Reconnoitered Recognition

I need to be better at accepting recognition ¹Also reassurance, but that’s another trick entirely. Right now my brain tells me that all recognition is at best sarcastic, if not much worse. That the message communicated by it – to me and anyone else who hears – is one of my inadequacy. Even if the thing I did was good I could always have done it sooner or more quietly or cheaper or with less prompting. I could have done it in a way that no one would of noticed or been able to recognize me. The fact that I did it in this way – in a way that could be detected and commented on – is obvious evidence of my selfish behavior and impure motivation.

Or worse still, it’s sincere and I will now have to repeat this performance on demand. Sometimes if Mother feels your actions reflect well on her, or makes her feel good, or reduces her responsibility, she will expect you to do the same thing repeatedly whenever it’s convenient for them. You successfully bandaged your arm without tools or supplies or assistance – good, you never get those things again, now that you proved you don’t need them. You sang a song that impressed other people – good, you’ll do it anytime there are other people around and I get to set the agenda.

And of course I know that any recognition from another source is evidence of my deception. They would never praise me if they could see how I cheated and fooled them. They think I’m human and maybe what I did was impressive for a human, but not for a monster like me. Mother always loved this version, where she got to threaten me in public and not get caught ²or as I see now, often caught but never held accountable. Where she could insist that I play whatever game she wanted right that moment, because refusal meant she would tell everyone about what a bad person I was.

Occasionally there was external recognition where she couldn’t make this threat. Where it was offered in a way that didn’t let her respond to the people providing it. So obviously this recognition was itself false, part of a scheme to abuse me in some way. Just a sales pitch to make me feel good and as a result to act foolishly. A viewpoint unfortunately supported by oppressive institutions everywhere, like schools and corporations (I’m looking at you, employee of the month plaque and perfect attendance certificate).

Needless to say, this makes recognition hard for me. Hard to offer, harder still to accept. It’s a thing I’m working on, but there are still very few people I can believe at all, and even from them I can only accept recognition in certain contexts. You can’t reassure me that I’m a real human, or that I’m not hurting people by knowing them, or that it’s possible for me to ever be safe. I have whole belief structures built around those issues even outside of my ability to be recognized.

But I do appreciate when you try. It helps if you can listen for the specific reassurance that I am asking for – if your recognition is based on careful observation. If your reassurance carefully hears the way that I’m afraid. And it can help if you recognize the process of change instead of the result. Incremental improvement is one of the ways I can sometimes recognize myself, so it’s a good option for you too.

I know that some of this implies that I think of you unkindly. And I sort of do, in the moment when my brain is trying to dismiss your statement. I’m working on that too. You shouldn’t have to put up with me doubting what you say.

This thing where my badness was a secret that she helped me by keeping is real tough. And it’s a dynamic that we set up far too frequently. Not only for young people but for ourselves. The idea that secrets produce or preserve safety is taught in many contexts in our society, but as far as I can tell it’s never true ³Note that secrets are not the same as privacy. Secrets are a thing that you and other people who could know agree (sometimes coercively) not to share. Privacy is where someone with the technical ability to know declines to find out (absent consent). Privacy is the default state of the world, absent the consolidation of power. Secrets are a thing … Continue reading, not in the long term. I say this not just from the perspective of radical philosophy my broken life gave me, but also as a thing I studied academically in significant detail. Secrets always have a cost – they come into existence when you start paying the cost – and they only get more expensive over time.

Sometimes secrets are useful enough to justify their short-term cost, but the useful period for most secrets is hours or at most days. And for many situations even the cost for the first 20 minutes is far too high. Secrets only keep you safe in situations that are already too dangerous for sustainable life, and their existence often causes great pain. But they’re useful for preserving power structures, so governments and militaries and corporations and patriarchies all have them.

This is also why I want to be the Music Man. I want to scam a town full of people into building a community. I want to sell vaporware to all of them. I want to make each of them feel important and recognized and empowered ⁴I do not want to do the sexual harassment part. In my Music Man Marion also get empowered.. And then I will escape – abandon – the while situation. I will steer clear of your community once I get it going. Afterward you might meet the thing that’s chasing me, and you might even want to take my side against it. But I’ll be long gone by then. I’ll leave so you can protect the community that I can only ruin.

Talked with V today. I was worried while you were away, since I know things are well outside the nominal operating range. But you showed up last night and promised to talk today. And you did, which is a significant relief for me. I know it was hard, hard to imagine you wanted if nothing else, but you did it and I’m proud of you for trying. You also agreed to my piercing plan, at least in concept, and that’s pretty exciting too. I’m trying to sell J on the same plan, but I’m not sure they’re convinced.

Talked to M. Maybe got some exciting news about future travel, though I’m still fuzzy on the details. Definitely got some spicy gravy though. And I heard that you did some sharing in another context, which I’m so grateful for. I think it was very valuable and I know it wasn’t trivial to get started. Good for you.

Talked with Shanda about organizing my clothes. It’s still pretty nervous for you – still lots of shouting answers when I’m hoping for discussion – but I think we made progress. I’m sorry it feels so bad when I write about my historical wardrobe. I try not to just yell sad things but my brain is full of a lot of sad things. And I do need to yell them sometimes to feel the feel and find another way through.

We did some travel planning for the summer. A day off in the near future, to give me a long weekend when you get back to WA, even if you have to get back to work right away. A couple of days in Vancouver for Bard on the Beach, but only half the plays this year. And a week at home at the end of July. It’s not up to our past holiday specials but it should be good. No one living with us. Air conditioning. Dog. And cheap enough that I won’t be worried about it every day.

Pushed hard to get through work today. From the moment I woke up and for the next few hours straight. Caught a break in the middle of the day but was back at it again pretty hard later and until almost 7. I did make progress on the most urgent bits, and avoided picking up most new things. My big SR is still going but the announcement is tomorrow so hopefully that continues to ramp down. I was able to close a bunch of intermediate work on it. I got riled up by someone on my team about work they thought should be done but weren’t offering to do (and didn’t suggest until week 3, and don’t really want to explain). I wanted to argue with them but eventually was able to give it up, with the understanding that, since I wasn’t volunteering to do this extra work, it just wasn’t a real thing. I am planning to finally sleep in tomorrow. We’ll see if that plan holds.

Therapy tomorrow. I want to talk about how to use LI in cases where I don’t actually know how to feel safe. The part where I can share safety with my younger self is working great but I don’t know how to make that same sort of thing work when I still don’t have the safety. When my best plan is still to run away and live (and presumably die before too long) alone in the woods. I also want to shop the storytelling analogy to make sure that tracks with the methodology. If it does I’ve got ideas on how to be better at it. And I want to check on the apology greeting I often get, to see if that’s a thing I’m likely to be motivating. I think this might be another week of the same infant story, and I agree there’s still good work there. If it’s not I want to push on the feeling about using up all my available care too fast, about having to save it for the things I really needed, just like I did for everything else I was deprived of.

I thought about what might have happened to me at the gym yesterday. I’ve been thinking about it because I definitely was paying attention to how I felt and it still came on from nowhere before I could reaxt. I don’t have much evidence but I’ve got a theory. One I came up with by thinking about my piercing plan. Last time I did piercing I dissociated around the time of the second poke. I was trying to keep myself together while I anticipated significant future trauma, while my body was still reacting to the first poke. When I dissociate in that way its easy for me to pass out. That’s what I used to do to protect myself from anticipated pain ⁵It’s maybe how I survived being an infant – that’s another story to consider for infant Zach flashback attack..

I don’t do it often – bodily stress management is the one body thing I’m good at – but when I do it’s maximum effort. I can avoid it even under extreme conditions so long as I get to sit or lie in a relaxed posture and not get too hot. But if I decide to push through, to keep doing what is necessary before that can happen, I can definitely put myself there. At the gym I was trying a different machine that was less safe to stop mid-motion than most, and I may have decided to push through to the end of the set, triggering a dissociation. I may have been worried about being hurt and reacted by deciding not to care how I felt and just going until I was done or collapsed. I’m sure it didn’t help that I wasn’t feeling well but I think a triggered response better fits what I perceived.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.