To ourselves, fifteen years ago.
Dec. 18th, 2010 05:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amorphaLow on spoons now so sticking this together from pieces of text files. One insight we had recently was about how we often forget things we've realized or learned and have to re learn them over and over. Actually is kind of funny that one of the things we forget is that we forget we forget. But it's not really funny that we forget some really valid insights and have to learn them over and over. For example this:
See, the thing is, if you have the perception of there being something seriously fucked-up about a certain person or group of people, it's almost certain that someone somewhere, or more than one person, has seen it and just isn't saying anything. But when you think you're all alone, it can really make you crazy, thinking you're seeing something that isn't there, when everyone else acts like there's no reason not to love this person or forgive them all their "little faults" because they agree with me/aren't attacking me the REST of the time.
(And btw don't jump on us for ableist language because we said crazy-- Julian wrote that and she actually did mean crazy. That kind of isolating situation can literally drive a person mad, disconnect them from reality. We've earned the right to use it in a reclamational sense through our own experiences, which ironically many of the people saying that it is always an ableist word have not.)
Anyway. Learned it years ago. Had to learn it again at least three or four times since then. Learned it again just very recently (no real good sense of pace of time passing right now). And will have to re-learn it again and again in the future. But this is part of the point of our writing things down, I guess. We may happen to run across an insight like that and save ourselves the spoons of having to re-learn it from scratch yet again. Just wish there was some way we could get it to stick in our brain permanently.
This is why we re-read our own writing so much. Because sometimes we have re-found those old insights at the times when we most needed them, when we were failing at bringing all the right patterns together to re-learn them on our own.
Anyway, reading comments to this today we also found this post that Ettina had made, about what advice she would give to herself when she was younger. Coincidentally, we had re-found something earlier today that we wrote almost two years ago, thinking along the lines of what advice we would have given to ourselves at a certain time in our life-- we kept thinking 16-17-- or to other people having similar experiences.
I do not know what we would really have done if we met us from 15 years ago. Probably we would freak out because the advice we would want to give them would be on how to avoid very specific bad situations that we got into, but if they managed to avoid getting into those situations and our life was changed, we wouldn't be the people we are now and I don't know how we would change. So instead of thinking about time travel mindfucky stuff, we decided we would send something like this instead.
Common memory remembers wanting to post it somewhere but not knowing where to put it. It had started with a discussion we were having with someone else, about how incredibly toxic ideas about "the person you should have been" can be-- to cling to thoughts about "where I'd be now if I had just been able to do this thing," to be constantly followed around by a phantom of the person you or others believed you "should have" been. Anyway, what we wrote in 2008 says it much better than we can right now.
But... I have seen many, many, many people, including some who were non-disabled and completely developmentally typical, cling to this idea of a "real self" within them that was waiting to emerge when a certain set of criteria were filled, or of "the person they should have been" if their life had followed a certain pathway; and that this real self or person they should have been was somehow more real and authentic than the person they were, and that they would somehow be completely happy and fulfilled in every way.
It's a wide-ranging phenomenon, but mostly I see a lot of people who are atypical in some way being susceptible to it. I've seen a lot of people who were autistic or disabled in some other way express it. I've also seen people mention it on fat acceptance blogs, talking about how they thought their "real life" wouldn't start until after they lost a certain amount of weight. Even among people who understood that their real self was not something that was yet to be created, most of the time, I've seen people make the assumption that their life would only really start after a certain event or events took place.
There is no "person you should have been": there's you, and you exist. The idea that the real you is the "person you should have been," or a person who doesn't exist yet, or is waiting to exist, because you haven't had access to the right kinds of life experiences or social opportunities or didn't get the chance to have certain experiences at the "normal" or "proper" age for them, is an illusion, one that often comes of buying into other people's arbitrary value systems about what constitutes a good or fulfilled or rich life.
Even if some or all of those criteria are eventually met, you will find that you will not suddenly, magically turn into a different person, one who is glamorous and self-confident and popular and somehow, suddenly able to do all the things you always thought you wanted to do. The "person you should have been" can be a dangerous, glamorous illusion, because as long as you're convinced that that person exists inside you somewhere in potential, you'll be willing to try a lot of things, some of which can just be unproductive and some of which can be outright dangerous, trying to draw out or become that person.
Some "paradises" can turn out to be hells of having to keep up a constant appearance of being something you are not, of the agony that results from a conflict between who and what you have been told you are and want to believe you are, and what your gut instincts are telling you you are (or are not).
And it's not as though reaching a point where your life meets all the criteria for what someone else has told you is fulfilment and happiness, and finding that you feel empty and unfulfilled and that your "paradise" doesn't amount to much, is totally unprecedented. The book "The Feminine Mystique," in the 60s, was all about how middle-class, white, heterosexual women were marketed a concept of an ideal life-- marriage, a house in the suburbs, taking care of the kids-- which many of them were unhappy and unfulfilled in, even when having all the material possessions and status symbols that were supposed to bring them a sense of completion and of filling their role as women.
You can't look into an alternate timeline and see what you really would have been like if your life had gone the way you think it should have gone, if certain events hadn't happened and certain others had.
Few people consider the possibility that, had those events happened, they would have been worse off rather than better off. I know that, looking at what we believed our ideal version of our life would be at 17, it would very likely have been miserable for us if we had actually been able to get into the kinds of situations and social groups we thought we should be in. We would have hit the limit of our skills in many areas; we would likely have been manipulated by many people who saw us as something naive to be taken advantage of (we were manipulated by several such people, but it would probably have happened even more under the circumstances we fantasized about, with probably more dangerous consquences).
Life, and the good things in it, are things that are always going on, even when the arbitrary criteria someone has drawn up for what they think constitute a "good life" or a "fulfilled life" are not met. Most people in the world, and most people in human history, have not lived lives that met all the criteria that most people in modern, industrialized nations hold for a "good life." That doesn't mean that many of them didn't still find enjoyment and fulfilment in life. Happiness did not invent itself with the advent of indoor plumbing, modern medicine, or anything else. These things make it easier for many people to live longer happy lives, and offer many people a chance at happiness who wouldn't have survived long in previous generations, but people (not just humans, but all the species which were ancestors to humans as well) knew about enjoying life and happiness long before these things had ever been invented. (As a side-note, this explains a lot of why I'm uncomfortable with charity approaches that rely on the concept of "these people will live utterly horrible lives destitute of any possibility of happiness unless you help out now"-- yes, some people do experience truly terrible things that should not happen, but portraying them as some kind of horror-porn freak show does not "help" anybody, and I don't think there is such a thing as a life destitute of any possibility of happiness.)
I want to note that with all this stuff, I'm not referring to things like, say, transgendered people wanting to transition, or needing to come out of the closet as trans/gay/plural/something else nonstandard in your culture. I tried to make that clear through context, but in case I haven't, I'm not saying "suck it up and deal" about whatever life you have, or telling people they can't make changes that are possible for them and that they want to make-- I'm talking about what happens when a person goes around for years feeling like they are not as real or valid as other people because they and their lives do not match up to some imagined norm or ideal, and that even the experiences that are rich and meaningful to them don't matter because they are not "normal" things to take pleasure in or find meaningful or something, and thinking that their life won't really begin unless they can become this idealized person existing in their imagination. Even when you are changing something about yourself, your life is still going on and has been going on long before that change.
Regardless, though:
Your life is real. You are a real person, whether or not your appearance, your history, your skills, or your life match up with what someone else has defined as real or ideal, or what you were told you should be.
Your life, and the skills you have, and the experiences you have had, are not worthless because they do not match up to some fantasy in your or someone else's mind of what you should be.
The fantasy of who you should be that may exist in your mind is not more real, or more authentically you, than the person you actually are.
The fantasy of who you should be, if you have one, will always be just that-- a fantasy. It is not horrible to have one, or something that makes you a bad person, but it is a problem when you forget it is a fantasy and start thinking it is something that you can and should try to match in reality.
The person you may have a fantasy of being is not waiting to exist or waiting to jump out from inside you and replace who you are now as soon as certain conditions are fulfilled in your life. They will never be real; you will always be real.
Some of the aspects of that fantasy may turn out to be things which can be real for you eventually, and a couple of them probably will, but it is very unlikely that you will arrive at those things in the way you think you should or the way it worked in your fantasy. They may come to you in a form so different from their fantasy version in your mind that you may not be able to recognize what they are at first.
Some of the aspects of that fantasy may turn out to be things you do not actually want at all in reality, if they turn out to be possible or if you even get close to them.
Your life is not something which is ever on hold or on hiatus or which stops because some ideal has not been met.
You will keep growing, learning, changing and having new experiences while you are alive, even if you are busy waiting for some condition to be met and believing your life won't start until then, and even if you can't see those experiences as valid while they are happening.
You will also keep growing, learning, changing and experiencing life even when who you really are is buried underneath a trained facade or a role you tried to play or something you tried to act when it wasn't what you were. Your real self has not died or gone away or been fundamentally replaced by the facade or act; you're still there and still you, even if it takes time to sort out the reality from the act.
Your life and your experiences are not worthless just because no one else around you recognizes the value or reality of them. It is better to have people who recognize their value and reality than to not have anyone who does, but they do not go away or become worthless under those conditions.
Your life and your experiences are not worthless just because you may be unable to communicate about them to others in a way that they understand, and they are not less worthy, real, or rich than the lives and experiences of people who can communicate about them in a way that is readily understood by others around them.
(Added 12/10):
You may at some point realize that who you are, the person you are, is actually transforming in some way, but this does not mean the end product of it is going to be that fantasy ideal person. Most likely whatever you are turning into, if you don't try to push it in a certain direction, is just into whatever you need to be, which may not be anything at all like what you fantasized. You may not get what you want, but you will get what you need. You can find happiness if you go along with the change and trust your instincts, but you will also have to trust that happiness comes in many forms and let go of the idea that only a certain type of life can truly fulfil you.
This advice would be specific to us, but may be useful to others as well: Be very careful to not leave yourself open and unguarded in certain ways because you think being around a certain person or group of people is helping to transform you into this supposed real person you were meant to be all along. And especially not when something feels wrong but you think you have to go along with it to turn into this person you think you should be. Because it can completely twist your whole perception of yourself and others and reality in general, sometimes in incredibly scary ways. Once you buy into the idea that there is this "person you should be" and that you have reached a point where you can become that person if you do the right things, it will already warp all your views of the reality around you from the start. And in trying to become that nonexistant person, you will start to systematically devalue the things you really are or not see how they make sense in context. And when you try to open yourself up to be transformed when that warping and devaluing is taking place, ideas that you would normally be able to defend yourself against can sneak in and take root very deeply. And if you have fallen in with the wrong sort of person, they can do some really scary things to you then. (If this does not happen to you, then obviously you can ignore it-- I just know we are not the only ones to experience this.)
(Obviously there is some individual variation in all of this. For instance, for us, it required the additional step of realizing that "accepting me" actually meant accepting we, and in the process, also dispensing with others' ideas and our own fantasies about how we thought multiplicity "should" work. But many individual members of our own system have been through variations of this in their own ways, even after the whole acceptance-of-we thing happened. And whoever originally wrote this, wrote it in singlet mode because we wanted to post it somewhere where a lot of people could see it-- but couldn't get it into "proper essay form" and gave up. But we wanted to share it in some form, so it is here.)
See, the thing is, if you have the perception of there being something seriously fucked-up about a certain person or group of people, it's almost certain that someone somewhere, or more than one person, has seen it and just isn't saying anything. But when you think you're all alone, it can really make you crazy, thinking you're seeing something that isn't there, when everyone else acts like there's no reason not to love this person or forgive them all their "little faults" because they agree with me/aren't attacking me the REST of the time.
(And btw don't jump on us for ableist language because we said crazy-- Julian wrote that and she actually did mean crazy. That kind of isolating situation can literally drive a person mad, disconnect them from reality. We've earned the right to use it in a reclamational sense through our own experiences, which ironically many of the people saying that it is always an ableist word have not.)
Anyway. Learned it years ago. Had to learn it again at least three or four times since then. Learned it again just very recently (no real good sense of pace of time passing right now). And will have to re-learn it again and again in the future. But this is part of the point of our writing things down, I guess. We may happen to run across an insight like that and save ourselves the spoons of having to re-learn it from scratch yet again. Just wish there was some way we could get it to stick in our brain permanently.
This is why we re-read our own writing so much. Because sometimes we have re-found those old insights at the times when we most needed them, when we were failing at bringing all the right patterns together to re-learn them on our own.
Anyway, reading comments to this today we also found this post that Ettina had made, about what advice she would give to herself when she was younger. Coincidentally, we had re-found something earlier today that we wrote almost two years ago, thinking along the lines of what advice we would have given to ourselves at a certain time in our life-- we kept thinking 16-17-- or to other people having similar experiences.
I do not know what we would really have done if we met us from 15 years ago. Probably we would freak out because the advice we would want to give them would be on how to avoid very specific bad situations that we got into, but if they managed to avoid getting into those situations and our life was changed, we wouldn't be the people we are now and I don't know how we would change. So instead of thinking about time travel mindfucky stuff, we decided we would send something like this instead.
Common memory remembers wanting to post it somewhere but not knowing where to put it. It had started with a discussion we were having with someone else, about how incredibly toxic ideas about "the person you should have been" can be-- to cling to thoughts about "where I'd be now if I had just been able to do this thing," to be constantly followed around by a phantom of the person you or others believed you "should have" been. Anyway, what we wrote in 2008 says it much better than we can right now.
But... I have seen many, many, many people, including some who were non-disabled and completely developmentally typical, cling to this idea of a "real self" within them that was waiting to emerge when a certain set of criteria were filled, or of "the person they should have been" if their life had followed a certain pathway; and that this real self or person they should have been was somehow more real and authentic than the person they were, and that they would somehow be completely happy and fulfilled in every way.
It's a wide-ranging phenomenon, but mostly I see a lot of people who are atypical in some way being susceptible to it. I've seen a lot of people who were autistic or disabled in some other way express it. I've also seen people mention it on fat acceptance blogs, talking about how they thought their "real life" wouldn't start until after they lost a certain amount of weight. Even among people who understood that their real self was not something that was yet to be created, most of the time, I've seen people make the assumption that their life would only really start after a certain event or events took place.
There is no "person you should have been": there's you, and you exist. The idea that the real you is the "person you should have been," or a person who doesn't exist yet, or is waiting to exist, because you haven't had access to the right kinds of life experiences or social opportunities or didn't get the chance to have certain experiences at the "normal" or "proper" age for them, is an illusion, one that often comes of buying into other people's arbitrary value systems about what constitutes a good or fulfilled or rich life.
Even if some or all of those criteria are eventually met, you will find that you will not suddenly, magically turn into a different person, one who is glamorous and self-confident and popular and somehow, suddenly able to do all the things you always thought you wanted to do. The "person you should have been" can be a dangerous, glamorous illusion, because as long as you're convinced that that person exists inside you somewhere in potential, you'll be willing to try a lot of things, some of which can just be unproductive and some of which can be outright dangerous, trying to draw out or become that person.
Some "paradises" can turn out to be hells of having to keep up a constant appearance of being something you are not, of the agony that results from a conflict between who and what you have been told you are and want to believe you are, and what your gut instincts are telling you you are (or are not).
And it's not as though reaching a point where your life meets all the criteria for what someone else has told you is fulfilment and happiness, and finding that you feel empty and unfulfilled and that your "paradise" doesn't amount to much, is totally unprecedented. The book "The Feminine Mystique," in the 60s, was all about how middle-class, white, heterosexual women were marketed a concept of an ideal life-- marriage, a house in the suburbs, taking care of the kids-- which many of them were unhappy and unfulfilled in, even when having all the material possessions and status symbols that were supposed to bring them a sense of completion and of filling their role as women.
You can't look into an alternate timeline and see what you really would have been like if your life had gone the way you think it should have gone, if certain events hadn't happened and certain others had.
Few people consider the possibility that, had those events happened, they would have been worse off rather than better off. I know that, looking at what we believed our ideal version of our life would be at 17, it would very likely have been miserable for us if we had actually been able to get into the kinds of situations and social groups we thought we should be in. We would have hit the limit of our skills in many areas; we would likely have been manipulated by many people who saw us as something naive to be taken advantage of (we were manipulated by several such people, but it would probably have happened even more under the circumstances we fantasized about, with probably more dangerous consquences).
Life, and the good things in it, are things that are always going on, even when the arbitrary criteria someone has drawn up for what they think constitute a "good life" or a "fulfilled life" are not met. Most people in the world, and most people in human history, have not lived lives that met all the criteria that most people in modern, industrialized nations hold for a "good life." That doesn't mean that many of them didn't still find enjoyment and fulfilment in life. Happiness did not invent itself with the advent of indoor plumbing, modern medicine, or anything else. These things make it easier for many people to live longer happy lives, and offer many people a chance at happiness who wouldn't have survived long in previous generations, but people (not just humans, but all the species which were ancestors to humans as well) knew about enjoying life and happiness long before these things had ever been invented. (As a side-note, this explains a lot of why I'm uncomfortable with charity approaches that rely on the concept of "these people will live utterly horrible lives destitute of any possibility of happiness unless you help out now"-- yes, some people do experience truly terrible things that should not happen, but portraying them as some kind of horror-porn freak show does not "help" anybody, and I don't think there is such a thing as a life destitute of any possibility of happiness.)
I want to note that with all this stuff, I'm not referring to things like, say, transgendered people wanting to transition, or needing to come out of the closet as trans/gay/plural/something else nonstandard in your culture. I tried to make that clear through context, but in case I haven't, I'm not saying "suck it up and deal" about whatever life you have, or telling people they can't make changes that are possible for them and that they want to make-- I'm talking about what happens when a person goes around for years feeling like they are not as real or valid as other people because they and their lives do not match up to some imagined norm or ideal, and that even the experiences that are rich and meaningful to them don't matter because they are not "normal" things to take pleasure in or find meaningful or something, and thinking that their life won't really begin unless they can become this idealized person existing in their imagination. Even when you are changing something about yourself, your life is still going on and has been going on long before that change.
Regardless, though:
Your life is real. You are a real person, whether or not your appearance, your history, your skills, or your life match up with what someone else has defined as real or ideal, or what you were told you should be.
Your life, and the skills you have, and the experiences you have had, are not worthless because they do not match up to some fantasy in your or someone else's mind of what you should be.
The fantasy of who you should be that may exist in your mind is not more real, or more authentically you, than the person you actually are.
The fantasy of who you should be, if you have one, will always be just that-- a fantasy. It is not horrible to have one, or something that makes you a bad person, but it is a problem when you forget it is a fantasy and start thinking it is something that you can and should try to match in reality.
The person you may have a fantasy of being is not waiting to exist or waiting to jump out from inside you and replace who you are now as soon as certain conditions are fulfilled in your life. They will never be real; you will always be real.
Some of the aspects of that fantasy may turn out to be things which can be real for you eventually, and a couple of them probably will, but it is very unlikely that you will arrive at those things in the way you think you should or the way it worked in your fantasy. They may come to you in a form so different from their fantasy version in your mind that you may not be able to recognize what they are at first.
Some of the aspects of that fantasy may turn out to be things you do not actually want at all in reality, if they turn out to be possible or if you even get close to them.
Your life is not something which is ever on hold or on hiatus or which stops because some ideal has not been met.
You will keep growing, learning, changing and having new experiences while you are alive, even if you are busy waiting for some condition to be met and believing your life won't start until then, and even if you can't see those experiences as valid while they are happening.
You will also keep growing, learning, changing and experiencing life even when who you really are is buried underneath a trained facade or a role you tried to play or something you tried to act when it wasn't what you were. Your real self has not died or gone away or been fundamentally replaced by the facade or act; you're still there and still you, even if it takes time to sort out the reality from the act.
Your life and your experiences are not worthless just because no one else around you recognizes the value or reality of them. It is better to have people who recognize their value and reality than to not have anyone who does, but they do not go away or become worthless under those conditions.
Your life and your experiences are not worthless just because you may be unable to communicate about them to others in a way that they understand, and they are not less worthy, real, or rich than the lives and experiences of people who can communicate about them in a way that is readily understood by others around them.
(Added 12/10):
You may at some point realize that who you are, the person you are, is actually transforming in some way, but this does not mean the end product of it is going to be that fantasy ideal person. Most likely whatever you are turning into, if you don't try to push it in a certain direction, is just into whatever you need to be, which may not be anything at all like what you fantasized. You may not get what you want, but you will get what you need. You can find happiness if you go along with the change and trust your instincts, but you will also have to trust that happiness comes in many forms and let go of the idea that only a certain type of life can truly fulfil you.
This advice would be specific to us, but may be useful to others as well: Be very careful to not leave yourself open and unguarded in certain ways because you think being around a certain person or group of people is helping to transform you into this supposed real person you were meant to be all along. And especially not when something feels wrong but you think you have to go along with it to turn into this person you think you should be. Because it can completely twist your whole perception of yourself and others and reality in general, sometimes in incredibly scary ways. Once you buy into the idea that there is this "person you should be" and that you have reached a point where you can become that person if you do the right things, it will already warp all your views of the reality around you from the start. And in trying to become that nonexistant person, you will start to systematically devalue the things you really are or not see how they make sense in context. And when you try to open yourself up to be transformed when that warping and devaluing is taking place, ideas that you would normally be able to defend yourself against can sneak in and take root very deeply. And if you have fallen in with the wrong sort of person, they can do some really scary things to you then. (If this does not happen to you, then obviously you can ignore it-- I just know we are not the only ones to experience this.)
(Obviously there is some individual variation in all of this. For instance, for us, it required the additional step of realizing that "accepting me" actually meant accepting we, and in the process, also dispensing with others' ideas and our own fantasies about how we thought multiplicity "should" work. But many individual members of our own system have been through variations of this in their own ways, even after the whole acceptance-of-we thing happened. And whoever originally wrote this, wrote it in singlet mode because we wanted to post it somewhere where a lot of people could see it-- but couldn't get it into "proper essay form" and gave up. But we wanted to share it in some form, so it is here.)