Jocelyn K. Glei: What if you’re not broken?

These are hard times, in general, but being quarantined (I'm on my 2nd week) highlights our ability to sit with ourselves (or not).

Currently listening to Jocelyn K. Glei: What if you’re not broken? 

My self-hatred and shame, are on my list as my issues I would like to work through actively this year. They were my main goal, before COVID-19 happened.

I relate to what she posits, that we have this habit of saying, I'll do it, when...

For me, it, romance and love have been blocked by my body, and my shame. My pain.

I have a lot to write these days, but because I stay on a computer all day in my work-from-home-quarantine, I am staying away from it. I am just taking things one day at a time and trying to get through the work I have to do to stay employed and paid.

Emotional identify and emotional inheritance.

From The Book of Life, on emotional identity:

... Emotional Identity, the characteristic way in which our desires and fears manifest themselves and our personalities respond to the behaviour, negative and positive, of others. There are four main themes around which our Emotional Identities are structured and it is their particular dosage and arrangement within us that decisively shapes who we are. To get to know ourselves is – in large part – a question of coming to understanding the configuration of our Emotional Identity.

Those four main themes are listed as self-love, candour, communication and trust.

For me, reading the self-love section is prickly, since I know how it's a very difficult subject for me. The page includes a simple test - and I clearly have a very high score for "lack of" self-love.

The chapter also discusses what it calls Emotional Inheritance:

What creates Emotional Identity? Why do we have the emotional identity we do and not a different one?

 A big modern response looks to genetics. We’ve got a specific genetic inheritance and (via many complex processes) this inheritance shapes our adult personality. We’re not saying genetics are irrelevant. But we want to focus attention on another kind of inheritance: Emotional Inheritance.

Developed mainly in early childhood, it plays a major role in our most basic character traits:

Psychotherapists have developed a special term to capture what we inherit emotionally from the past: they call it our ‘transference’. In their view, each of us is constantly at risk of ‘transferring’ patterns of behaviour and feeling from the past to a present that doesn’t realistically call for it. We feel a need to punish people who aren’t to blame; we worry about a humiliation which isn’t anywhere on the cards; we’re compelled to betray as we were once, three decades before, betrayed.

So how do we navigate knowing what we're pre-disposed to?

Maturity involves accepting with good grace that we are, of course, involved in multiple transferences, along with a commitment to try rationally to disentangle them. The job of growing up means realising with due humility the exaggerated dynamics we may constantly be bringing to situations and to monitor ourselves more accurately and more critically so as to improve our capacity to judge and act in the here and now with greater fairness and neutrality. We need to see how the people and situations in our past that have given rise to habits of mind that lead us to see current events in particular ways. The idea is to grow a little wiser as to where our troubles are coming from and around what areas of our lives we will therefore need to be especially careful.

Lastly, three benefits are listed as being the result of this type of self-reflection:

Firstly, we become aware of ways in which we are a bit crazy (that is: puzzling to others and inappropriate in our responses). We can catch ourselves before we do too much damage. But we also grasp why we are like this. We don’t have to hate ourselves, we can become more sympathetic to the way we’ve had some awkward legacies – and have learnt a few somewhat counterproductive ways of coping.

Secondly, we can more calmly explain ourselves to others. Even if we can’t entirely change, we can flag up what might be challenging about living around us. If we understand ourselves better we can help others understand us more sympathetically too. 

Thirdly, we begin to see that we have a degree of freedom and opportunity to change (to a limited but useful degree) the difficult parts of who we are. We don’t have to keep on repeating exactly what we’ve been doing. There are other options.

A worthy read, a lot to unpack.

Jessica's "Daily Affirmation."

Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless by Laurie Penny.

Please read Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless by Laurie Penny.

The isolating ideology of wellness works against this sort of social change in two important ways. First, it persuades all us that if we are sick, sad, and exhausted, the problem isn’t one of economics. There is no structural imbalance, according to this view—there is only individual maladaption, requiring an individual response. The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you. Society is not mad, or messed up: you are.

... 

 When modernity teaches us to loathe ourselves and then sells us quick fixes for despair, we can be forgiven for balking at the cash register. Anxious millennials now seem to have a choice between desperate narcissism and crushing misery. Which is better? The question is not rhetorical. On the one hand, Instagram happiness gurus make me want to drown myself in a kale smoothie. On the other, I’m sick and tired of seeing the most brilliant people I know, the fighters and artists and mad radical thinkers whose lives’ work might actually improve the world, treat themselves and each other in ludicrously awful ways with the excuse, implicit or explicit, that any other approach to life is counterrevolutionary.  

...

The harder, duller work of self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant. A world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are. Real love, the kind that soothes and lasts, is not a feeling, but a verb, an action. It’s about what you do for another person over the course of days and weeks and years, the work put in to care and cathexis. That’s the kind of love we’re terribly bad at giving ourselves, especially on the left.

Great read. Check it out.

On makeup.

Lately, I've been wearing full-makeup. I have a face regimen. I use highlighter. Concealer. I am even trying to contour. I had started watching makeup tutorials a few months ago, just to start learning, and then Bell's Palsy hit. And, well, it really made me appreciate my face.

I've been taking the time to put on full-makeup, and I really feel like it's a type of psychological armour. Especially for going into the city to work.

My treatment is antidepressants and lipstick by Hafsa Guled reminded me of that.

I'm no makeup pro, I'm learning, and it's expensive as shit, but taking the time to take care of my skin, and trying to apply makeup in a way that makes me happy with the way I look, well, it's in the theme of self-love, or it's at lease parallel to it.

My face hasn't 100% healed, and I think a droopy eyelid and some uneven musculature in my cheeks/smile are my new normal, but my eye closes and I'm 90% healed, and I'm grateful for that.

Monday, after what happened in Orlando I put full-makeup on, hard. Contoured harder than usual, went full glam. It was just my way of getting extra-ready for the day.

It's just a cross-section between taking care of your skin but also giving yourself a little boost of self-confidence. I'm not saying it's necessary, but I'm saying for me, lately, it helps.

Trust.

I watched Super Soul Sunday yesterday, which featured Iyanla Vanzant. She was promoting her new book, which is all about Trust. Although I like Vanzant sometimes, her experience is very God-centered, and it sometimes alienates me. There was however, a quote from the episode that poked me right in the guts.

There is no greater battle in life than the battle between the parts of you that want to be healed and the parts of you that are comfortable and content remaining broken.

Snap!

There's a lot to un-pack here.

First, the comfort of what is known, and what is habit. There is absolute comfort in things remaining the same, or as constant as possible. I am a creature of habit, I could do the same thing weekly, on rotation, and be reasonably content. There's also comfort in habit and in minimizing surprises or discomfort.

My friend E and I were talking about someone who has a "victim mentality" and who often re-frames situations to always revolve around her, and on top of that, inconvenience or hurt her in some way. For E, it took years for a pattern to make itself visible. After a while she realized that her friend was always at the centre of the drama, and seemed to stoke that drama when and where she could. We talked about it, and it became increasingly clear it's a large part of her (self prescribed) identity and that she get a lot out of it. She wanted to re-centre herself. But it's also part of how she lives, and how she has lived for over 30 years.

In her case, she seems to invigorated by being put-upon. Are she and I alike? Do I see the things that bind me to habit? Do I see my triggers?

What do I get out of identifying with my illness?

How is it certain memories can completely drag you into a remembered shame or pain?

Why is it so difficult to let go of?

What do I get out of the safety of isolation?

What does my lack of trust for the male sex really mean for me? It means loneliness, doesn't it? I'm attracted to heterosexual males, unfortunately for me, that's a group that I have a lot of distrust for. I guess there's also safety in shutting down that conversation, or possibility before anything ever happens. There is zero room for rejection, since I do not put myself in situations in which I can be rejected.

I can't be rejected if I don't even show up.