My email today contained one of those random nostalgic gifts our social media-connected world sometimes brings. My high school French teacher was going through poems she’d kept and found one of mine from grade 11, so she passed it back to me with some kind words.
I’m tempted to mock 16-year-old me, testing out the subjunctive and the meaning of life, but I feel protective of the earnest, awkward girl I once was, who grew into the slightly less earnest, possibly even more awkward woman I am now.
Loosely:
Before I die, I want to do everything possible.
Before I die, I want to say everything I think.
Before I die, I want to laugh with all my heart.
Before I die, I want to cry with all my soul.
Before I die, I want to be someone I like, someone I’m proud of.
But I don’t have that courage, so I want to live in my own unique way, with my own way of doing, saying, laughing, crying, being.
I must be only me.
I often think of the differences between my younger self and my current self, acknowledging the hard-won transition from someone who couldn’t get off the bus if it meant asking the person beside me to move to someone who can, reluctantly but not disastrously, speak in front of an auditorium of strangers. The poem is a reminder that the girl is always inside me, now with a protective coating.
I remember writing an essay on Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron in high school English. We were to discuss how we would react in a society where the gifted were weighted down to be average — the intelligent wore earphones with noises to distract their thoughts, for example. So most of our International Baccalaureate class wrote essays about how they would defy the system, casting themselves as heroes. I wrote about staying quiet and appearing average so I would be able to live inside my head, as myself, in peace. It’s possible mine was the more realistic scenario, but most people at least believed they have the courage to be the hero, to be more than they daily appear.
Last month at work we participated in a Myers Briggs workshop and were given funny “prayers” for each type. Mine, INTP, says: “Lord help me be less independent, but let me do it my way.” I do still just want to be me.
People who know me well aren’t surprised that I’m 100% introvert on the Myers Briggs scale, though some who don’t are fooled by that protective coating.
Before I die, though, I would like to prove her wrong, to feel like the hero of my own story.
A year ago today I lost the most important person in the world to me. I wasn’t sure if I’d want to mark the anniversary, because every day is marked. Every day I think of him. I find comfort in nurturing the parts of me that were also part of him. In the wise words of a cartoon, “I am only gone from myself, not from you.” Our relationship continues.
The anniversary feels like a turning point, though. One where I need to look forward more, inward more, avoid as much as I can the numbness of grief and be more deliberate about what I want from life. He’s always going to be part of me so the best way I can honour him is to be me.
I don’t like the term bucket list or its implication. I’m too adaptable to circumstance and open to random opportunity to believe there are things I must do before I die, and I don’t believe death should be the impetus for action — life should be. I’m not much for grand gestures or needing a constant adrenaline rush, so much of what living fully means to me seems too light to carry all that weight of MUST DO BEFORE I DIE.
But that’s semantics. I do have, floating in my head, a changeable list of things I’ve long wanted to do or see. Today it’s time to pin those things down in literal form — like, Excel spreadsheet form — mull over whether they’re really my priorities or just things that once appealed to me or sounded like they should, and deliberately work on making them happen, re-evaluating as time goes on.
I won’t share all of this literal not-a-bucket-list publicly, but here’s some examples:
Improve my Spanish again, starting with taking a conversational course in the coming year
Find a place soon to regularly practice yoga that doesn’t namaste or Lululemon me to eyerolling death
Travel more. Possibilities in the next 5 years or so: Turkey, hopping across Europe, Galapagos, Haida Gwaii, New Orleans, Newfoundland, whatever comes up
Write for pleasure every day, no matter how little or how unshareable
Take a helicopter ride
You can hold me to these actions … but you’ll notice I gave myself the re-evaluate card as an out. I wouldn’t be fully me if my list of what fills my bucket didn’t include doubt about its permanence.
If you read my last post, you’ll know that I struggle to express ideas precisely and am frequently frustrated knowing that my listeners are hearing something different, because I’m not good at that precision, because they’re bringing their own experiences and perceptions of the ideas and of me to what I say, because we’re so used to hearing hyperbole that we tone down any proclamation, like lopping off the score from the East German judge*.
So I don’t self-identify as a geek or a nerd because neither camp would fully accept me as one of their own. I love Star Trek but not (gasp) Doctor Who, have been to NASA JPL twice now and am waiting for the next open house after the sequester cancelled this year’s but I haven’t been to the local less-dramatic space science centre, I love reading and hearing about physics but get to a point where I hit a wall of WTF, I admire Neil Gaiman but think Joss Whedon is overrated, I’m not a gamer but I’m immersed in some aspects of web culture.
It’s always good-natured but it happened again this weekend at the Northern Voice blogging conference. If attending that doesn’t scream geek of some kind I don’t know what does, but it’s the kind of place where admitting you found Firefly boring gets you teasingly ostracized.
But there’s the old adage “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” In my offline circles I’m geekier than many. At most of my workplaces I’ve been considered tech savvy, which makes my truly tech savvy friends laugh.
The geek handshake, where there’s a checklist of things you must enjoy, is another example of how we put each other into boxes. As if any two people have one set of traits, as if we’re not all way more complicated than that. And even in good-natured-ness, it’s another way of dividing people as in the club and not in the club.
I had a boss once who drew a Venn diagram to show me where he thought friendship lives:
I agree that commonalities draw us together, but I countered by saying the most interesting parts of friendship are where the circles don’t overlap. If our secret handshake excludes the rest of the circle, the boundaries of our own circle will never expand. My mixed metaphors would have worked better if Venn diagrams were square, but in essence we put ourselves in boxes.
Which leads me to another Venn diagram, this one presented by Dave Olson of Hootsuite at the conference about living an enriched, story-filled life (I’ve re-created – his was nicer):
I don’t do this well. I’m an introvert – my comfort zone is inside my own head, and while some might call that a very weird place, my version of the weird I want to explore out there in the world would be sedate compared to, say, Dave O’s version. But I do think the world would be more interesting — we’d all be more interesting — if we spent more time dodging the handshake instead of seeking it.
I have this tendency to want to know the literal truth. Yeah, yeah, that fish you caught was 10 feet long, but how long was it really? I love metaphor and story and ambiguity and shades of grey, but if something’s presented as truth I generally want that truth to be precise.
People either admire this trait in me, accept it along a continuum of accepting to begrudging, or treat it like a fatal flaw. Where they fall on the scale tends to determine how close we can become. To use annoying corporate-speak, it’s one of my core values, so it’s not going to change, because I don’t want it to change. But something about how I wrap my head around it needs to change.
Even though I’ve been accused of being too literal, I sometimes feel like I need subtitles because even the people who say that don’t take me literally.
The fault is mine. I often understate or make a joke of something in order to not make myself vulnerable, so compared to the expected dramatic retelling I seem less affected than others might be (for you Austen fans, I’m an Elinor rather than a Marianne). On the other hand, I often overexplain because I feel I have difficulty making myself understood … which makes it more likely that I’ll be misunderstood because she doth protest too much.
I’m caught outside the Goldilocks effect of literalness; too cold or too hot, I can never get it just right.
When I write a blog post I’m usually making a specific point — I just take a babbly, circuitous route to get there — so it’s frustrating when, say, someone reads a post about how getting down to survival basics and nature helps me cope with death and translates that as “yay, you’re totally over it!” Or when a multi-billion dollar media conglomerate refutes points I didn’t make. Or when that same multi-billion dollar media conglomerate says “it doesn’t read that way” of a tweet that literally reads that way. What they meant was they were objecting to the subtext they had ascribed to my literal words.
I spend too much time in my head inventing future scenarios in order to practice expressing myself in a way that will convey to the listener exactly what I want to say. I play conversations in my mind trying to land on the magic formula that might allow for understanding, and to prepare myself for possible objections or misunderstandings. It’s the coping mechanism of an introvert who wants to be heard when I talk, dammit.
I have a friend who regularly misunderstands my “I’m trying to think of how to say this…” as “I need a lie in order to get the end result I want…” but it’s the opposite. The end result I want is for people to understand my truth, even if they don’t agree with it. (Though, yeah, I’d rather they agreed with it.)
I understand that I can’t control other people’s behaviour, only my own. I don’t seem to understand that there are no magic words that will allow someone to hear exactly what I want them to hear. Even if I had subtitles, I can’t control the subtext.
If you haven’t seen the video of David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water, an abridged version of his commencement speech at Kenyon College, then you have obviously just emerged out from under a fallen bookshelf and have not been able to access the Internet in the last week. For your benefit, here it is:
It might feel odd to take posthumous life advice from someone who killed himself less than three years after giving said advice, but that’s where Hyperbole and a Half’s brilliant post on depression comes in handy, to illustrate what depression is and is not.
The video had me going into my draft folder where half-finished blog posts go to die. Sure enough there’s benefitofthedoubt.doc from October 2011, where I inelegantly proposed the idea that DFW so eloquently expressed. I wish I’d known then of the unabridged transcript of his speech, available at the Internet Archive.
An excerpt from my draft (after a long and now outdated preamble framing the idea of giving people the benefit of the doubt):
One of the ways I still cope with my nervousness at doing interviews is to think that the interviewee is nervous. Sometimes I know it’s true, sometimes I suspect it’s not, but it doesn’t matter: thinking of the interviewee’s nerves takes the focus away from what I’m feeling and on to my job as interviewer, to make them more comfortable. (Disclaimer: I’m not saying I’m good at putting people more at ease, I’m saying it’s an effective brain trick to put myself more at ease.)
And that’s an even longer preamble to say that sometimes thinking of other people before yourself actually helps you, maybe even more than it helps them.
Maybe the person who cut you off in traffic is distracted because they just visited a loved one in the hospital. Or maybe they’re a jerk driver, but your rage won’t doesn’t teach them anything and makes you rage-y.
Obviously there’s a point where this line of thinking becomes disgustingly Pollyannaish, or making excuses for people who treat you badly, but in most cases what’s the downside to thinking of alternate explanations for these ephemeral interactions and reacting accordingly?
This was written before last summer, when I was the distracted driver returning from visiting a dying loved one in the hospital, or furiously concentrating on driving as smoothly as possible with him — precious, nauseous, pain-wracked cargo — in my car and therefore driving too tentatively. The summer when I wanted to beg every stranger we encountered to please be extra nice to him, and I wanted a tattoo on my forehead to say the same about me.
The upside to horrible experiences is it can give you empathy for the truth that everyone is carrying their own burden. But we don’t need to have experienced an identical burden. If we need an empathy lesson we can, for example, read Allie of Hyperbole and a Half sharing her story of depression.
Or as David Foster Wallace points out, we can also simply open our minds to the idea that we are all swimming in the same water.
I’ve been experimenting with some online animation and presentation tools, ultimately to use for work but I’m learning the tools by making samples for myself. This one was created with Powtoon (as they will yell at you at the end), which has a greater learning curve than, say, VideoScribe, but not as much as, say, Xtranormal.
This was a piece I meant to write but I struggled to come up with much to say; I mostly had an image in my head of people trying to squish irregular shapes into a box. So it seemed like a good idea to represent visually: a short reflection on selfhood, combining some thoughts after years of reading Dan Ariely (aka my braincrush) and having recently finished Proust Was A Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer.
Yes, Lehrer was discredited and shamed for self-plagiarism and just plain making stuff up, but this was his one book that was vetted post-publication, not found suspect, and not pulled from circulation. And maybe, just maybe, Lehrer is more than the person in that plagiarist/fabricator box.
