staying the course minus the carrots

A few weeks back I wrote several journal entries about resilience. I wrote about not feeling as though I have any. Then I wrote about times when I was resilient, and how it took lots of thinking and writing to learn to see resilience in any of my past behaviors. I also wrote about wanting to develop resilience, to become more resilient.

Perhaps the universe does sometimes give us exactly what we want. I am now in, as best I can tell, something like resilience boot camp. Nothing is terrible right now. But everything is also just a little bit not quite right:

1. I'm finally getting back into the habit of exercise after having that awful Cold to End all Colds and my workouts aren't bad, but they aren't great either. I can feel muscles during and afterward, so that's good. But I feel worn out even while I exercise. I have not had that awesome triumphant badass rockstar experience in ages.
2. I am working on my dissertation most days. But the work is  s  l  o  w  going, and that is being charitable. Yesterday I spent an hour fixing my template because somehow everything went right-aligned. ?! I am lucky to write a sentence--one sentence--these days. 
3. All my acts of housewifery take what seems like forever to achieve. Making the bed feels like a morning-long chore. How is it that one person can dirty up so many dishes in one day? How does one cat shed so much hair? 
4. There has been more (and more varied) social time and it has been taking shapes that are unfamiliar to me. I walk away from this time feeling sort of emotionally sore--not in pain, but as though I've worked some social-emotional muscles and I can feel them. I walk away not quite knowing if I've worked these muscles properly, with good (sustainable, beneficial) form.

I can let go of my worry over my current frazzled state, my fears that I am slipping permanently, and see this state for what it is: Resilience Boot Camp. Maybe I'll put on three pounds that will stick around for a few months. Maybe I won't feel like a rock star in my workouts for a few more months. Maybe I won't write more than a few sentences a day in my dissertation for a few months. Maybe I'll just feel tired and imperfect and behind for a little season. I need to know, to really know, deep in every bone, that that is okay. Every day, by refusing to throw in the towel because I am imperfect, by going through the motions and phoning everything in, I am training myself in resilience. This is hard work and I get to take some credit! I don't have to eat so many cookies or donut holes or chocolates to take credit. I can ease off of that. But I can remind myself that I am kicking butt when it comes to developing resilience. That resilience-development is where I am excelling right now. Every time I make my bed, I get a resilience point. Every time I clean house, do the dishes, mop; every time I bring my lunch; every time I put on nice clothes; every time I don't buy something; sometimes when I do buy something; every time I write one sentence in my dissertation; every time I meditate; every time I do a workout or even just take a walk or warm up or pedal on the stationary bike; every time I refuse to turn down time with friends--all these choices and actions represent ways that I am developing resilience because I do all of them so imperfectly right now and I still have not stopped doing them. I am still dragging myself through each one even though none of them make me feel amazing or awesome or rock star or energetic or relieved. I feel a little behind and worried and disappointed: I want growth to be linear! I want to rock sexy abs! I want to have a perfect shredded body that digests anything I eat on command! I want to have already finished my dissertation and have a job waiting for me! I want to have everything all Figured Out and on display, glossy like a magazine spread.

Right now nothing is bad, nothing is dire. I am not injured. I am not completely stalled. I'm just sluggish. Slow. Easily distracted. Tired. A little sore. Feeling my bones and my age and my worries deeply. If I was in real pain, I would (and should!) stop, rest, and heal. I am not in real pain; I am in minor ache. Proceed with caution, but don't stop moving. I don't want this to be my new forever pace, but I need to see this as an actual pace, and I need to remember to reward myself for movement that is mostly forward. I am going. I have not stalled. I can keep going. It might take a few more cups of coffee, a few more naps, a few more binge-recovery days; it might take a few novels, a massage or two, and a face mask. 

This--and not some glamorous, All Set, shiny, couture fantasy--this is what resilience looks like. It's slogging on and being willing to be ungraceful, inelegant, dirty, a little bloated, tired, frazzled, behind, late, slow, wrong, out of breath, off beat, out of tune, underpracticed, and emotionally disheveled. And doing it again tomorrow. And then the next day. And then, when this season of dishevelment is past, when things are a little shinier, more polished, smoother, faster, and prettier, it means a stronger, more grateful, more joyful core.

There's a fight song in here somewhere, but I'm too tired to write it.

Thanks, E. Jean

A note I wrote to E. Jean, my favorite hero nearly 2.5 years ago:

Dear E. Jean, I'll be blunt: I am afraid I have been channeling Edward Casaubon for much of my life. Channeling a postmodern E Casaubon, that is. My reasons: (1) I am in my third year out of coursework and have yet to produce a viable chapter; (2) I am dating a man as virtuous, lovely, and great-spirited as Dorothea; (3) I am convinced that I am incapable of enduring friendship. The first two worry me least (the man is not a worry at all, in fact). The third, however, is dispiriting! As a good postmodernist/Kierkegaardian/existentialist (circle one), I am well aware that I cannot deserve any friendship: friendship is a daily offering of generosity, not a professional contract. Etc. But how do people do it? Let me state in my own partial defense that I am not entirely a social cretin. I can be charming and rather humorous company. I enjoy being around others about as much as I enjoy solitude. Still, I marvel at the friendships my friends experience with others. They endure over the course of many years—decades, even. They may ebb and flow, but there are phone calls, visits, emails—communication—across all sorts of distances. This is not my experience. Once a friend has left my zip code, friendship, like an unwatered plant, loses its bloom. Ah, my would-be Philoctetes, you say, why not call up these pals, send them emails, letters, flowers plan visits? I do... Perhaps not as much as I ought to do, but I have such a sense of intruding on their lives, taking up their free time or of insisting that they talk to me, now! that it is difficult to sustain the effort. If this had happened once or twice, I should think nothing of it—not all friendships are of the life-long or even years-long nature. But this has become such a regular pattern for me that I am faced with the strong possibility that there is some relationship between this incapacity for friendship and my own character. How can I overcome the limitations of my own character and learn to have lasting friendships?

Some things have changed in the interim: I have produced almost and nearly viable chapters. The current draft of chapter one my dissertation director has in his hands may indeed be viable. I do now worry whether the man and I will be able to forge a relationship that endures into the future. What hasn't changed is my fear of forcing myself on others. I feel I speak the language of friendship brokenly, with insufficient vocabulary and no grasp of verb tenses. 

I suppose the answer is in the metaphor I just wrote: If I wish to become more fluent in friendship, then I must devote much more time to it.

preparing for Lent

I have decided to keep Lent this year. I have never done so and have spent the past week or fortnight wondering what it is I might do. I've overheard conversations, spoken and online, in which a conversant gives something up: chocolate, coffee, and facebook are items I've commonly heard. I could give up meat, but then I don't eat much anyway. I could commit to praying the Daily Office twice a day, and that would indeed be good discipline. It isn't in my heart (yet?), though, and I don't want to (re)train myself in scrupulous rule-keeping this year. 

Then I found this poem and I think it is exactly what I will do:

For Lent, 1966
by Madeleine L'Engle
 
It is my Lent to break my Lent,
To eat when I would fast,
To know when slender strength is spent,
Take shelter from the blast
When I would run with wind and rain,
To sleep when I would watch.
It is my Lent to smile at pain
But not ignore its touch.
It is my Lent to listen well
When I would be alone,
To talk when I would rather dwell
In silence, turn from none
Who call on me, to try to see
That what is truly meant
Is not my choice. If Christ’s I’d be
It’s thus I’ll keep my Lent.

Leaning into the discomfort of happiness

This, I think, is the name for the work I have to do this year. I need to learn to lean into happiness even though it makes me very uncomfortable. 

I have been learning and re-learning many things over the past year. I stepped up my exercise habits and have been re-learning many new things about breathing and form and pacing. I learned a few things about teaching when I taught my first class and I learned a bit about book indexing when I indexed a book for the first time. I learned more about how to edit electronically when I took the last class I needed for a certificate in copyediting. I have learned, finally, (I think!) what it is my dissertation can do, and I am in the process of finding out how much of what I currently have written I must release in order to craft a single, elegant argument. 

I have been learning about the effects of stress and anxiety and worry and negativity on my eating habits, on my digestive health, and on my voice. 

For many of the things about which I have been learning, I have relied on sources pretty far removed from myself. I have a nice little library of workout videos, for example. I learned how to index by reading about it and then just by doing it. When I taught, I tried to follow the examples set for me by the excellent teachers I have had, but otherwise I learned by paying attention to what I did and the results I got. As I've been learning to calm my anxiety, I've been seeking out online articles and self-help books about meditation, digestive health, and letting go of perfectionism.

For my voice, however, I have found a teacher. I need a teacher. I need there to be someone who does not live inside my head who will push me to do things I find uncomfortable. Although Jillian Michaels tells me to "dig, dig, dig, dig, DIG!" in her fitness video, she can't see my response. Sometimes I dig and I push harder; sometimes, at that point, I'm shaking my head at her and drinking water. She has no clue, and that helps me to feel safe. It is much the same with all the lessons I seek online and in books: I can retreat into self-congratulatory smugness and no one will push me to see it. I can pick and choose what I want to take from those lessons and there is no accountability.

I know that what I need to do in order to improve--in order to learn--is to be teachable. In order to be teachable, I have to be soft and flexible. I have to be sufficiently and appropriately vulnerable. In order to do that, I have to stop hiding behind the cynicism, skepticism, defensiveness, negativity, and weakness I've been using as a shield to protect me from feeling so vulnerable not only around other people, but inside myself: I am so worried about having to feel happiness, joy, excitement, wonder, awe, pride--all these pleasant emotions terrify me. Learning brings up all of these emotions. Being able to do something I couldn't do, understanding something I didn't understand--these are very, very good things. 

I am so ashamed of showing how pleased I am about something that I lacquer over the pleasure with negativity, as though that will protect me and my feelings of pleasure. Sometimes, however, before I feel the feeling before I've had a chance to coat it. Usually this happens with some kind of art: poetry, music, painting; sometimes it happens with a story about some bit of human interaction. When I allow myself to be moved, to feel the uncoated feeling, usually I cry. Often the tears are not polite, company tears, either. I don't want to do this around other people. If I let myself stay soft around others, I risk cracking open and that seems manipulative and inappropriate.

This is what I worry about as I try to shift from a default response of negativity toward openness, positivity, hopefulness, and trust. I am afraid that as I lean into the discomfort of happiness, I will break open and that others will have to witness the breaking. I am afraid that I will be laughed at and scorned as I begin these steps toward openness and trust and joy. I already feel guilty about the discomfort I will cause others as I aim for discomfort myself.

this is why you should keep your closets full of secrets

I found my old prayer journal yesterday. Over the weekend I did much cleaning and culling and throwing away. While moving things around to fit more and different things into my closet, I found an old, beat-up, red, spiral-bound notebook. I thought, when I picked it up, that it was my high school poetry. That, it seems, must have been purged long ago. These were high school prayers. 

What a revelation those prayers were! It isn't the case that anger is a new struggle for me: it turns out that I have been struggling with anger for much longer than I remembered. It may be that I have always been quick to feel offended. That I was crazy about boys, however, was not at all a surprise. 

I am relieved to have found compassionate tendencies in that journal. And I am relieved to have learned that I thought much about and struggled greatly with questions about how to be a good friend. This is something I think about a lot these days and I thought that this might be a new concern. It isn't the case that I used to practice friendship with ease and fluency that I have since mysteriously lost. Instead, I found that it was hard for me then to know how much or little to say; when to offer advice and opinions and when to hold back; how much to share with friends and how to ask for help. This makes me feel a lot better now. 

I was happy to recognize myself in many parts of that journal. What surprises me a little is that it feels as though I am meeting myself again. That is, I see now and lately that I feel very angry more often than I would like. In high school I was also aware of my anger. But it seems to me is that there were years in between then and now during which I did not think of myself as angry. The same is true about my concerns regarding friendship. I am aware that other people have needs and boundaries and differences that I can't always see and I am aware of my tendency to hold back, assuming that others don't need or want my advice or opinions or perspective. And I was aware, at least to some extent of that back in high school. There seems to be more coincidence between my current self and the self I found in that journal than I expected and there seems (though I may be wrong in this) to be more coincidence of selves than there was a few years ago. 

What feels alien to me now, of course, is the intense longing for God. I've wondered if I had manufactured (somehow) that desire back then. I don't think I did. I think it was genuine. But I can't imagine being that passionately identified with anything in any way like that at all. 

I am left wondering, then, whether I have been broken or fixed. Or neither. Perhaps just different.

Poetry may be the best church of all

Watching the rain pouring from the street down through the cracks in the trainyard on Friday I felt delighted and buoyant and eager and it took me several minutes before I could locate a name for the unexpected feeling: happiness. The thought that followed--that it has, I think, been some time since I have felt such happiness (and that I am surprised to have not recognized it)--didn't diminish that happiness in the least. I was pleased to feel so happy. 

And the thought occurred to me that perhaps I can develop a taste for happiness; acquire a knack for happiness. If I can learn to savor the taste of beer or of chevre or of olives, then perhaps I can also learn to love the taste of happiness, "like small wild plums":

The Plum Trees
by Mary Oliver

Such richness flowing
through the branches of summer and into

the body, carried inward on the five
rivers! Disorder and astonishment

rattle your thoughts and your heart
cries for rest but don’t

succumb, there’s nothing
so sensible as sensual inundation. Joy

is a taste before
it’s anything else, and the body

can lounge for hours devouring
the important moments. Listen,

the only way
to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it

into the body first, like small
wild plums.

growing pains

I have never had to end a friendship before. Friendships have slipped away, dissolved, or gone underground. Slack and tension have been adjusted and readjusted. In my adult life--perhaps all my life--I have not had to choose to end a friendship.

I have now done so. I did not do it well or gracefully. I don't feel pleased with myself. Though I could have done it differently, I still think it having done so was the right thing to do.

I wish now that I had invited more honesty and that I had been more honest myself. I wish I had thought about why I wanted (did I want?) that friendship. I wish I had been able to better express my own growing pains. I wish it were easier to hear someone say "I value our our friendship" and I wish it were easier to ask for patience and for support.

In general, I am feeling more capable these days. More resilient. I know myself to love and need solitude and I also now know I am not afraid of it. I have been learning that I do in fact have more than a few good friends. And there are acquaintances/casual friends I admire very very much. I am learning that I don't have to spill my guts to everyone in order to be their friend; I am also learning that I can have different friends who fill different roles. I am learning, it seems, lessons I should have learned years ago and didn't. And I am learning that, for the most part, I don't have to spend time with people with whom I can't express my best and growing self. I don't need to make a friendship "work"--either it is a friendship (and therefore works) or it is not and I don't have to try to force anything.

Perhaps I have been making strides, then, in self-care and self-love. Perhaps something about the idea that even at my worst, I am lovable and worthy is sinking in somewhere. I am not worthy *because* I can stifle my needs and thoughts and feelings and therefore make a friendship work. And I am not unworthy when I try and fail to express my thoughts and feelings well. I am already worthy and already allowed to be a friend and have a friend. I am not perfect, and perhaps I am not even very good. But there are still, somehow, people who love me. Even better--there are people who are happy to love me. Even though I am nowhere close to perfection. That is such a lovely thought--a thought I can sink into--and it is a thought I want to hold on to. And I think that, for now at least, to hold on to this thought, I need to let go of habits of relating built around the belief that I, just as I am, am insufficient.

It is hard to resist the temptation to be very angry and disappointed with myself for having let go of this friendship in such a graceless way. So I'll distract myself with work, writing, and by spending time with the friends whose care I increasingly desire.

On being a difficult person

It is difficult to read self-help/personal development blogs, books, and articles that recommend that one cut negative people from one's life; that one avoid difficult people; that one manage difficult people. As though only easy/positive people read these blogs, books, and articles. As though people were always and to everyone either positive or negative; either easy or difficult.

I am a difficult person. I have been accused of being very negative. Should everyone cut me out of their lives? I suppose it is up to them, but I tend to be happy when people choose not to do so.

Nothing in any of these articles is very helpful for difficult people. The writing assumes that difficult people simply like being difficult, refuse to change in ways that are clearly positive (because the positive people have already so identified them), and require management or a very wide berth. But what is a difficult person to do about her own difficult-ness?

Remember, you positive, easygoing, laidback, cheery, easy to get along with folks: negative, difficult, awkward, uncomfortable people have feelings as raw and real and delicate as your own. In fact, it is possible that the difficult people in your life are even more sensitive to negativity, difficultness, awkwardness than you are. Some of us are hypersensitive to ourselves and to others. This makes us super self-conscious much of the time. It also means that we can go from being a-okay, happy to be around folks and out in the world to being overstimulated, deeply uncomfortable, and shut down or closed off within minutes. This can be triggered by anything--by things that seem like nothing to those around us. It's not our fault. Are we responsible for it? Sure! But what is it you'd like us to do? No response we can make that accounts for our intense discomfort will feel acceptable to you. If we simply leave and retreat to our homes or rooms or beds, refusing to take calls until we feel sufficiently lacquered over to handle company or the world at large again, then you call us selfish, closed off, abrupt and uncomfortable. If we try to wait for the moment to pass (just a little!), taking breaths and smiling weirdly (or not able to smile at all), saying little or nothing and hoping no one will notice until we've collected ourselves a bit before participating again, then you tell us we've shut you out, we're acting weird, you don't know what to say to us, we're changing the energy of the moment, we've made things awkward again. If we tell you we can't be in touch for a bit because we're in a rough spot, then we're not letting you be a friend, we're pushing you away, we're devaluing the relationship. If we try to tell you about our sensitivities as we experience them, sharing what is really hard to share, you often don't understand--that made you upset? That much? Can't you just get over it now that you know? No, no we can't. That's the point. That's what we're trying to say. That's why it feels so hard all the time and it takes so much effort so often just to appear natural. Alternately, you turn our stresses and worries and overwrought feelings into a judgment of your character, or our relationship. When we say "interaction X" left me feeling raw and drained, you take it personally, as though we are accusing you of having done something intentionally hurtful. What hurts is not you or your behavior (much of the time); it is the feeling of outside air on a soul that feels scantily covered. Sometimes a breeze makes its way beyond the insufficient skin and that breeze--delightful to others--can be painful for some of us difficult, highly strung, negative people. And it doesn't stop being painful.

Cut us out of your lives if you must--you do us no favors by remaining in relationship with us if it bothers you that much; remember, we can be highly sensitive and are often keenly aware of your discomfort and of the fact that we can do nothing about it. And if you decide to "let" us stay, do stop trying to manage our difficultness. Part of what makes us so uncomfortable to you is the fact that we don't try to manage your discomfort around us--we aren't able to change ourselves in order to make you feel more comfortable in our presence. Yes, we know you are uncomfortable with our sensitivities, our weirdness, our lack of reliable social grace. And many of us understand just why you are uncomfortable--after all, we make ourselves uncomfortable, too. But we (some of us at least) are able to let you have your discomfort and we can, to varying extents, sit with that discomfort we both feel. Can you do that for us, too? Can you let yourself be uncomfortable with us? For many of us sensitive, difficult folk, that is one of the most longed for expressions of friendship: the ability to acknowledge our discomfort, awkwardness, unease, self-consciousness, and rawness, to sit with it without trying to "fix" it or "cure" us, and to love us anyway, somehow.

Of course we understand that this doesn't look like the kinds of friendship other folks get to enjoy. It looks, well, negative. It looks sparse and chilly. But this is what we need if we are going to share the other parts of our personalities with you. Even those of us who are rather difficult are rarely difficult all the time. We might go through phases--whole years maybe--when it feels that way to you and also to us. But we have moments of pure sunniness. Some of us are quite clever, hilariously funny and entertaining; we can be deeply supportive and we can be creative and warm in the ways in which we show care; we can be or play the part of the outgoing extrovert at times. We can be amazing friends, lovers, and partners. But you won't get to know or experience that unless you are able to love--equally--all of the ways in which we are also difficult.

It would be nice to see any of this addressed in the advice offered for "dealing with" difficult people. (One "deals with" pests, generally; perhaps if you can't think of difficult people in any other terms than having to "deal with" us, then you might take that as a sign that you can't help but see difficult people as the enemy, in which case, yes, avoid us. We will be grateful to you.) As a difficult person myself, I tend to find such advice very depressing. I am difficult but I am not (usually; I, like any "easy" person, have my moments) a jerk. And I don't like being difficult. Very often I wish I could be otherwise. The truth is that I can't. And it hurts to read that one should not share one's dreams with difficult or negative people because they'll just look for ways to bring you down. It hurts to read that folks think that their successes produce negativity in difficult others. Maybe in/for some people it does. But then there must be as many ways of being difficult as there are of being not-difficult. It hurts to read that difficult people need to be "right" all the time. Sure I like being right. I like it a lot. In terms of interpersonal relationships what I need more than being right is acknowledgment that I am not necessarily wrong. Just because my feelings are nothing like what your feelings would or might be doesn't make me any more wrong or right than you. It just makes me and my feelings very different. The more you tell me that I am wrong to feel in some way, the more I will dig in and assert the reality of my experience. It hurts to read advice suggesting that you not respond to someone's negative or difficult attitude. Would you refuse to acknowledge or respond to a friend's sickness if she had, say, a cold? If your friend were missing a leg would you tell her to get over herself and just run a 5k with you? Or would you respect her limitations (whether permanent or temporary) and adjust your responses accordingly?

I started by asking what a difficult person is to do about her own difficultness and I haven't even addressed that all. This is amusing as I began by criticizing other authors for not addressing just that question. I've not come up with any ways of becoming any less difficult myself, for example. On the other hand, I am not entirely convinced that being difficult is itself a problem. There are many things we value because they are difficult--running marathons, climbing mountains, earning advanced degrees, performing brain surgery. I suppose I am trying to learn to value the ways in which I am difficult, which is itself a difficult thing to do. I invite others who are not difficult, or who are less difficult, or who are differently difficult to challenge themselves to learn to value difficultness in the relationships of which they are a part, too.

Courage and Silence

I have a new reason for avoiding my dissertation and it is one I am loathe to confess. A few years ago I was delighted by the silence constructed and maintained by the Ramsays in To the Lighthouse. I marveled then at their proficiency in circumlocution. I still see the love there and I am not entirely disenchanted. Or, if I am disenchanted, then it is in the best of possible ways: I see how Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are not magical; they are, insofar as fictional characters can be, terribly, wonderfully human and they fail and succeed as other humans do.

When I last read the pre-prandial conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, I found myself wishing they’d said more, that they’d challenged themselves and each other more. Specifically, I wish Mr. Ramsay had said to her—

Then, he wanted to tell her that when he was wakling on the terrace just now—here he became uncomfortable, as if he wer breaking into that solitude, that aloofness, that remoteness of hers. . . . But she pressed him. What had he wanted to tell her, she asked, thinking it was about going to the Lighthouse; that he was sorry that he had said “Damn you.” But no. He did not like to see her look so sad, he said. Only wool gathering, she protested, flushing a little. They both felt uncomfortable, as if they did not know whether to go on or go back. She had been reading fairy tales to James, she said. No, they could not share that; they could not say that.

I see now, as I did not see before, that this is a failure in the silent communication between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. Intimacy requires a willingness to brave discomfort for the other. The other things Mr.and Mrs. Ramsay resist mentioning—the bill for the greenhouse roof, the possibility that Mr. Ramsay would have written better books had he not married, and the things they do discuss instead—Andrew’s future, Prue’s beauty, the flowers—are part of a shared conversation they’ve built over time. The bit quoted above shows a spot of tenderness, something that resists even a careful eye or a gentle finger. They have no conversation to cover over this tender spot, this bruise in their union. Now, a few years after my first readings of To the Lighthouse, I find I wish Mr. Ramsay had been brave and forged ahead, had told Mrs. Ramsay how he felt about her solitude, about that fundamental remoteness from which he could never protect her; I find I wish Mrs. Ramsay had been strong and acknowledged her thoughts; had told her husband that she thought, first, that “there was no treachery too base for the world to commit, that “no happiness lasted.” That she  thought, shortly thereafter, watching the light, that “she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness,” and ended in an ecstasy of “It is enough! It is enough!”

Had she known how it pained him to feel their fundamental separateness, would she have seen his concern differntly? Had he known that in her separateness she was capable of holding nadirs and zeniths, would he have seen her protectiveness differently?

I am being made to see that I needed the Ramsays’ silences to justify my own. Moreover, now that I am finding that explicit speech is sometimes required, I am newly critical of the Ramsays. I had not realized that my dissertation was an attempt to affirm my own proclivities, and now I see that, at least in part, it has been so. This makes me more than a little uncomfortable and I am uncertain how to move forward.

Seeking Failure

This is my next goal: I want to fail. A lot. Frequently. To challenge, court, invite, and risk failure.

When one exercises one's muscles with heavy weights, one learns to work to failure to test how far the body can go to learn how to become stronger. Failure is the inability to do even one more repetition, even if offered a million dollars as a reward. When you know where failure is, you have a sense of where to begin and where your goals lie—how progress can and should be measured.

I hate failing. I avoid failure. I avoid doing anything I cannot do extremely well. I avoid anything that I know makes me look imperfect (and I worry over all the things that make me look imperfect that I do not see).

Still, I know that avoiding failure is itself failure. I avoid doing things I do not do well so that other people will think more highly of me. By avoiding these things, I make it impossible for other people to connect with me in any but the most superficial ways and so I fail in worse ways than I had feared.

So I am going to hunt down failure. I am going to learn to delight in failure. I already hate failure. I will develop a taste for it, as though it were a particularly fine cheese, or a strongly flavored liquor. I will become drunk with the success of failure. And then it will take more failure and more failure before I can fail. And I will grow stronger, and failure will become strength.

Thanks, Anne Lamott

And we are put on earth a little space.
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

silentium

still searching for megalopsychia but right now the search requires silence.

Expectations

The question was whether it is better to have unrealistically high expectations or to have lowered expectations. I think the question is unclear and asked whether the question was whether it was better to have unrealistically high expectations or unrealistically low expectations, or whether the question was whether it was better to have unrealistically high expectations or lower, more realistic expecations. That clarifying question was not answered.

The next question, which I didn’t ask, is whether we are talking about a natural predisposition, or whether we are debating which kind of expecting one should cultivate. Is it better to tend toward having unrealistically high expectations or is it better to cultivate unrealistically high expectations are two different questions, both leading to very different discussions.

Given the original poster’s response, that unrealistically high expectations might be a useful coping tool, I am going to assume that we are debating the cultivation of expectations.

There is one woman who feels very strongly that lower expectations (whether lower than high and therefore more realistic, or lower than realistic was not made clear) are preferable. She claims that the person with lowered expectations will be pleasantly surprised when something better happens, but that the person with high expectations will never be satisfied.

It may be that she is thinking of her own life when she makes this claim, even as I am thinking of my own life when I take the opposite position, and so I hope to be kind and gentle. To both of us.

This woman further stipulated that one should have high expectations for oneself and low expectations of others. I don’t recall if she mentioned events or situations.

That sounds like a lot of work to think meanly of others and highly of myself. It sounds, I’ll say it, elitist: others simply cannot live up to my standards and quality and I shouldn’t expect it of them.

When I expect my colleagues to say racist things, to be unprofessional, to be petty and uncharitable, I usually find that these expectations turn out to have been very realistic. When I expect them to be interesting, well-informed, creative, and kind, I am sometimes surprised to find that these expectations were also realistic. Sometimes, at least, the expectations I cultivate reveal much more about the things to which I am paying attention, and about my attitudes and judgments about others, than they do about ‘the real nature of things.’ This isn’t to say that the racism isn’t there to be seen, but that the racism and the pettiness are not the whole story. The ways in which I frame my expectations of others can determine the kinds of story I tell about the world. They make the world more manageable by eliminating (or ameliorating) surprise: though I may be surprised when my racist colleague says something enlightened, by calling him or her (in my head) The Racist, I learn to forget to look for other parts in his or her personality. I make the world smaller instead of letting my idea of the world grow larger.

When I expect very little from my boyfriend by the way of conversation, time spent together, the desire to communicate with me and not just the me in his head, I find that I am even less satisfied with what I get. Instead of enjoying the time we have together and delighting in his company and conversation, I realize that I have been consumed with measuring that time and company and conversation. Measuring is not delightful. Lowering and lowering my expectations in this case requires constant measuring: are my expectations lower than they were yesterday? Good. Measuring and perhaps a little air of martyrdom.

When I expect very little from myself or from my life, I find that I push people away, I fall back upon rehearsed performances of anxiety, I grow envious and self pitying. No, I will never get a job. I’ll have to go into Exile. How many times have I said this? Worse, how many times have I said this when others have congratulated me for having made progress on my dissertation? How many times have I so responded when others, who have more faith in me than I do with myself, have tried very gently to remind me that the future I picture may not be accurate?

These are three things: framing the world, measurement and evaluation, and faithfulness. The expectations I have or choose to have tell a story about how I interpret and move through the world. They reveal the ways in which and the extent to which I thrust measurement and evaluation between myself and the people and situations that make up my world. They are themselves a measure of the faith or faithlessness—better, unfaithfulness—that makes up my attitude toward people and events and situations—the world.

When I expect little from others and from myself, I tell a story about all of us that turns us into the kind of people from whom little (or little good, anyway) can be expected. I tell a story about essences and about worth.

When I measure my interactions with others and when I try to scrupulously measure my own responses and beliefs, I substitute my measurements for people and events and situations and even, sometimes for myself. I don’t respond to a friend as my friend, but as a quantity of experiences which I then judge. I become my friends’ and lover’s judge and set myself up as arbitor of reality and of goodness.

I am unfaithful to my colleagues, acquaintances, family and friends when I expect very little out of them. I am unfaithful to my boyfriend when I expect very little from him. I am unfaithful to myself when I expect very little from myself now or in the future.

Given this, I am lead to believe that I must carefully craft my expectations based upon the love I wish to bear. Not even upon the love I do currently bear, because that love is tainted with the ghosts of previous determinations and judgments and infidelities and despair. The love I wish to bear is free from these things. It is upon this love that I will build my expectations.