Rambling thoughts that only make sense to me

So here it is, February of 2013, and I'm in a holding pattern of some sort. I'm annoyed by it, but not despairing because I think the next month or so will bring changes. We've got more spring coming this way, the time of change, and we've got spring break, followed by a new term, new schedule. Things will change one way or another, and that's a good thing. So if all I seem to be able to do these days is lounge around watching TV, doing kakuro, and listening to podcasts, not eating well, not exercising, not doing anything proactive, that's okay. It will pass.

Thing is, right now I can't think what I want to do. I just want to do something that's less passive. I always worry about how much stimulation I take in in an attempt to not have time to deeply reflect on "important" things, but I don't know that it's something I always do to avoid deep thought. I think it's just an inertia thing. But I've found lately that I downplay most of those kind of thoughts, either because I've entered into a deeper level of repression, or just because it feels unnecessarily histrionic to ascribe a more portentous meaning to these things.

It's that worry about complacency again, but it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe it's part of self-acceptance to not be as hard on myself as I used to be. It's probably a good thing. Of course, it could be lowered expectations. Although how they could be even lower...

Anyway.

What does it mean to waste your life? We're back to POV, something I've considered before. Wasted according to who? There's this set of things you do, this set of things you could do, this set of things you'd never do, and those set of things you don't know that you might do. I think it's important to not just do the things you do, to consider the possibilities, even to reevaluate the things you'd never do or leave yourself open to discover those things you didn't know about before. But you have to follow your own path to find the other things; I don't think you can force it. I'm into widening my environment to let other things filter in around the edges of my established world, but I'm not sure the best way to do it.

But see, that's still relatively passive. I've spent a great deal of my life as an observer, acting mostly to position myself in such a way as to see what I need to see without being seen by others looking back. Back to that idea in Cloud Atlas that you only know yourself in the gaze of the Other. If that's true, I'll never know myself because I refuse to legitimize wholly the gaze of the Other upon me. I doubt I could change that, but maybe I can still use the idea somehow. Especially now that things seem less urgent and dangerous. I'm less self-conscious, less worried about being seen now than I probably ever have been. Surely I can use that to my advantage?

If there's a way to -- not objectively, not dispassionately, but calmly? maybe -- consider the assumptions others make about me in a way that allows me to come to a new understanding of myself, that could be a good thing. I just still don't see why -- I'm a bit stubborn about that still. I don't know if I'm insisting on my perspective or running from the truth though. Probably both.

It sounds defensive, which is one thing I remember infuriating me from my youth, when I was told in an argument not to get defensive. And I remember very little from my youth, but that burning injustice still stings. How to tell the (very legitimate) difference between being overly defensive, meaning reacting without thinking to a presumed attack, and defending your view or your actions from a real attack meant to shut YOU down without having to think about the point you're making? It goes to something Jacob (and others) have said about telling girls to be polite or nice means denying them their own voice, being polite or nice is a self-abnegation, losing your voice and ceding the ground to the others around you. The Others who only see you as an adjunct to their story where they're the hero. The ultimate idea of being defined by the Other as seen in and ultimately rejected by Dollhouse.

That's part of the issue I have with that idea. Still, consensus can be a more complete picture. There are things some of those Others who are closest to you see and understand that are of value. I just -- it also goes to the idea of needing validation from another, something too many women my age and older seemed to too often succumb to in the form of their relationships with men. Not only just the idea of getting validation from the men themselves, but legitimization from society for doing the thing you're supposed to do, pairing up with a man and all that follows. It's a security thing, an on the surface easy way. Follow the track that so many do, take on the labels "everyone" does in the right order, and you always know who you are. As opposed to forging your own path and having no ready definitions to apply, no easy, well-defined personas to take on. Of course, I understand now that no path is easy, even if you do what's expected. There's always problems. But often those problems arise from the dissonance between the label you bought into and what you want and need for yourself as a labelless, real person.

So I no longer know if it's harder to be adamantly nebulous and rejecting labels or to take on labels that only fit uneasily. At least if the former, you're playing dolls with yourself, trying out different specific Barbie outfits to see which feels better and which you need to burn. Whereas if you try so hard not to allow any of the premade outfits, you've got nothing to wear and nowhere to go except a nude beach of nonidentity. Probably the best thing, and what I think the younger generations excel at, is mixing and matching. Not tossing out the wardrobe entirely, but just picking a hat here, a skirt there, whatever you want. And it's about using the labels as they're understood, but showing that you get the artificiality of them. Using that artifice to create a self-made synergy. So not rejecting the labels, not accepting them, but recognizing they're artificial constructs, and using bits and pieces as -- not fetishes, but -- symbols of deeper meaning, that meaning needing to be taken in context of all the other symbols to be understood or to be occasionally subverted or radicalized.

On one hand it feels extremely derivative, or even somethings adolescents have always done, but it's at a new level now, it's viral. And it's active, not passive, for males and females. I think it's in the knowingness of it now. Well, I can't go down that rabbit hole because all I know about kids at this remove is what I see on TV or in the movies or read. And artists have always been more knowing.

Anyway.

Not sure how I got to trying to understand -- whatever. I liked the Barbie analogy.

So back to me. :) Boring subject. How does that all help me understand life, the universe and everything? I spent my life trying to ignore the labels. I tried on some identities, but I never took them seriously. My dark observer undercut my posturings at every turn. Oh, I'm a film nerd, I'm alternative, I'm into punk, I'm a leftie, I'm an underground zine maker, I'm a city person, I'm a writer; all things I have thought about myself at different times, but I never really allowed myself to try and externally express any of it. Or to talk to others from those positions. They were just what I thought of myself, but I felt that showing those things on the outside was pretentious and was posturing. In my twenties I had more disdain for people who needed to shove their personas in other people's faces than practically anyone else. It all felt desperate and a lie and I wouldn't allow myself to do it and hated when others did.

I don't know why that was such a big deal. Why was self-expression perceived with such cynicism? Maybe because I never felt my external truth and my internal truth ever matched? Maybe I just was always afraid to be challenged to prove myself worthy of the persona I was adopting. If I ever felt any of the labels that applied to me were true, rather than me trying to be something I wasn't, maybe really getting into it would have been easy. Maybe would have been fun.

I don't know when I decided everything was a lie.

I see others as I see myself, therefore everyone else is a liar? It just seems like I had a view that everything was so cliched or something. All the stuff you go through in high school and college, I had read about it, I had seen it somewhere, so the fact that I was going through it was nothing special, I was nothing special. I rebelled as a teenager, but only internally, because that's where it mattered. It ties back to the gaze of the Other. The external self is what others see, and not what you see. Anything you do for yourself is internal. If you have to wear a mohawk and a leather jacket with safety pins to be a punk, that's just to show others that you think you're a punk. That has nothing to do with what you actually are. It's all about show.

That's what's so hard about all of that. This weird distinction I make between what's for real and what's for show and thinking they don't ever match. Or thinking it's somehow a statement about someone's character that they make everything a show. While at the same time, honestly, being envious of those who do it. I see others as I see myself, therefore I view them with both admiration and contempt? I envied the arty kids in high school, but I never once thought of emulating them or trying to be one of them. Even today I get a thrill when I see anyone, of any age, with a intricately constructed external persona (hello hipsters). I'm so happy that someone can do it, when I just can't. I've learned to accept the admiration part and ignore the contemptuous part that wants to scoff at the artificiality of it. Maybe by the time I'm 80 (god forbid) I'll be a crazy lady with a purple mohawk.

I think I've always been concerned with what is real and fake, probably too concerned. Probably thinking that there's some sure way to tell the difference. Every time I tried out a persona, in my mind, it always felt like a costume. So even today my "fashion" sense is almost nonexistent. I've never really tried to decorate myself or transform myself from the outside in, even though I think that's something that could be done, carefully. Humorless, practical, utilitarian, puritanical -- those are huge forces in me. Yet I'm not actually humorless or puritanical at least, so that's something. But I do think those conservative tendencies are what lead to the cynicism, and recognizing that they're conservative and therefore less optimal, I try and reject them.

I have terrific parents who have always supported me and wanted the best for me, who have never tried to push me in a predetermined direction, but let me make my own choices. Yet I seem to still have picked up this -- not self-hate, but -- self-doubt maybe. I always fall on the side of distrusting myself or thinking the worst of myself, even as I have a strong sense of self and stand firmly in the world, not swaying with the winds of others. It's a weird thing. It's also why the comment in Conversations With Dead People between Buffy and Holden really hit home. You do have a superiority complex, and you have an inferiority complex about it. This motherfucker of a Janus-headed coin, where I in one way only really trust myself to define myself, yet I always distrust the conclusions I make about that topic because it's all a self-promoting, self-aggrandizing lie to make myself seem cooler than I am. But other people, they don't know shit about me.  (Partly because I try to tell them as little as possible.)

I reframed my whatever the fuck it is not being able to express myself thing as purposeful mystery. Other people always judge me by what I look like or how I seem to act, and I look nondescript and my movements are small and quiet and smooth, so I'm giving them nothing. Therefore anything they think about me is wrong, based on incorrect assumptions. Ha! What a joke. I'm bland on the outside, but if they only knew what I was inside, but they never will. It's got to be all about fear, right? I'm afraid to be myself on the outside? Or is there nothing to translate? Maybe I'm bland on the outside because I'm essentially bland on the inside. Or maybe I just don't know what the fuck I am and lack the ability to figure it out. Kevin.

And again, anyway.

What does this backwards looking self-reflection do for me? Am I learning anything I didn't know? Am I figuring out how to mitigate the bad and accentuate the good? I really don't know. I honestly don't think that how I express myself externally is all that important, but I leave open the possibility that I'm wrong about that. Maybe that is a key to something. I'm sure some of it is the fat thing. I think of myself as ugly and that might feed into anything having to do with externalities. Not like grotesque ugly, just not at all attractive in the context of my culture. I suppose I lack confidence in my ability to present myself in any way that would make anyone overlook the basic fact of my appearance. Maybe all the rest of the self-definition springs from that. Maybe the dichotomy I mentioned above is all about it. Maybe that's the whole reason I privilege inside to outside, intellect to physicality. I've allowed that my brain is beautiful, but my body is not; therefore I ignore the external as much as possible and make the internal all important. Maybe that's the one thing that if I could get over it somehow would revolutionize my life. I don't know. On the one hand it seems too simple, but on the other hand, in all my life I've never managed to do that one thing, so maybe it's not.

And it feels so ridiculous, I know all the arguments for how stupid that whole idea is, yet it's there. I think I even know intellectually that it's not true, but I can't believe it. I'm evening feeling like crying right now, which means this is important because I just don't cry. Weird.

Maybe I should work on that more directly, privilege that as something important to change and not ignore. I don't know how. Affirmations are a lie. A cheat to try and trick yourself into believing something that's not true. That's unfortunately how I feel. Again feel, not think. You would think that if I truly put intellect ahead of everything, I could get past the unreasoning feelings like that.

Love yourself. I mean, it's not like I don't, it's just that it's not absolute. Like I feel I have to overlook my faults to love myself or something. Well, we all do that when it comes to love, right? I'm continuing to understand why I've never loved anyone enough to want to spend a significant portion of my time/life with them.

A few years ago, when I had yet another friendship blow up due to a combination of issues on both sides, after a few weeks of misery and a concatenation of self-loathing and self-pity and anger, I came to a very intellectual decision that I think ultimately made my life better. I was stuck with myself for life. I could hate myself and doubt my every move and blame myself for not being able to be a proper human or I could accept myself, faults and all. Up until then, it might have felt like a defeat, giving up on the possibility of changing myself for the better, but at that point, it was what I had to do to survive, and it made sense and made me feel a bit cleansed, made the experience at least closer to cathartic.

I made peace with myself. But I still have doubts, and I refuse to give them up because I think it is important to evaluate yourself and try to make yourself be better if you can. But accepting myself as I was at that instant was important. Maybe it and not just age has helped me reach a less histrionic view of my issues, made the abyss seem less like painful fear and more like common anxiety. But that self-acceptance was also a very internally directed handshake. It was not about accepting how I look or anything like that, it was about accepting my personality quirks. It was a step. Maybe I can work backwards.

If the core issue is that unquestioning acceptance of external -- ranges from ugly to unappealing to unremarkable -- looks as a negative, and that basic assumption leads to equal assumptions about what is really me and what is me pretending to be something I'm not, and that leads to disdain for my need to pretend to be better than I am, and that leads to disparagement of what I am that I would need to rise above it, etc., then can I work back from accepting some parts of what I am as okay to accepting that I don't need to worry about pretense versus reality -- no, it's breaking down. I don't know how to follow that thread. Does not compute.

But what does work is that my agreement with myself that day did lead to less self-hatred and more self-acceptance. It didn't lead to determining the "truth" of what was real or what was wished for or anything, it left that out of the equation. Which I think is good. The search for self-knowledge is always important and will never stop, but the need to arbitrarily say this is really what I'm like and this is a sham, this is something other people think I am and this is something I want to be is diminished. Maybe true self-knowledge is all of those things collapsed together in 4d space. Maybe there's no real way to separate them anyway. Maybe it's more important to realize that you are who you wish to be.

I guess that's all I've got for now. As usual, more questions than answers. But the hope is to get ever closer to the right questions, and this was useful. For me anyway.

Connections to other people

So the world is trying to tell me something I don't want to hear. The idea of life being less meaningful or less fun or less "insert positive thing here" without connections to other people. It's not that I disagree so much as it feels like a pointed statement to me right now. Yeah, I know the obvious downsides to choosing to exist as a oner instead of as part of a couple or larger family. And I accept them. But I am also recognizing lately that there are less obvious downsides that I haven't considered for a while. Even little things like thinking over movies I've seen or music I've listened to, I remember that I wouldn't have seen or listened to this or that particular thing were it not recommended to me by the people I was hanging out with at a certain time in my life. Somehow that seems more significant to me than the knowledge that I don't have anyone to freakin' cuddle with at night, which is what seems to drive a lot of people into relationships. How many cultural experiences do I miss from that lack of input?

Of course, there's the internet, which provides reference services all the time. But it's almost ephemeral, surface level; it's not the shared physical experience of watching a David Lynch film and discussing it for hours and feeling on fire with ideas, or going to a Brazilian Girls concert with a friend when you'd never even heard of them before and feeling that emotional specificity that music provides.

I have friends, and I see them fairly often, so it's not a dire situation, just something that has come up recently. A reminder to not let them fall by the wayside out of lethargy or hermitage.

______________________________________SEGUE?________________________________

To my mind, Cloud Atlas was all about how our connections to other people are pretty much the only good thing in a world full of horrors, about how interacting with other people changes us, and how magical that can be. There's even one point where a character says the only way we truly know ourselves is through the eyes of the Other. Which struck me because I've spent my whole life attempting to reject definition from the outside. If that's a true statement, what does that say about my inherent abhorrence of the whole idea? I'm just not sure what to do with that. The right to self-definition is one that I consider to be of pretty primary importance. Why would we seek to have another define us?

But I get it. There is the nausea of looking into yourself and finding a lack of purchase. Maybe the eyes of the Other give you something to stand on, a reference point? I've always found the idea of myself in Others' eyes to be inevitably wrong. But maybe that's more about what I can and cannot accept about myself than it is about what is a truth about who I am.

I don't know. Through my life I've found that women especially, when they define themselves by the Other, it's almost always by the male Other, and that's problematic because historically men have viewed us as less human than men. Why would I want to be defined that way? That's not shelter from the storm; that's a lie that demeans us both. That's worse than existential pain and loss. That's the worst thing I can think of (relative to this discussion).

So is it possible for the Other's gaze to be helpful? To be less about objectification or broad generalization based on the Other's own understanding of the world rather than my specific self and more about telling me a truth that helps my self-understanding? Can I be made less abstract without being frozen in a shape of someone else's choosing?

I find it doubtful, but I can't help but be intrigued by the thought.