Stranded, through discipline

This blog originally started out, as most author blogs do, as a promotional tool. Turns out that I wasn't very good at that kind of blogging. When I finally narrowed down what I was trying to do with it, I had dealt with a handful of serious blows in quick succession: the tax-return moment when writing became an unaffordable hobby, the breakup of my only real post-divorce relationship, a severe flare-up of my disease, a prolonged legal battle and the subsequent fallout, the death of my grandmother, and a car accident and suicide attempt in my family.

It would be very difficult to walk away from all of that unaffected.

It meant sitting down and thinking about where I was and where I was going from there, and if I think there was one fault in my therapy, it's that nobody told me the truth. Nobody told me that the damage was so extensive that much of it was probably permanent, and that it would, in turn, do damage to a great many different kinds of relationships, not just with people but with phenomena. Nobody told me that while my moods could be managed, I could never be cured.

Nor did it teach me that an extremely abnormal life might be a very good one. The idea was to make me as normal as possible, or perhaps to seem as normal as possible, not to make me as stable and content as possible. Only one of those was realistic. Guess which one it was?

It's like pumping someone full of chemo without telling them that the cancer has metastasized, only this cancer isn't fatal. It changes you, slows you down a bit, but it doesn't kill you. Chemo, however, can. It's a notoriously brutal regimen, appropriate only when the alternative is death. I'm not going to die, so I've decided to take the needle out of my arm and see what my life really looks like.

One of the things about that life is that the bar was set very low right from the start. For me, having a stove that turns on and off when I want it to, or consistent running hot water, or an indoor toilet are a matter of being spoiled. I also don't have to plant, weed, dig up, chase down, gut, pluck or skin my own food. I have warm clothes that fit.

No one hits me. No one hurts me. I'm as safe here as it's possible to be in this world.

I have a car, a library card, internet access, and Netflix. And Mabinogi.

I'm grateful for the bits of weird luck that have come my way, not the least of which is my son. He would have been suicidal stupidity to attempt on purpose. As it is, I'm glad we survived more or less intact.

I'm grateful for where I live. I have room to work, and I've barely had to turn on the heat this fall.

I'm grateful that I don't have to date. I can choose to or choose not to, but I'm not compelled in either direction.

I'm really grateful that I can live alone. That has not always been so easy for women, even as recently as my mother's generation, when getting a bank account or signing a lease meant having a man's name on the documents.

I'm also really grateful that I'm not part of the Boomer generation, with it's perpetual quest for youth. After having watched large chunks of my mother's generation go what I consider to be literally insane in their their battle with time, I'm quite happy to pull on my Mom jeans in the morning. Give me another twenty years, and all of my waistbands will be elastic. I'm even contemplating getting a housecoat in memory of my grandmother.

In the time I've written this blog, there have been countless loaves of fresh bread, new songs learned on the guitar, many hours spent reading and petting my bird, even more hours spent in dungeons with my son, almost as many hours spent decompressing afterward, a lot of anime and British murder mysteries watched, Christmas trees taken down and put up, birthday presents opened, endless experiments with hair conditioner conducted, laps swum and miles driven, as well as the more mundane tasks of dishes, laundry, vacuuming, making dinner, cleaning up after the birds, and hounding my son into cleaning up after himself.

In other words, it's been a pretty ordinary life all in all, and it's in that last paragraph that the answer lies. I'm not going to be the next J.K. Rowling-style single mother success story; I'm not good enough. I'll never have a normal job, either. I'll never be sure what to do in social situations. I'm not going to be perfectly frugal and keep a proper budget. I'm not going to be "not like that" to men, who generally consider me damaged goods, good enough for now, but not good for anything else. I won't be a miracle cure, either. I will live with this thing until I die.

These are really big, big things, the things that cut me out of large chunks of what people consider to be normal life. Fixing them would make a major difference. Unfortunately, trying to fix them is also an enormous energy suck that, for the most part, has gone nowhere. Even worse, it's taken away from other things that might have been a more productive use of that energy.

The first indication that the big things might be less important than the little ones was when I got pregnant. I didn't have time to fix all of this stuff. I had nine months, more like eight by the time the pregnancy could be confirmed. I was going to have to tackle this task head-on, with every deficit in place.

Needless to say, more than one person has seriously considered trying to have him removed from my care!

After all, what do I have to offer him? Near-poverty? Dependence on SSDI? Introversion? An anxiety disorder, managed or no? The physical limitations imposed by my disease? Crappy social skills? Night-owl tendencies? The psychic poison of a woman who's been the victim of a sexual crime or two?

Turned out I had more to draw on than I thought. I won't pretend for a second that I've been a normal mother, but we're having a lot of fun, which is part of what leads me to wonder what might happen if I took the same attitude toward the rest of life.

When I went into this, I had goals. I wanted to:

1. Write more consistently.
2. Get well.
3. Go to bed earlier.
4. Procrastinate less.
5. Keep a cleaner house.
6. Be more responsible financially.
7. Learn social skills.
8. Make more money.

At this point, I write even less, depend for what energy and mobility I have on a drug that literally leaves a bad taste in my mouth, go to bed even later, procrastinate about as often, clean up only slightly more than previously, spend exactly as I ever have, and go out even less than I did before. I also make less than before.

Along the way, I discovered that the happiest lives are also the hardest, that human beings have a limited capacity for self-control, and that some aspects of social behavior are both innate in general and absent in individuals, just as any other sense can be absent. I found that certain psychological problems can be an asset at the same time they're a liability. I saw the downsides of the path my generation as a whole has followed, to the point where I no longer have any desire to catch up.

Looks like failure, doesn't it.

What was I expecting, though, to become someone someone else who never lived my life? When my life is actually a normal part of life? We might not be happy that that's the case, but it's true. All of it is true, the bad as well as the good, and if I try to be anything other than the sum total of it, I'm a liar even if I never open my mouth.

Ever since I was a kid, I've been "a fighter". It stops here. Maybe not all at once, but piece by piece, moment by moment, because I simply do not have that kind of time. It's not just that I don't have time to wait until I can change the world, I don't have time to wait until I can change myself. I don't have time to wait until my disease isn't active. I don't even have time to wait until I stop grieving, not just for the dead but for those who nearly died.

This blog also stops here. Among other things, I have a regular website that desperately needs attention, but it isn't just that website. It's other things. I've been documenting a process that very much wants to go on autopilot now.

I also want to use the time I've spent blogging for other things. I know I only post twice a week, but that's enough to make me wonder how other people post once a day! Writing isn't a quick process for me. It takes time and a lot of painstaking editing, which means this takes up a lot of space that I want for other things.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm working on the wrong kind of keyboard right now.

And what more is there to say? That the human brain is fallible? That both reason and memory are flawed?That the world is what it is, and people are what they are? That our wishes, goals, thought projections or other exercises in fantasy are mostly distractions from what we have right now, and our commitment to them can blind us to the opportunities actually in front of us?

That the idea of improving ourselves and our lives is detrimental because of that blinding? That in our quest for something better, we overlook or ignore the value of what's there, and even develop a habit of self-rejection, and that habit can in turn develop into a second habit of paying more attention to outside rejection than we should? That faking it until we make it can create far more problems that we already have? That we don't create reality, we either accept or reject it?

And finally, that we are complete idiots to reject it? That rejecting ourselves, if only to undergo a series of psychological make-overs and plastic surgery, is a zero-sum game, and rejecting life itself is worse?

That 99.9% of what masquerades as self-improvement is exactly that kind of rejection?

It might seem like I've spent the last few years wallowing around in things I should just get over, and in fact it all started as one last, gigantic effort to get over it. Ironically, the tool I chose, meditation, has unpredictable effects, and in this case, I found myself stuck on two related questions. What if it's all so true that there is no getting over it? And if so, how bad would that really be?

What would life be like if we simply got over everything?

The answer, I think, lies in a line from Emily Dickinson:

Power is only pain
Stranded, through discipline,
Until weights will hang.

Reject pain, and you reject power, the power you really have instead of the power you wish you had, and like it or not, getting over something, putting painful experiences behind you, isn't power. It's cowardice. It's a fear of pain that constricts our lives until we can no longer breathe. There is nothing more imprisoning than the idea that a good life, a happy life, is one in which the experience of pain is succesfully avoided or minimized by our own efforts, and in which success is defined by our own vision and achieved by our own will.

Because the world is so much bigger than that, and we are so much smaller.

And that's the best possible thing.

Further thoughts on the rock thing

I was thinking that recognizing certain things as being outside of my control is freeing up a lot of time. This is hard to do sometimes, because I've operated under the assumption for a long time that minds especially can and even should be changed. However, as a direct result of easing up on that theory, there's an outside chance that, in spite of the elaborate work involved, my son's Halloween costume will be done on time.

I was also thinking that the consequences of being expected to "recover" from various things implies that I should have to prove myself beyond what most people need to do. I've thought for a long time that the bar for me was set extremely high, but it comes down to the twice the effort to be considered half as good thing, combined with the "what you resist, persists" thing. The harder I try to prove myself, the more people think there's something horribly wrong with me. The constant efforts to recover were a kind of smoke. Naturally, people assumed there must be a fire.

This isn't to say that I think things like PTSD shouldn't be treated. I just think we can stop there. Keep trying to unwind every single quirk a person has and tag it to a past trauma is a bit like giving someone chemo long after they're cancer-free, on the grounds that once you have cancer, you always have cancer. That, and a failure to measure up to our ideals of a perfect human being can't always be attributed to trauma. Some people are just...well...odd.

My 60-something mother's fondness for World of Warcraft, for example, hurts no one and helps keep everyone at Blizzard Entertainment employed. What's the problem, again?

We expect to hold the cure to everything inside us, and yet we were designed to fail, physically and mentally. My disability, the result of multiple issues, is still a perfectly normal thing. Someone, for example, with the genetic tendency toward auto-immune disease is probably going to develop it if they encounter a trigger, regardless of what that trigger might be. Even the brain itself is designed to fail, with most of what we consider to be logic and good sense actually being the result of dependence on mental habits that work just consistently enough so that we think they work all of the time.

We are also resistant to change. I used to think I was new-habit-impaired, until I read Gretchen Rubin's blog entry about habits. How long does it take to change habits? Not seven days, not even twenty-one days. It takes sixty-six days. Periodic relapses are normal.

In my case, I think it takes longer. My meditation practice, for example, is still a work in progress that took literally years of experimentation, relapses and advancing by baby steps. I no longer feel bad about this.

Barbara Ehrenreich just published a new book called Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America. I haven't read it yet, but I intend to, because she seems to have come to the same conclusions I have regarding relentless positive thinking: You can't change the world with your mind, and the attempts will hurt you.

I just had a wake-up call on that recently. Those years of painstaking, often uncomfortable, meditation practice did nothing to slow my current flare-up. What did? Quinacrine, an old quinine derivative. Plain old medication did the trick. One of the habits I'm trying hard to break right now is the one that involves trying to deal with illness by attaching it to a mood and fixing the problem by fixing the mood. Last time I tried that, it turned out that I had a cold, which is no surprise given the season and the prednisone.

This might sound ridiculous, but even my doctor does it. When the NSAIDs I'd taken for fifteen years started to strain my kidneys, apparently causing night sweats and heart palpitations, he wanted to prescribe an anti-depressant. I'm grateful now that I refused it. My rheumatologist at the time rather sensibly ran a blood test and found the problem. As soon as the drug was withdrawn, all symptoms went away.

Sadly, this is the kind of thing that happens when you have both a physical illness and a psych diagnosis. It's very hard to keep from internalizing it, but if you don't, you'll end up even crazier than you were to start with.

I don't know if it's the meditation or what, but I'm coming to understand that I'm a very small part of a very large universe that, for the most part, does it's own thing completely unaware of me. At first, it scared me. Now, though, it's starting to reassure me.

The world won't come to an end if I put the rock down.

Step away from that rock!

There are reasons why people who try to do stuff like this go to ashrams for months. The early Christians had it easy, when you think about it, with all of the desert available to them and no such thing as a cell phone. All they had to do, if they wanted space and time to think, was walk long enough.

I don't have that, so I blog. Go figure! I guess it keeps me on track, and this hasn't been empty time, not really. It's just taking a long time because I have a kid and a cell phone, and because the conclusions are difficult to take.

There are things that are a lot more important to me than a functional living space, the projects scattered around the condo, my slap-dash accounting, even writing and music, and I want to take care of those things first.

And I can't.

I have long-standing goals regarding how my life needs to be straightened out. Behind my notion that I can set certain things aside until those goals are met is the idea that I can actually meet those goals.

And I can't.

The idea that simple, basic safety cannot be somehow guaranteed is hard for someone with a high level of risk aversion to take.

A good deal of how I've dealt with that risk aversion was by taking full and total responsibility for everything bad that happened to me. From my point of view, it created a kind of mental substructure upon which I could build a safe concept of the world. If everything bad that happened was my fault, then I could correct my behavior and avoid it in the future.

This is where simple aging starts to become a factor, because I'm now old enough to realize that behavior driven by constant anxiety and an unrealistic sense of responsibility doesn't guarantee anything. Life happens no matter what you're thinking about or doing. There's a much bigger issue at work, though, one that was much harder to come to terms with.

Blaming everything on myself leaves everyone else completely free of responsibility, which actually leaves me in more danger than assuming that people are sometimes really awful. Here's why. If I assume that I'm solely responsible for someone else's behavior or attitude, my tendency is to try to fix it. I can get amazingly invested in trying to fix it, even if I don't actually like the person involved. Taking responsibility doesn't just absolve the other person, it impairs my ability to just walk away.

However, it helps me maintain my view of the world at large as being a generally safer place than home, which is a very dangerous thing to believe. I keep forgetting, mostly because I so desperately want to, that home was part of the world. This wasn't an isolated thing. It happened in a wider, cultural context that permitted and even condoned it, perhaps a human context given how entrenched the behaviors are, not to mention the justifications used by the perpetrators. Those attitudes aren't just products of the specific time and place where I grew up. They are endemic to society as a whole, complete with a narrative about how those involved are to be considered and treated after the events occur.

It's one of the things that makes the whole issue of what to do with sex offenders so difficult. There are a lot of them, far more than we like to consider, and they are, for the most part, productive members of society. The victims, however, are not, or are perceived to be incapable of significant contribution--unless you consider being a whipping boy or a cum dumpster to be a significant contribution. Stigmatizing the offenders on anything like the level that the victims are now stigmatized is creating a problem of unexpected proportions. All of a sudden, we have this population of effectively useless people, most of whom are men. It's freaking people out, and there are calls everywhere for leniency and compassion.

Behind that is an assumption that these men have the potential to be contributing members of society. Their victims, however, are objects of pity and contempt, if not suspicion, who are presumed to be useless.

I read Nicholas Kristof's column in the NYTimes regularly, and one thing that strikes me is how many of the women he writes about move on from various hells, from war-related rape to fistulas to domestic violence, to living alone. They don't marry or re-marry. They start businesses, schools, or otherwise find some way to survive on their own, and this is a victory worth writing about.

It's true, and this is why I'm so slobberingly grateful that I can live alone. Maybe if it were one thing or another, I'd have a different possible outcome, but it's not one thing, it's several, any one of which can hamstring what we consider to be a normal life.

The problem is that this, too, is normal. So are the lives of the women Kristof writes about, which is another thing that makes me slobberingly grateful for having been born when and where I was. There are definitely places where life could be easier, but there are more where life could be much worse.

It's not that being alone is a perfect outcome. It's that it's a significant step up from what usually happens.

Anyway, accepting that people are pretty much free to behave however they want regardless of how hard I try to convince them otherwise, or "teach them to treat me" as the latest jargon has it, leaves me feeling as puzzled as Sisyphus would be if someone told him to just leave the rock at the bottom of the hill and walk away. What? But that rock is my just punishment! It's a large chunk of my identity, to the point where people use my name as a metaphor. Most of the praise and admiration I get involves how hard I try to push that rock up the hill. What do you mean walk away?

The problem is that walking away won't get that rock to the top of the hill. Ever. You're essentially admitting to yourself and the world that the rock is going to stay right where it is, and you will make no effort to move it. And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the clincher. People like me are lauded for their willingness to fight. Refusing to fight means giving up what little social approval I have left.

Here's the thing. If people think they have reason to believe you're an incorrigible nymphomaniac, they will treat you as if you are no matter what you actually do. If people think they have a reason to believe you're a pathological liar, they will treat everything that comes out of your mouth as a lie. If people think they have reason to believe you're manipulative, every move you make will be assumed to be a form of manipulation. If people think they have reason to believe you have no sense of humor, they will take everything you say seriously and literally, no matter how absurd it is. What you say and do is far less important than the preconceived notions, and this is where people really, truly create their own psychological reality. Nothing happens that can change our minds when we're locked into this.

We can also create a reality by justifying other people's bad behavior as a one-off, a mistake, or a response to something we did wrong. This isn't a great reality, either. Unfortunately, it's the one I've been living in for a long time.

We don't, however, create reality. We cannot summon earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards or the flu. The physical events of the world happen separately from our moods, our prayers, or our wishes, and the idea that we can, in fact, make all of this happen is yet another common, cognitive trap, a desire to find patterns in events. It's so strong, that we'll invent patterns where none exist.

One of the things I found out about people in general and risk aversion is that we usually act in a way that preserves the status quo. We feel better equipped to deal with the devil we know. This applies here. The idea of a world full of random hell that I can't do anything about terrifies me, because I got through childhood and early adulthood by believing that the rest of the world was a better place than home.

That home, however, is part of the world. They're not separate. There is no refuge and there is no clean slate, exactly because these two worlds are connected. The smaller one is part of the bigger one, and the bigger one has rules and attitudes toward those who are raised in the smaller one. It's all the same world.

This looks like a big no-brainer, but it's not that easy. It's something that people have gone off into the mountains, forests and deserts to come to terms with, and it's why those people are hounded by other people who want the benefits without having to actually go off into the mountains, forests and deserts. God knows I spent enough time doing that myself; my shelf full of self-help books testifies to that. It took me a very long time to set the books down and start meditating.

Cheri Huber talks about a kind of void that you run into if you meditate long enough, and I am looking at it now. It's not a reassuring thing to see. Lupus has turned me into something undead, unable to participate in large chunks of what we consider to be a normal, healthy life, but unable to die. Child sexual abuse did irreparable damage to my relationships and financial life, and took a other people down in the process. The impact of that radiates to a degree I never imagined possible and nobody really talks about. Being a single mother is right up there these days with wearing a scarlet letter, and then there's the peculiar temperament I inherited from my mother, an inability to locate or identify the box even when I want to think inside it. In the void, there are no answers. There aren't even any questions. It all just exists.

It exists side by side with a lot of other things, though, like my kid, my birds, my new keyboard, the co-op, the condo where I live, even the chair I'm sitting in now, which as far as I'm concerned is one of the most comfortable ever made. It exists alongside Fullmetal Alchemist and Fruits Basket, alongside Nicholas Kristof's work, alongside the strange, wild beauty of a Michigan fall. Nothing compensates for anything else. Nothing cancels anything else out. It all just is. All of it.

Every glorious, terrifying, unexpected, heartbreaking aspect of it.

No amount of trying to push a rock up a hill will ever change any of it. I don't have that kind of power, and much as I might wish I did, it's actually a good thing I don't.

Scoring with hot chicks?

Not my best week

I try to come up with something relatively profound for my weekend entries, or at least to come up with something thought-provoking, but I'm empty-handed this week. At least I think I am. There are two things that have been circling through my head, none of which have easy resolutions.

The first is that the things I most want to change are beyond anyone's power to change, and it makes it hard to find meaning in anything I do. This stuff is crucial. It comes down to things as essential as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and I can't have it. I have to figure out how to live without it, and it's really hard.

The second is that if being the victim of a crime at a very young age does nothing else--and it does a lot else!--it does insane damage to one's ability to cope with uncertainty and risk. I was thinking about the fact that women who are sexually abused underperform economically, and I think it comes down to this risk aversion. It's one thing when you are an adult and have a history of positive outcomes behind you, as well knowing you handle negative ones, but when you're a child, you don't have that perspective. You learn that when something bad happens, there is nothing you can do and no one will help you. Very little happens in early adulthood to change that perspective.

I also know already, and have blogged about already, the way that fearfulness is interpreted as we move into adulthood. Someone once accused me of liking animals better than people, and it's true. Animals don't lie. They don't use people beyond the obvious, like shelter, food and cuddles. They don't care that my primary source of income is SSD. They don't care that I'm divorced and a single mother. They don't see my weaknesses and fears as opportunities. They don't have the idea that once a woman is broken in, they can do anything to her that they want and it doesn't count against them.

The exercise for the week was to just do things, no matter how trivial compared to the bigger, scarier picture they seemed, and I think I got a D -. This is turning out to be unbelievably difficult, like dealing with quicksand. The more I struggle, the deeper in I go, but if I don't struggle, nothing gets done. It's the choice between a slow death and a quick death. Every time I start one of these tasks, I'm reminded that it won't help. It won't change any of the things that seem important to me right now, and it's not just that my enthusiasm wanes, it's that in loops into negative numbers. It's not just that I don't see the point anymore, I actively resent having to do it at all if it's not going to change anything that matters.

Here's the reason I keep trying: A very long time ago, things happened that set me on a different path than most people. A lot of things, not just one or two. For the most part, I've kept my head down and plowed in the direction in which I was facing, but that direction wasn't forward. It was sideways. I was trying with all my might to go back to where I thought I was supposed to go.

It's not just that I can't get there, it's just that it no longer makes any sense. I've seen what I've seen. I know what I know. I can't live as if none of this happened, or none of this was true.

I also can't keep living as if there was some thing, some one thing, I can do that will change everything, if only I try hard enough. In therapy, they kept trying to find a sort of core trauma, something that would turn the tide against the various fallouts, and they never did. It even got so far as to encourage me to invent things in a desperate attempt to find a kind of magic button that, if pushed, would cure everything that was wrong with me. I set large chunks of life aside in this quest, under the assumption that once it was over, everything else would be easy.

Naturally, it didn't work, but the concept itself dies hard, which is what makes it so difficult to pick up everything I once set aside. It still doesn't seem as important. I understand why. Embracing that alternate path is a scary thing, and I don't deal with fear very well. That instinctive understanding that there's nothing I can do and nobody will help me remains with me even now.

And really, I'm not doing all that poorly. A D - is better than an E -. The fact that it's not a passing grade doesn't mean there has been no improvement.

Perchance to quit dreaming

There's a lot out there about making your visions reality, about making them concrete and manifesting them by keeping them in the forefront of your mind. What I'm starting to think is that this misses the point by creating a situation in which you're set up to miss out on an awful lot.

A long time ago, I made a vision board. I took it down when I realized that about half of it involved things I could only do if I got well. I would love, for example, to be able to run again, or wear pretty shoes on special occasions, but that's just not in the cards, and it's not a good thing to focus on.

I also realized that the financial goals were problematic. Also on that board were pictures of things I'd like to do if I had enough money, especially the places I'd like to go. I've never crossed the ocean. I've never been south of Mexico. I'd like to visit my family on the west side of this country. I'd like a state-of-the-art Mac. On a more pragmatic level, I want to get off of disability. Earning my own living was a big part of that board.

The danger I found was that focusing on all of this stuff, on all of this stuff that could happen if or when, I was losing track of what I have right now.

What is here? The wild, wooly world of Japanese media, which is showing me good stories and new ways to tell them. My son is in the homestretch of his childhood, an infuriating but fascinating stage. I have a condo full of unfinished and half finished projects, and live close to a fantastic library. I have two languages besides my own, one to maintain and one to learn. I have stories in my head; songs, too. I have, in other words, more than enough as it is. I don't need to focus on the future, even in terms of "manifesting my dreams".

I think the vision board was valuable in the long run, if only because it showed me the discrepancy between what I have and what I want. That discrepancy was huge, and for the most part, defined by things beyond my control, which made it easy to question what I was doing. It was as if I'd created a vision board with pictures of fairies on the assumption that if I thought about it hard and often enough, I could sprout wings and fly.

It's one of those situations in which my disability is an advantage. Merely wanting it badly enough isn't going to make a medical miracle happen.

It also didn't take change into account. A picture of a stark white bedroom, something I thought looked wonderful at the time and I had actually created just because I could, eventually became infused with deep red. I have no idea why. I just had a weird impulse to start adding red. Writing also featured prominently, but then Nobilis gets this brainstorm for his novel and I end up with a new midi keyboard. Manga was nowhere to be seen. At the time, I was looking at is as a teen fad, not as an art form.

So I had this vision board, and I had this life. They weren't matching up, so I took down the vision board.

I still have a board, but it's a cork board with a shifting arrangement of miscellaneous stuff, mostly reminders to pay attention to what's happening now instead of dreaming about the future. There's something from the Harvard Business Review about mistakes we make in risk assessment, a Demotivator from despair.com about quality being a death march, a quote from somebody somewhere that says, "I have a mental affliction. But it's an asset." It all revolves around keeping me from dreaming, not manifesting my dreams.

Is dreaming bad? No, but I think it's distracting. I think it can add unnecessary pressure, remove pressure we need, or just keep us from paying attention to the task in front of us. I think it can blind us to opportunities, especially those that aren't directly related to the dream. I think it can blind us to problems that really should be taken care of now, simply because they aren't related to the dream.

There's also a stark, unpleasant fact about us as a species: we suck at predicting what will make us happy. Even worse, from a cost/benefit point of view, we often don't find out how bad we are at this until our dreams come true, and they turn out to be nightmares.

This is why I've shied away from setting new, "better" goals. I now know that part of the problem was that I was wrong on my assessment of what would work out well for me. I also know that because of the aforementioned cognitive glitch, I'm unlikely to do better this time. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is one of the popular definitions of insanity.

My mother is a good example of this. Her attempts to self-manage her depression usually revolve around learning something new, which holds her attention for a little while. Unfortunately, it eventually becomes familiar and routine, and of course the depression comes back. Novelty, in other words, isn't a long-term cure for ennui, unless your budget runs to non-stop novelty.

I think the whole uncluttering movement is a testament to how little getting what we want does for us. We get what we want, and then we don't use it, get something else, or otherwise neglect that thing that we were sure would make our lives so much better.

What would it mean to live without want? Not without lack, which all of us suffer in one way or another, but without want? What would it be like to wake up in the morning without that yearning for something we don't have, whether the object is tangible or intangible?

The quick answer is that we wouldn't bother to get out of bed at all, but I'm not sure that's true.

When we are children, the things we want are often withheld or granted as punishments or rewards, and maybe that's part of the problem. Maybe we still see it that way, that failing to get what we want is a punishment and getting it is a reward. Maybe getting what we want has a kind of glamor to it that makes it look more special than it really is, especially if we don't have it. Maybe, when we have it, when we get over that initial thrill of being rewarded for an imagined good behavior, it's reduced to whatever it really is, whether it's a house, a car, a piece of candy, a toy, whatever, and when that's all it is, we get to see if it was really something we need.

As adults, we punish and reward ourselves similarly, and often in weirdly self-destructive ways. It makes no sense to reward a week's worth of dieting with a candy bar, partly because then the diet looks like a punishment and the candy bar becomes more valuable than it really is. It makes no sense to reward a week's worth of frugality with a spending spree for the same reason. It even makes no sense to see one's vacation as the reward for doing one's job. Work becomes a punishment, and God help you if something happens to interfere with that vacation!

The real danger, though, is allowing what we want to blind us to what we have. It's not a reward. Withholding it isn't a punishment. It's just a thing, a place, even a state of mind, that we think will improve our lives, and we suck at predicting what will improve our lives. We suck at assessing risk. This is, in other words, something we are so horrifically bad at as a species that we might as well give it up.

Unfortunately, we're also bad at not doing it. We want to be happy. We want to minimize risk. The idea of waking up in the morning with neither aim in mind is so alien that I keep thinking, "but I should..." And then I have to remember that the more focused I am on what I don't have and what I think I need, the less able I am to see what's really there.

What's really there is really all we have.

Courage

Sharing my addictions with my friends yet again...

This is pulled, of course, from Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, the second anime series and the one that, so far at least, is following the manga faithfully. The point of this is a definition of courage. It's not the lack of fear. It's the willingness to act while literally puking from fear.

You don't have to watch the whole thing, just 8:31 - 11:01. The scene is a young man digging up what might or might not be the remains of his mother, and whatever it is, he's the reason it's there.



Thankfully, it's the sort of thing you only have to do once, even if you're a character in an anime.

And yes, his right arm is a metal prosthesis, which may be a contributing factor to my fondness for this series. He is missing both an arm and a leg, a situation that's treated fairly well, in my opinion, as the "automail" limbs can be both an advantage and a serious problem, depending on the situation.