The Prior and Present Self
Mar. 19th, 2004 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurMy LJ tends to be relatively surface-oriented -- I'm a bit private, and not entirely comfortable with public introspection. But there are times that one must talk "out loud"; silent musings just don't have the same psychological effect. So the following is some unrepentant navel-gazing; consider yourself warned. It's long, and quite probably incredibly dull, but I need to muse a bit.
No one reading this journal knew me in high school, which is probably for the best. I didn't have a great time -- no surprise, many of us didn't. What's less obvious, I believe, is just how different my outward personality was at the time.
It always surprises me how bemused people are when I say that I'm shy. That's because they didn't know me when I was fifteen. At the time, I was much more my mother's son: the true introvert nerd. I wasn't even the loudmouth geek who people disliked -- rather, I was the quiet SF reader who no one noticed in the slightest. I had a modest number of friends, but none were close; I had essentially no social life outside of school. The defining moment of my high school career was at the very end, with the senior beach party: I found out about this after the fact, simply because it didn't occur to anyone to invite me.
By my junior year, it was already clear that this situation couldn't continue: I'd simply go insane. But there was no real way to change things at the time. Expectations are a powerful force, and once people have known you for several years it's rather difficult to change their image of you, especially when you are none too confident of what you're trying to change it to. So college marked a clean break for me -- not just a break with the people who I'd been interacting with, but a substantial break with myself.
As I understand it, the INTJ personality type has one distinct characteristic: a tendency to more or less coolly examine and evaluate everything, all the time, oneself included. By the time I started college, I'd been examining myself for years, and concluded that I didn't much like myself. More precisely, I didn't respect myself much. I had some abilities, but was too shy to express any ambitions for them. And my complete lack of friends had left me fairly miserable: the combination of my mother's introversion with my father's need for socialization was proving to be downright unhealthy.
So I decided to try to be someone else. I swallowed my rather intense fears, and simply forced myself to be outgoing. That worked decently well, especially once I found the SCA. I forced myself to actually do things, ranging from autocratting to teaching dance; bit by bit, I convinced myself, intellectually at least, that I really could accomplish whatever I set my mind to.
Over time, I rather consciously built myself into the person I had decided I wanted to be. Some of you may have noticed that I actively prefer the name "Justin" to "Mark". That's not entirely accidental -- the two names have very different connotations for me. Mark is still a lot shyer than Justin is. That's not quite as schizophrenic as it sounds: they just reflect different aspects of me, which come to the fore in different moods.
The odd thing, though, is that somewhere over the past five years, they seem to have begun merging. The gregariousness isn't as much of an act as it once was, and the idea of taking on projects doesn't scare me much any more. Indeed, most of the things that used to terrify me don't any more. And that's the rub.
The funny thing about turning yourself into something is that you then have to live with the results, and the Law of Unintended Consequences holds as true for this as for anything. I've been finding that, while Justin is overall a more interesting person than Mark, he has his own unfortunate traits, which I'm finding myself having to wrestle with. All of them are inter-related, but they've all become much more noticeable to me over the past year.
First, I've become a lot more arrogant. That's not entirely negative -- it's just the downside of self-confidence -- but it seems to have gone overboard. I'm altogether too sure of myself these days, and have sometimes run rather roughshod over the ideas of others. That's not very evident in my SCA dealings, but it's been happening a lot at work lately. I suspect it's masking some amount of inner insecurity: there's a need to be right that I don't much like.
Second, I've become lazy and unfocused. I've been noticing that for several years now: after keeping so many balls in the air for so many years, I've begun to drop them far too frequently of late. That's part of why I've been backing off from taking on new responsibilities: I need to start proving to myself once more that I can get things done. It's still definitely a problem, but of the lot, this is probably the most tractable.
Third -- and this is the one that really prompted this bout of introspection -- I've become a lot angrier than I used to be. Again, this is less evident at play than at work: I've become rather verbally harsh to a couple of specific people whose skills I've lost respect for. On the one hand, the disrespect has been somewhat deserved; still, I've been finding myself with a genuine hair-trigger temper under some circumstances.
This really bothers me profoundly. While I've sought a measure of strength, I've always prided myself on being a basically gentle person under the hood. Indeed, the main reason I was such a complete failure at SCA armored combat was a deep-seated fear of hurting somebody, which always caused me to pull my punches. Somehow, that gentility has gotten itself buried under a layer of ambient anger that's masking it, and possibly eroding it. I have a nasty feeling that the ongoing political tensions I've been through in the past ten years (both in the real world and in my clubs) have a lot to do with this: I don't recall often getting these kinds of temper swings before dealing with The SCA Membership Crisis, my unpleasant year as Master of my Masonic Lodge, and perhaps most crucially, the Hell Year of chairing Intercon 15. Too many years of swallowing too much bile may have given me a psychic ulcer. (Ooh, now there's an entirely unpleasant metaphor.)
What set off this round of introspection is my dreams; in particular, this one. On the surface, it's fairly ordinary, but the outburst of anger at the end left me deeply shaken for hours. I've never lifted a hand in anger in my life, and I pride myself on that; seeing that principle violated, even in a dream, is blackly disturbing. And I can't even claim that it's a complete aberration: about once a month lately I've found myself waking out of a dream in which I had entirely lost my temper and was yelling at someone over something wholly idiotic.
I'm not sure why this is coming to the fore now. I think it's been building for the past decade or so, but the past year has actually been pretty decent -- in particular, once I began to distance myself from Intercon and the raw wounds left from old politics there, it's been a pretty calm year. And yet I've found the anger just bubbling over, as if I've gotten so used to being angry at one thing or another all the time that it's just seeking new outlets.
I'm really not certain of what's going on here. Some of it may simply be exhaustion: despite the fact that I've been sleeping adequately lately (which for me is an improvement), I've been finding myself horribly tired all the time. That makes me stupid (a feeling I despise more than almost any other) and just plain grouchy. But I don't think that's all of it; as far as I can tell, some of it is simply part of who I've wound up as.
So it seems to be time to give some more thought to who I am, and who I want to be. I've managed to instill in myself the confidence I once lacked, but at the cost of different insecurities -- because I really think the anger stems from insecurity at some level. It's funny, because almost all of my surface fear has just gone away somewhere. Even when I find myself in no-pants dreams (or didn't-study dreams, which hit more or less the same buttons), they just don't scare me any more: in my dreams, I simply talk my way out of any crisis. But I can feel raw fear nibbling around the edges of the anger. I'm not sure what it's fear of, but the emotion seems to be lurking there nonetheless.
Once upon a time, I set out to remake myself as someone with the strength to be happy, and I largely succeeded. Twenty years on, it's time to pull out the mental tools again, with a different goal: to find the self-understanding to be content. There's a project to keep me busy for a while...
No one reading this journal knew me in high school, which is probably for the best. I didn't have a great time -- no surprise, many of us didn't. What's less obvious, I believe, is just how different my outward personality was at the time.
It always surprises me how bemused people are when I say that I'm shy. That's because they didn't know me when I was fifteen. At the time, I was much more my mother's son: the true introvert nerd. I wasn't even the loudmouth geek who people disliked -- rather, I was the quiet SF reader who no one noticed in the slightest. I had a modest number of friends, but none were close; I had essentially no social life outside of school. The defining moment of my high school career was at the very end, with the senior beach party: I found out about this after the fact, simply because it didn't occur to anyone to invite me.
By my junior year, it was already clear that this situation couldn't continue: I'd simply go insane. But there was no real way to change things at the time. Expectations are a powerful force, and once people have known you for several years it's rather difficult to change their image of you, especially when you are none too confident of what you're trying to change it to. So college marked a clean break for me -- not just a break with the people who I'd been interacting with, but a substantial break with myself.
As I understand it, the INTJ personality type has one distinct characteristic: a tendency to more or less coolly examine and evaluate everything, all the time, oneself included. By the time I started college, I'd been examining myself for years, and concluded that I didn't much like myself. More precisely, I didn't respect myself much. I had some abilities, but was too shy to express any ambitions for them. And my complete lack of friends had left me fairly miserable: the combination of my mother's introversion with my father's need for socialization was proving to be downright unhealthy.
So I decided to try to be someone else. I swallowed my rather intense fears, and simply forced myself to be outgoing. That worked decently well, especially once I found the SCA. I forced myself to actually do things, ranging from autocratting to teaching dance; bit by bit, I convinced myself, intellectually at least, that I really could accomplish whatever I set my mind to.
Over time, I rather consciously built myself into the person I had decided I wanted to be. Some of you may have noticed that I actively prefer the name "Justin" to "Mark". That's not entirely accidental -- the two names have very different connotations for me. Mark is still a lot shyer than Justin is. That's not quite as schizophrenic as it sounds: they just reflect different aspects of me, which come to the fore in different moods.
The odd thing, though, is that somewhere over the past five years, they seem to have begun merging. The gregariousness isn't as much of an act as it once was, and the idea of taking on projects doesn't scare me much any more. Indeed, most of the things that used to terrify me don't any more. And that's the rub.
The funny thing about turning yourself into something is that you then have to live with the results, and the Law of Unintended Consequences holds as true for this as for anything. I've been finding that, while Justin is overall a more interesting person than Mark, he has his own unfortunate traits, which I'm finding myself having to wrestle with. All of them are inter-related, but they've all become much more noticeable to me over the past year.
First, I've become a lot more arrogant. That's not entirely negative -- it's just the downside of self-confidence -- but it seems to have gone overboard. I'm altogether too sure of myself these days, and have sometimes run rather roughshod over the ideas of others. That's not very evident in my SCA dealings, but it's been happening a lot at work lately. I suspect it's masking some amount of inner insecurity: there's a need to be right that I don't much like.
Second, I've become lazy and unfocused. I've been noticing that for several years now: after keeping so many balls in the air for so many years, I've begun to drop them far too frequently of late. That's part of why I've been backing off from taking on new responsibilities: I need to start proving to myself once more that I can get things done. It's still definitely a problem, but of the lot, this is probably the most tractable.
Third -- and this is the one that really prompted this bout of introspection -- I've become a lot angrier than I used to be. Again, this is less evident at play than at work: I've become rather verbally harsh to a couple of specific people whose skills I've lost respect for. On the one hand, the disrespect has been somewhat deserved; still, I've been finding myself with a genuine hair-trigger temper under some circumstances.
This really bothers me profoundly. While I've sought a measure of strength, I've always prided myself on being a basically gentle person under the hood. Indeed, the main reason I was such a complete failure at SCA armored combat was a deep-seated fear of hurting somebody, which always caused me to pull my punches. Somehow, that gentility has gotten itself buried under a layer of ambient anger that's masking it, and possibly eroding it. I have a nasty feeling that the ongoing political tensions I've been through in the past ten years (both in the real world and in my clubs) have a lot to do with this: I don't recall often getting these kinds of temper swings before dealing with The SCA Membership Crisis, my unpleasant year as Master of my Masonic Lodge, and perhaps most crucially, the Hell Year of chairing Intercon 15. Too many years of swallowing too much bile may have given me a psychic ulcer. (Ooh, now there's an entirely unpleasant metaphor.)
What set off this round of introspection is my dreams; in particular, this one. On the surface, it's fairly ordinary, but the outburst of anger at the end left me deeply shaken for hours. I've never lifted a hand in anger in my life, and I pride myself on that; seeing that principle violated, even in a dream, is blackly disturbing. And I can't even claim that it's a complete aberration: about once a month lately I've found myself waking out of a dream in which I had entirely lost my temper and was yelling at someone over something wholly idiotic.
I'm not sure why this is coming to the fore now. I think it's been building for the past decade or so, but the past year has actually been pretty decent -- in particular, once I began to distance myself from Intercon and the raw wounds left from old politics there, it's been a pretty calm year. And yet I've found the anger just bubbling over, as if I've gotten so used to being angry at one thing or another all the time that it's just seeking new outlets.
I'm really not certain of what's going on here. Some of it may simply be exhaustion: despite the fact that I've been sleeping adequately lately (which for me is an improvement), I've been finding myself horribly tired all the time. That makes me stupid (a feeling I despise more than almost any other) and just plain grouchy. But I don't think that's all of it; as far as I can tell, some of it is simply part of who I've wound up as.
So it seems to be time to give some more thought to who I am, and who I want to be. I've managed to instill in myself the confidence I once lacked, but at the cost of different insecurities -- because I really think the anger stems from insecurity at some level. It's funny, because almost all of my surface fear has just gone away somewhere. Even when I find myself in no-pants dreams (or didn't-study dreams, which hit more or less the same buttons), they just don't scare me any more: in my dreams, I simply talk my way out of any crisis. But I can feel raw fear nibbling around the edges of the anger. I'm not sure what it's fear of, but the emotion seems to be lurking there nonetheless.
Once upon a time, I set out to remake myself as someone with the strength to be happy, and I largely succeeded. Twenty years on, it's time to pull out the mental tools again, with a different goal: to find the self-understanding to be content. There's a project to keep me busy for a while...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Hey... You following me down the hole???
Date: 2004-03-19 10:25 pm (UTC)It is amazing how so many people I know are finding some odd introspection at this time, and expecially this week...
What you posted is different yet oddly familiar... (Hmmm. Didnt you just write ME in an introspection? Although mine wasnt so "good".)
You at least have a goal...
And you have someoone from your past who is willing to help you if need it, want it, or whatever, and maybe we can even help each other in the process...
Just remember something you told me not so very long ago...
"Again, *hug*, and don't be afraid to reach out when you need it..."
Re: Hey... You following me down the hole???
Date: 2004-03-21 09:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-19 10:50 pm (UTC)I've also been having anger issues at work, also dealing with incompetence. I've been struggling to figure out why. It's not that I think other people's screw-ups shouldn't make me mad, but that it's never really gotten under my skin before. I've always just coldly observed, "OK, he can't do his job, route around him and get the job done, and bill for the extra hours/take more vacation when it's done." Even more weirdly, there's a boss who is incompetant, but who is giving me completely free rein in my judgement as to how all sorts of things should be done. She doesn't want me to ask her -- she gets cranky when I do -- she just wants me to do whatever I think best, and, it turns out, she'll live with it. And this is pissing me off, because I should not be making executive decisions about a bunch of this stuff (i.e. not merely how to implement, but important business policy decisions about what to implement.)
Clearly, I must have lost my mind: I'm the only person I've ever heard of to get pissed off at being given too much power.
At any rate, as far as anger goes, I have three paradigms of anger that I like, which are both somewhat contradictory and somewhat complementary.
One of them holds that anger and fear are two sides of the same coin: both are reactions to things that threaten us, one that lashes out (anger) and one that lashes in (fear). Anger rouses, fear paralyzes: fight and flight, our two recourses when threatened. So it might be the anger you find bubbling up now is really just your old fear wearing a new face; or more precisely, they are both results of the same cause (though not the same thing or in response to the same things). If you cast off your old fearfulness by force of will, that which made you fearful, in the first place, may remain as an unresolved problem, yet lurking to vex you.
The second holds that anger is the natural response when our boundaries are transgressed. It's kind of like a motion-detector of the soul. If you have it set too sensitively, it goes off when a mote of dust passes in front of it. Or if you have it aimed wrong, people passing by in the street might set off false alarms. But, and this is important, one should never try to just turn down the sensitivity without first figuring out what set one off. Never assume it was a mouse -- maybe you really do have a burgler prowling around.
Or put another way you have plenty to be angry about. You know, your story about not being invited to the senior beach party is an outrage. Perhaps you have more cause for anger than you've let yourself even know about, if you've been telling yourself you're a good person for not getting angry with people.
The third paradigm is that anger is a kick-in-the-seat-of-the-pants, a jolt of energy one can harness for productive purposes. That energy comes in a form which is not always applicable, but in the circumstances in which it it applicable, it's invaluable. It makes the timid, bold. It lifts one out of one's self-consciousness enough to do remarkable things. If you're feeling anger, this paradigm holds, it is because something in you wants to get something done, and it's calling up this burst of energy for you to do it with.
b
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-21 09:20 am (UTC)Justin, it sounds like you're doing some good searching. No matter what you find along the way, I'm pretty sure I'll still be here. (I assume the others will too, but I don't speak for them.) I encourage you to continue examining your anger and fears, even if they seem to be about issues long dead (such as the senior beach party). In therapy, I've found things in my childhood that I'm still angry about, and dealing with these issues now has given me new understanding of myself, even respect and care for myself.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-21 10:54 am (UTC)As for the productive element of anger, you're definitely correct there. The problem is that it seems to have gotten disproportionate, to the extent that it becomes unproductive.
A *cold* anger can be extremely useful, especially when it's well-deserved. Traditionally, I only get angry very occasionally, and in most cases I'm good at banking it until I get just the kind of dim but white-hot embers that can really get things done. That's where all my best online flames come from, for example: when I manage to produce a message so utterly scathing that it sets people back on their heels and gets them talking. Used once in a great while, that's an enormously effective tool.
The problem is that what I've mostly been seeing lately has been the kind of nervous *hot* anger that tends to be really counterproductive: the sort that clouds reason, and gets me too dug into a position to be able to argue effectively. It knocks my strategic sense for a loop, and gets into arguments before I've completely prepared the rhetorical 2x4 that makes the point.
None of which is really to disagree with your point, that anger *can* be an extremely useful tool for motivation and focusing. Unfortunately, this particular anger doesn't seem to be having that effect.
And as I said, it's been tending to be disproportionate. I'm overreacting to relatively minor stupidities and offenses. That squanders a useful resource, which is better stored up to shock properly when it really *is* deserved...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-20 10:19 am (UTC)(* = I think in many ways this is one of the best things about college; it's an opportunity to re-invent onesself + become steady in one's new ways before entering "real life".)
Kudos for having the self-awareness to notice the problem, and to not simply blame it all on the external environment ("Of course I'm angry; person X is being a putz").
And yet I've found the anger just bubbling over, as if I've gotten so used to being angry at one thing or another all the time that it's just seeking new outlets.
*nod* In my experience - and from what I've read - emotional states can be just as much a matter of habit as anything else - those who are accustomed to being happy will tend to default to/drift towards "happy" absent compelling reasons to the contrary; likewise with many other emotions.
(I think it was Abraham Lincoln who once said, "Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be"? I think that, too, could apply to many emotions.)
Twenty years on, it's time to pull out the mental tools again, with a different goal: to find the self-understanding to be content. There's a project to keep me busy for a while...
Good fortune to you in your endeavor! If at any point you want to talk about it more, I'd be happy to listen/discuss.
college digression
Date: 2004-03-20 04:16 pm (UTC)Yesirree. I'm as yet unconvinced of the value of a college education* apart from "being supported for four years and figuring out who you are. *modulo serious technical education and the rubberstamp effect.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-20 04:19 pm (UTC)I was particularly bemused by the Mark/Justin persona dichotomy, because you've long been the primary character-association for one of my very favorite protagonists, Miles Vorkosigan/Naismith, who developed and resolved exactly this problem.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-20 07:02 pm (UTC)Heh, ditto. What she said.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-20 04:54 pm (UTC)I'm glad that you realize this, and see it as a negative trait. (Which is not to say I think you're arrogant, I honestly hadn't noticed.) I have known several people, one a very close friend in college, who developed extreme arrogance as a way to mask their inner insecurity. The need to always be right, or better than the other person, was a central feature. At best, these people were annoying and abrasive; at worst, they were intolerable to be around. And yet, inside and underneath, they were the same insecure, broken and miserable people as always; their pomp had gotten them nothing. What they ended up having was the two polar opposites of a continuum at once, when what they really wanted and needed was the happy medium.
As for dichotomy, I have a similar issue with what was (is?) my original and major online persona. Until I graduated college in 1999, I'd never spent time on IRC or on any online community that wasn't either local to where I lived or specific to the college. The more time I spent in "persona", naked as I cared to be in thoughts and ideas but utterly hidden in physicality, the more I became the persona. I was somehow not me, and more than me, and as me as it's possible to be, all at the same time. And somehow, the persona began to take on a life of its own.
You might notice me "slip" sometimes that I've been on LiveJournal since 2001 ("Wait, your journal says it was created in September!"); I have, that's the persona journal. No, I don't share the username with my local friends.
When I moved to Boston, it was such a major upheaval - mentally and in terms of time and practical matters - that I left IRC and LiveJournal for almost 2 months. I started to feel like what was happening in my life wasn't relevant to the "persona" life. And it wasn't. I also started to feel - especially as I began to make friends and settle in - that the "persona" life isn't relevant to my life here. That I didn't want it to be relevant. I did go back to IRC, eventually, but that other journal mainly collects dust.
In a way, I'm in the third stage, but in another way, it's as if the
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-20 05:28 pm (UTC)I get that too. Other people tend to notice the times that you're social, not the times that you stay by yourself. And they don't know what mental strength it takes to go out and *be* social -- whoops, talking about myself again :-)
I had a similar experience to yours, though I had my "break" starting in 10th grade, when I went to a new high school. By the time I met you, I had already pieced together the major pieces of who "Alexx" would be. The process continued through college, of course. I had a number of significant sub-personalities I was working on integrating, eventually successfully. They're still there, down in the depths, and I generally take it as a Warning Sign when I start to hear their individual voices again. (Yes, Cynthia, I identify with Mark Vorkosigan at such times.) This is actually the reason why my SCA persona started out with a name so similar to my "mundane" persona, and without any significant defining features; it took so much work for me to become a *single* person, I was very leery about inventing someone else to be.
[Hm. I don't actually remember when I started using the "Alexx" spelling, but it may well date from the same time that I really achieved stability in my personality. I certainly think of my(current)self as far more "Alexx" than "Alexander Scott Kay".]
I do think of you as a person who is rarely angry. I remember when you were moving into (or out of?) our shared student-slum apartment, and a sofa got stuck in the stairwell, and you lost it. I was shocked, as I had never seen you angry before. And I seem to recall your saying that it happened very rarely. Of late, now that you mention it, you're definitely more prone to being at least annoyed. I wouldn't call it a problem, at least on a social level -- after all, I hadn't noticed it till you brought it up.
Perhaps the arrogance/anger at work is at least partially due to your work history in recent years. You have personal, visceral experience that companies can fail. Having incompetent people at your job can only make that more likely, so you're motivated to get rid of them.
On the flip side, perhaps you feel (at some level) that this job also won't last, so what's the incentive to keep up civil relationships -- you'll be parting ways from these jerks soon enough. [This is theorized to be part of why old people are so rude -- Tit For Tat breaks down if you know that the relationship will probably end soon.]
Or, here's another take: For the last several years, you've been too steeped in crisis to be able to afford anger -- you've needed to act. Now, when your company has actually shipped a product, and you're pulling back on social responsibilities, you feel more secure, and can afford to start bleeding off the excess pressure that's been building up during all the crises.
[OK, so those last two paragraphs are contradictory. People are large, and contain multitudes. I'm just tossing out ideas; take what works.]
A final thought: Anger is not, of itself, necessarily bad, nor is content always good. Being content can mean accepting a situation that, with a little work, could be much improved. Anger can, as Tibicen pointed out above, be a useful fuel for making such changes. It's a good idea to keep in practice with all the tools in your mental toolbox.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-21 02:44 pm (UTC)Yep, I remember the incident vividly. (It was into.) It's the first time I can remember being completely, utterly, irrationally angry. It's a slightly different shade than the cases I'm talking about here, though -- that particular incident was born of extreme frustration, particularly a sense that there must be an answer, but I'm not finding it.
Now that you mention it, though, that type of anger has also been on the upswing lately -- still uncommon, but it's been happening on the order of once every few months. Few people aside from
you're definitely more prone to being at least annoyed.
Yeah, that's a somewhat lesser problem, but still quite real. It isn't just the outbursts -- it's that I've been just plain cranky lately, and that's no fun for myself or anyone else. I'd like to believe that that's mostly a function of health (which has ranged from mediocre to crappy for the past six months), but I'm not entirely certain.
[Theories]
I don't think the anger is related to the work experience, actually. Oddly, while my self-esteem has taken a hit from the failed companies, it's actually been pretty slight. In none of the cases have I felt that the failures were particularly my fault -- all of them have failed due to business issues more than technical ones. So while I've been disappointed, that disappointment is mainly one of opportunity cost: while it's a pity that I didn't get the ego-boo that comes from a successful product, I still got to feel that I did a good job.
It's hard to be sure that you're incorrect here -- this stuff is fairly buried -- but examining my gut reactions, it doesn't ring true.
And I concur that contentment has its limits. As I mentioned in a later post, the Buddhist approach *mostly* fits with me. But when you get down to it, I *do* like to make a difference for the better when I can. I don't think there's any chance that I could back off to the extent of completely leaving that off. But I need to regain perspective...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-21 01:17 am (UTC)At 15 I was very introverted. Since I joined the SCA I've become much less so, and in turn more angry, unfocussed, and arrogant. Probably not so much more lazy but it does happen a little. I wonder at times whether there are different and competing personae inside myself that have these traits in opposite quantities.
Oh, except that my dreams always end up with me being eaten by a crocodile, and have very little to do with real life.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-21 05:11 pm (UTC)I'm another person that has become much more extroverted since I've been in the SCA, but since that time maps to 'college and everything after' I'm fairly sure it would have happened anyway.
At any rate, I'm very social IF the group I'm with at any one time seems to fit my various criteria for worthwhile people. That is probably arrogant, although I think of it as elitist. I think it's probably a means of still being an introvert, because there's so much of humanity (and even of the SCA) that's still outside the pale. I'm not so much an extrovert as I am a larger-social-circle introvert.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-21 12:23 pm (UTC)I, too, used the SCA (subconsciously, I'm pretty sure) to develop a personality more suited for living in the world. I'm still pretty introverted in many situations, but I learned a lot of life lessons in the SCA. That's probably why the Troubles of ten years ago hurt so much; these people were actively destroying the society we had built in a way that would make it harder for the next generation to do what we had done. (And it still lingers, of course; the Troubles didn't end but rather mutated.)
I've found that the tools you have available for anger release make a big difference. Counter-intuitively, I sometimes find it harder to release anger in a harmless way when I'm around people I care a lot about. You'd think that caring friends/SO would give you a comfortable environment in which to vent, but that's not how it works a lot of the time. If I'm alone, I can yell and scream and vent about the injustices of the world; if I'm with my husband (or generically SO, before him), I don't want to drag the other person into it so I'll keep things bottled up more, where it can feed on itself. When I realize this is happening I can of course do something about it, but I do have to notice. Are you keeping things in more than you should, by any chance?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-21 03:00 pm (UTC)Oh, without question. I'm still a fairly private person, and find it pretty difficult to talk about my feelings. Doing it in person is *extremely* hard for me, especially when it's with people I care about. It isn't even a matter of not wanting to drag them into it -- it's more that I'm still a bit afraid of the out-of-control emotions that can come pouring out when I really talk about stuff like this out loud.
Really, that's something I like about LJ. It provides a good middle ground for me: somewhere that I can "talk" about my feelings in text, which gives me some help without being too painful. When I was doing this 20 years ago, it was entirely internal: I spent much of my freshman year of college taking long walks alone, just doing self-analysis. Doing so here allows me to interact with folks a bit (which really is helpful) without feeling *totally* emotionally naked...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-22 09:26 am (UTC)(An annoying complication is that as you get older and your metabolism changes, your bubble of "best" food intake, etc., also change, so if you haven't changed your regimen but your body has changed, that might cause problems; I noticed this a few years ago in myself; you are a few years older than me, and might be undergoing a different transition.)
Too often we assume our emotions are simply the product of Freudian-type hidden conflict, or the environment they are in; but watch anyone who is low-blood-sugar and tell me that it hasn't had an impact on their emotional response to a set situation.
Just one more thing to look into...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-22 06:34 pm (UTC)Oh, absolutely. Part of why it's hitting me so badly right now is that my health has been crap, and part of why my health has been crap is that I'm not getting anywhere *near* enough exercise, and really haven't been all winter. Really, the main thing that bothers me about this damned cough I've had for the past five weeks is that it's kept me away from running, which would certainly pick up my mood a good deal.
But I'm pretty sure that the problem is broader than that. It's been evolving slowly over ten years, and there's been no apparent correlation between the existence of the anger issues and my metabolism. There's some correlation with the frequency and intensity, but I think the metabolic issues are just exacerbating something a bit deeper...