Wandering through the woods

"Be patient with yourself," the kinder of my friends tell me, when I wake up with the millionth sad dream and start asking for distractions and hugs.

The thing is, it takes effort to be patient. If nothing else, it's hard to recognize that for all of the ways that you integrated someone or something into your life -- building a habit -- it's always much worse breaking a habit. That's just at the behavioral level.

At the emotional level, it's exhausting, constantly monitoring your thoughts for a slip and implementing the "exercise and go change the pace" regimen.

We have a set amount of energy to start the day with. I was reading this article on self-monitoring, and how it's a finite resource. Changing things about yourself is hard because self-monitoring -- tracking your emotions and dealing with them in a healthy way -- takes energy, and we only have so much of it.

I know I sometimes say that it's not worth "wasting" energy on futile dreams that all of my logic says really don't stack up properly. But that's not the way emotions really work -- we fall into habits for our dreams, for who we love and what we love. We can't (realistically) unwalk our emotions without paying some sort of price for it; closeted emotions boil over in other ways.

So when I say silly things like, "it's not worth the emotional energy to deal with this," that's not what I mean. What I mean is, "I do not know how to deal with this/ I don't have the resources to monitor myself right now." Because it takes just as much emotional energy to not deal with something.

I think that most of the time, when dealing with healing broken dreams, we manage to get things down to a nice, calm 10% of what they were by re-working new emotional tracks -- by doing new things. And it takes emotional energy to form all of those new tracks. (Though sometimes seeing friends and doing things temporarily gives me a boost of additional energy to do all that).

That's why people say healing is a slow process -- that's why you can't just "get over it" or "roll with the punches." It's because emotions and habits are one-way streets that you can't just undo, and it takes an incredible amount of energy to carve new dreams and habits on top of them. Being patient with yourself is not a passive thing. It is far more active than having fallen in love in the first place.

Something from Gladwell's The Tipping Point that is rolling around in my head is the idea that in order to remember something, it "sticks" best if it's both practical and personal. (Clearly, there are other memory factors, too: how long our attention span is, whether we repeat information, whether we receive the information in whatever visual/kinesthetic/auditory/however-we-learn-best format, etc. But for now, I'm interested in the practical-and-personal bit).

Somehow, in order to make our messages "stick," we need to format information in a way that really connects to people's lives. greyduck, amongst other friends, was always talking about poor memory -- having no recollection of what happened in a day, for example, or poor recollection of when to do something. But if something was important to remember, like a task, and writing it down didn't suffice, would it stick better if we tried to make up a little story about it? Would "I need to go to the post office" work better if you drew yourself a map of the post office (practical) and made up a little story about how exactly you'd interact with the postal officer (personal)? I bet it would.

Hmm. I need to think about how to format my messages in a more personal/practical way.

It is fairly widely known that we make many, many assessments of the people we meet within the first 2 seconds of meeting them. Applying this concept to romantic assessment in particular, it is clear that all of us must make some judgment as to whether someone is datable within 2 seconds of meeting them. There are only three possibilities -- "yes," "maybe," and "no."

The thing that is somewhat puzzlesome for me is that people often delay and avoid the possibility of dating because of complications in their own heads, even if they suspect that they are compatible/attracted to someone. Logically speaking, this is silly -- while rejection does sting, the reality of the fact is that if the answer from the person you're interested in was "no" to begin with, then it was always going to be "no." You were always going to be rejected; it's wired in from the first second you meet someone.

Therefore, my initial conclusion was that most of us should be asking each other out much more often than we do, in order to gain certainty, because the worst that could happen is already inevitable.

Neil pointed out that the above is a fairly deterministic outlook, and, being Neil, offered a more quantum sort of rebuttal. He argued that often, when we consider people to be worthwhile as friends, we sort of automatically stick them in the "maybe" category -- that "maybe" is not just "maybe yes" but it's also "maybe not." (He also claimed, as a corollary, that "maybe" happens more often than a true "yes.") He said that it was the hope of avoiding "maybe not" that made us act in a much more "wait and see" fashion than logic might allow (well, that, plus the pain of rejection, which does, I admit, suck pretty hard.)

"Maybe not" is also hard to reverse. If Person Y were to ask whether Person Z wanted to date them, and Person Z was having a terrible day or felt that there wasn't quite enough worldview-match in common, that the impact of Person Z telling Person Y, "You are great, but I'm not sure this would work right now" would make it really hard for Person Z to change their minds and say, "Well, I was having a terrible day before and maybe we could give it a try."

This all has merit -- and certainly the reasons for which we avoid definite commitment to either "no" or "yes" are subject to change with circumstance. But -- and this is very Myers-Briggs "N" of me -- I think we are likely to actually already know whether the "maybe" falls closer to yes or no without much true uncertainty or real possibility of changing our minds. (We might not necessarily trust our gut, and frustratingly enough, we might not communicate that in any useful direction, but we do know.) For most people, too, I think we are more likely to err towards agreeing to date if there is any true question -- most people seem pretty conservative in wanting to gather more information to prove or disprove preliminary impressions, regardless of the fact that our subconscious assessments are probably pretty accurate and hard to shake anyway. (Hand-wavyness here).

Thoughts?

Yesterday, I talked with entropicangel about commitment, after a conversation with pallasathene82 on the same topic. They are pretty much in agreement; commitment, in a relationship, is about expecting to grow together as a couple.

I blinked at this steady-eyed assessment, and snarkily commented that some people can't even be expected to "commit" to growing up as part of their daily lives; I could point to some people I dated that couldn't be bothered facing a fear of hot water, or who lived in Vermont and couldn't be bothered to go more than 30 miles away from it to go to college in Williamstown. Not that I'm naming names, of course.

To this, Neil gave me The Look. The Look translated to: "Then really, why did you date them?"

I conceded the point. When you're picking people to date -- no matter how important it is to love people as they are and accept their limitations and flaws -- it is much better for one's mental health if one dates grownups, not people who are in some way afraid to face life. People grow at their own pace, and if your significant other is still coping with much more basic fears/limitations, you're going to be stuck babysitting them when you really should be focusing on your own growth. And honestly, when you're stuck there, everyone's time gets wasted -- for the person whose growth is a little slower, they would almost certainly be learning life lessons faster if they were forced to by the bigger prods of loneliness and desperation; for the person who is stuck trying to jog someone else's growth along, they're engaging in a Sisyphusian task, and almost certainly compromising themselves somehow to do it.

In the world according to Neil, I learned, the just-past-college-or-younger age group is distinctive and relatively easy to spot. This statement provoked some surprise on my part, since I'm absolutely terrible at judging ages and experiential gaps between twenty-somethings, and I didn't think to ponder about the ages of the group of people who went out to the diner with us after the contradance. (They were all under 23).

Okay, sure, there is sometimes an energy gap between our older friends and younger ones, but then again people like ppaladdin kick that entire "energy" differential to the curb, so I don't trust it as a good guideline.

Neil claims, though, that in college, when we're more social and less experienced with the grind of a job day-in-and-day-out, we have a more generic sort of flirtiness. The social flirting is more expansive, and people are more clearly not-yet-settled-down.

Waitaminute, I said. What about that whole gaggle of our college friends that were already practically married by their junior year in college?

Still less experience with having to pay the bills and having to worry about practicalities, Neil said. Even if they have part time jobs, they are still leaning on parents financially, and it shows. Some of the prioritization of social life versus what you can do to pay the bills shows. Unless you're in academia, and then you live on a whole different planet anyway.

Hmm. I guess that's probably true, but not something I spot so easily in a social situation. And I sort of wish I could regain the mentality Neil's talking about again.

It's a weird thing, living in a 2-party country. As cosmicbabe says, "moderate" often means "wishy washy." I suspect that's because during election years, we tend to pick issues that really hit people's hot-emotional buttons. Everyone has an opinion on abortion and gun control and taxes, and if you try to see both sides, you're hit by waves of yelling on either side. And it takes some time to try to read multiple points of view, from different newspapers, and lots of effort, so most people lean in one direction and keep quiet when more extreme views come up.

Paul Krugman, in his op-ed today, wrote that Republicans were trying to sway the country through the politics of anger/resentment: "the other side looks down on us." That particular editorial made me cranky, because, well...

The other side does look down on you. Both sides look down on each other, in fact.

A few emails ago, I got a note from the Obama website going, "why would Republicans spend their whole night attacking ordinary people?"

That's just as irritating as when the Republicans say, "the Democrats are sexist hypocrites who claim the working class only clings to religion and guns because it's easy."

The politics of resentment is part of the way politics in this country work year-round, day-in, day-out. Two parties mean that you end up with polarizing opinions. It would be nice if there were more articulate wishy-washy people who pointed out, "well, that's sort of right, but not really."

If you only want to see an angry right or an angry left, that's what you'll get. If instead you try to focus on the moderate right and moderate left, and stay focused on issues that can actually be compromised on, you'll end up with a much happier middle. And most of America is in the middle; we're just quieter about it.

I've been thinking about judgment calls. We all make judgments that have us looking down our noses at others. When we're feeling better mannered, we pull them back in and try to soften them, or we remember that things often aren't our place to say -- but when we fail to restrain ourselves, we do a disservice to our fellows. Trying to actually be welcoming of other opinions rather than patting ourselves on the back for the instances when we sometimes are restrained is one of those interesting challenges (Christian challenges?) that very few people succeed at. But it'd be nice if we tried harder.

I had an interesting conversation with Neil about past lives, where he demanded to know why, if we had past lives, we hadn't morally evolved better. I pointed out a number of arguments, including that because morals are by nature flexible within situations and subject to interpretation, it's hard to learn an into-the-next-lifetime absolute morality. I also made some silly mathematical arguments, about how few people learn anything lastingly, and how few of those would even be reincarnated.

But at the end of that quibbling, what really sticks is this -- I think we have evolved spiritually, though it's hard to call as for "morally." We've evolved more compassion. We're a more global society, we're wealthier on average, and we're more aware of our neighbors' suffering; we don't tend to do much about it, but we *do* do little things, when we never would have before.

Susie Bright's entry today is about how flicks of women carrying their children to term (rather than aborting) are getting popular all of a sudden. Essentially, she's disturbed about how there's no one romanticizing the other side: the relief of having had an abortion (smushmortion).

I suppose it's possible to think of some hilarious scenarios -- to vie with movies like Knocked Up or Juno -- where you learn something about yourself after having had an abortion. You could play up all your faults beforehand in an amusing way, and then have the grand climax be like, "ta da! post-abortion, all is good! I've learned my lesson about not wanting kids in my life and not taking a risk with non-super-protected sex!"

... No, wait, that's really not all that amusing. In real life, I'm sure abortion -- like any other medical procedure -- can be a great relief. But it's not the stuff of Hollywood romantic comedies. It's not possible to come up with a counterpart, romanticizing abortion, because that's like romanticizing um... medicines that get rid of athelete's foot. Yes, I'm sure that after you've had the medication, you learn your lesson about wearing proper footwear in locker rooms, so you never get athlete's foot again. But that lesson is not the stuff of good stories. There's no way to draw out the lesson in storybook form.

I suppose my point is basically this: stories are not real life. Movies are not real life. Anyone who's ever watched a picture-perfect family on TV and thought they could make their own family dynamics work that way knows that. Anyone who's ever watched a horribly violent movie and compared it to their own lives knows this.

Or, to put it another way: in real life, no one is heroic and plucky. Everyone is just plodding along doing their best.

If Ms. Bright's point is that people would like to believe in heroes, and that carrying along an unplanned pregnancy is the more heroic course (therefore people will do it) ... um, well, carrying a pregnancy to term IS the more heroic route. It's the more torturous, annoying, grinding route, where you get a few more smiles from other people for it, and therefore it's the more "heroic" one. Along the lines of "heroism often gets you hurt," I'm sure some people really do want to be Lancelot, too.

However heroic, carrying an unplanned pregnancy to term is not always the wiser or smarter course, though, and it's not the more expedient one. If the complaint is that we don't value wisdom or expedience enough in Hollywood, well... okay. Duh. Want to complain that the men in romance novels don't actually exist, too?

* * *
In loosely-associated thoughts, along the lines of "wisdom that tends to get ignored": if you want to really ensure that you aren't going to get preggers and you still want to have sex, you have to use at least two forms of birth control. People do get pregnant using just condoms alone, or just the Pill alone. Yes, that could be you.

More words of wisdom that tend to get ignored: if you happen to get preggers and are in no way ready for the child financially, and don't think it's possible to take 9 months off of work to bear a child to term while hoping to give the kid away to someone else, then get an abortion. Our screwed-up healthcare and social-support system is not set up to support the adoption system, or mothers who don't have money or time to take off 9 months (and it looks bad on a resume, to boot), or any alternative between "abort" and "raise the child yourself."

I went to a fascinating seminar by Tom Myers, the author of Anatomy Trains (he talks essentially about how our bodies are all connected by this one network of fascia, or a kind of connective tissue, and how it all ties together. End digression).

One of the women at the seminar asked about treating a patient with muscular dystrophy (a neuromuscular disease, genetically linked, where the muscles just waste away). She talked about how very afraid she was of doing something terrible to the muscle tissue; years ago, as a personal trainer, she would have tried "doing more" with the muscle and doing more serious stretching, but now, with more knowledge behind her, she was too scared to try.

Here's what Tom said: "Ah, the courage of the innocent; once you know the risks of what you do with bodywork, it's a lot harder to do them, isn't it? Anyway, it's a mistake to think that you're going to cure him, because muscular dystrophy affects your peripheral nervous system along with your muscles, but... I'd try working with the fascia and doing light stretching all along the posterior fascial line."

"You would do that?"

"Well, the thing is, you can either work conservatively, and never hurt your clients, but also never make them any better. Or you can work with courage, risk hurting your clients, but also sometimes help them get better."


And I guess that is the thing, isn't it? It's always a balance; sometimes you take risks and they fail, but if you don't keep hoping, and trying, and working with people on the things you undertake, things don't get better.