better. So for now it merely needs to be “good enough” – not perfect – because I can imagine that it – that I – will be better in the future.

And this has served me well across a whole range of circumstances in my life. I think it’s one of the things that people admire about me, and it’s certainly one of the things that lets me do the things I want to do.

But it’s not something I know how to communicate to people who are striving for perfection. To people who are so worried about having failed to achieve it that any commentary, no matter it’s technical content, is critical and not reassuring. To people who hear my message of a better tomorrow as a demand for further perfection, or as pressure to try harder or work faster or magically be better. It’s something that happens all the time with Shanda, and prevents me from comforting her even though I can see and understand her pain. And I know I have the same dynamic with others at times.

I don’t know yet how to improve myself on this point. Maybe it’s not something that can be communicated in the way that I hope, or that isn’t useful in the way I imagine. But I’m confident that by changing myself or the world around me, by learning something new or forgetting something I think I know, by demanding the right thing from the people I want to help or by freeing them from some demand I ought not to make, it can be better in the future.

Shipped Dog home today. Far too early and at too high a cost in all components. But I’m glad he was here for a while. Had a chatty driver for both legs of the trip – I took a car home too instead of the train, since the cargo terminal is a mile from the train stop. Between his endless questions, the whining dog, and my ill rested countenance it was a tough morning. The sudden downpour and general worry about traveling Dog didn’t help either.

I also missed the trip for a Penelope Pal by less than a minute, then failed to go back to bed because I didn’t understand the rest of the day’s schedule. But before long there were 2 more guinea pigs in the household and so plenty of furry snuggles for everyone, which helped a good deal. And eventually there were groceries and supper and clean dishes and even some ideas about glasses, none of which required much management on my part, and some of which happened without even my participation. I neglected to get any day job done, other than a worthless meeting, but eventually I got to the gym, had some exercise and some sauna, and will get to sleep in tomorrow. And I got to chat in real time with a whole slew of people today, which always makes me happy.

I’m a little worried about V, as your last message was a whole ball of concerns. I know I should give it a couple of days before I freak out but patience is hard, and worry about people not talking to me is sort of my thing. If only I could figure out a useful next step when worry doesn’t do the trick, instead of me feeling dumb for waiting and simultaneously still too demanding. So I’m complaining about my damage here, in hope I can vent about it without adding any pressure. Or at least not more pressure than is helpful.

It was 60 and pouring this morning. It rained all afternoon and was humid enough to choke a frog. Now it’s 20 and and snowing. It’s been windy all fraking day, and I still don’t own a decent coat. But I got a long sleeved shirt today and maybe I’ll be able to try it out tomorrow, to see if I can get over my aversion. In the mean time it should at least be easy to keep cool in bed tonight, and that’s always welcome.

ZiB

*To philosophize a bit, I have three general classes of information:
1. Things I share
2. Things I don’t yet know how to share
3. Lies I tell to protect me from hurtful people
The Screed is obviously in the first category, and I use it to help me move things from the second to the first (something I encourage you to help me do as well). But so is everything else I tell you, absent some specific disclaimer. I take the lies I tell very seriously too – ask Shanda how carefully I misinform Mother when we have to interact, from hiding bits of physical reality and coordinating careful lies about my doings to literally walking away from the encounter in a random direction and circling around to transportation to avoid leaking any knowledge about the next part of my life.

**It is technically possible to arrange your life to never be disappointed, but I wouldn’t recommend it for what I hope are obvious reasons.

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Sent from a phone.