memevector (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
memevector) wrote2005-01-25 08:29 pm
memevector) wrote2005-01-25 08:29 pm
on having or not having problems
Had a very interesting insight on Sunday in my thinking sesh.
I started out wanting to think about some things on which I tend to move slowly, and one of them is my accounts (which are on my mind at the moment due to the tax return deadline on 31 January).
Initially, I was remembering a slightly similar area where in the past I'd started wondering "Have I got some kind of psychological resistance to this?" but eventually concluded "Naah - it just is complicated, and all slowness is easily explained by logistical factors". I thought it was possible that this was one of those and I was making 2+2=5 (as they say).
But I also had a little inkling that maybe there was some kind of thing going on which explains why I never seem to get my tax return in till the last minute, and which explains why for the last week I've been not doing it :-)
When I started looking at that, I realised that part of it was, if not exactly a logistical factor, a simple habit: that a lot of the time, I'm busy, and I have this habit of ranking things by urgency. "Can this wait? - Yes - OK leave it for now then". And of course that would tend to push things like the accounts right up to just before their deadline. Whereas in fact there are some things where a better question or thought would be more like "How about I polish off some of this now? and I'll thank myself for it later". (And indeed I do apply that sometimes, even sometimes to aspects of my accounts.)
I also realised that there's one stage of doing my accounts which I particularly dislike, which is when I get to the things which aren't entirely straightforward but require subjective decisions. Like whether to bother stocktaking some area where I've got supplies, or whether to count something as a business expense, or whether to throw away a receipt which I'm pretty certain was business but where I can't now work out what it was. And it seems like in a way I've been using the deadline to push me through the stage where I finally have to deal with those.
And I thought: well, even if I want to keep using the deadline to push me to do these last few tricky bits, that's still no reason not to do all the rest of it much earlier. The whole job doesn't have to be permeated with that tricky flavour - some of it is simple.
But the really juicy insight was yet to come:
I have this sense that, although I have genuinely struggled in the past with the sheer complexity of organising (even finding :-) ) that many bits of paper and that many bits of data, nowadays one of the main factors in not doing my accounts till the last minute is to have something to join in with when people are moaning about their lives! ::haha::
It actually runs deeper for me than that somewhat flippant formulation makes it sound. But that's the outline of my realisation.
It is such a British thing to have a moan. And sometimes it would be conspicuously weird and socially risky to say "my life is wonderful, flawless, I have no problems". ("All right for some.") And having a big old load of undone accounts hanging around is a really good card to play in that situation, because (a) to most people that sounds quite impressive as a problem, and (b) it isn't an invitation for nosey people to stick their nosey fingers into my business. (Partly because other people mostly don't seem to feel like they're full of good advice on how to do accounts, and partly because even if they do poke at it a bit, it just isn't very sensitive territory for me.) Perfect!
So in that way it's comfortable and defensive for me to allow this "problem" to persist year on year.
The deeper level is a whole perennial issue for me about being privileged and lucky, and how I am about that and how other people are about that.
In describing myself as privileged, I don't mean that I come from a specially rich family, although we weren't specially skint either. Nor did I go to a posh school; but I do consider myself educationally privileged, partly in that I was brought up to think for myself. Then there's having had an unabusive and generally fairly sensible upbringing and having through luck and caution escaped any traumatic encounters with scary people (touch wood); being white in a white-majority country, reasonably physically fit and naturally fairly thin, which save me a lot of prejudicial bother; plus having enough to eat, not being at war, having mostly-free healthcare, and all the things which many people take for granted which are privileges of being in this part of the world at this time.
Plus, an aspect of those combined pieces of luck (mainly health and the educational privilege of a good grounding in emotional wisdom) is a resilience which allows me to keep the downside in perspective. Which is itself something not to be taken for granted. I mean, it's not like I "lead a charmed life", but I can usually put stressful or painful events into a context that includes love and beautiful sunsets.
As for other people's attitudes: Two historical stories spring to mind in this connection, one a sustained era of bad stuff, one a small incident.
The era of bad stuff is from a household I lived in in the early 1990s.
It was a shared house, and people moved in and out over the time I lived there.
Someone moved in (call them C), and over some months or maybe a year or so, they developed a "thing" about how I had my life arranged. I had done a mutually beneficial deal with someone else in the house, to trade away some of the prosaic domestic things that I didn't want to do. But C was having to do their own share of the same prosaic domestic things, and C didn't want to either. And if C had to, then it wasn't fair that someone else had worked out a way (however ethical) not to have to. So I was getting away with something.
(Or at least, that's what I think now was the gist of the issue. At the time, it wasn't that clear to me.)
I think initially I didn't handle it very well - I was like "if you don't like my arrangements that's your problem", which was theoretically defensible but tactless. But as the whole thing of C's complaints about me and my "selfishness" became a bigger and bigger issue, I really went out of my way to try and sort it out. I apologised for where I thought I'd been a bit dismissive, and I tried once or twice to initiate a conversation like: this is how I'm feeling about the situation, how are you feeling about it, is there something specific you want, how do you think we can resolve this? But none of that worked, and the atmosphere got horribler and horribler until I was basically hiding in my room whenever C was home in order not to encounter them. And eventually I solved it by moving out.
After moving out, I gradually started to feel better and "more like myself", and only as it wore off, a year or so later, did I realise the degree to which C had successfully convinced me that I was a bad person.
It helped when one day I was introduced to my successor in the old household, M (whom I hadn't met till then), and found out that M had been having an extraordinarily similar experience with C.
(C accused M of not doing their fair share of the housework. M said: let's draw up a rota then. C refused: they "shouldn't need to do that". - No, because of course we should all know by telepathy the one true way of dividing housework according to C!)
It also helped when I discovered a wonderful essay by Joanna Russ, anatomising a particular pattern where person A, who's given away a lot of their power, will behave in a very hostile way to person B who still has theirs, because it was obviously B's job as the more powerful one to take care of poor little A, and how dare they not. There was a phrase in the essay something like "A assumes that B has no feelings, or that if ze does, hurting them is a meritorious act". I still remember the moment when I read that sentence and recognised it as how C had been treating me towards the end.
Some years later, I told this whole story to a wise friend H, and H said they thought that I was being emotionally abused in the relationship with C. (I use the term "relationship" in its generic sense. C had been a fairly close friend of mine at one stage but never a lover.) I was quite taken aback, because it had never occurred to me to frame the events in that context or think of myself as abused, but looking at the lasting effects of it on me, I had to concede that H had a point.
And although obviously C never said this, I feel convinced that part of what was going on was that my life looked "unfairly" better/luckier to C than their own. And one of the effects which I think has remained with me is a fear of that situation where someone else looks at me and envies what I've got, and treats me with hostility as a result.
To be fair, I think I probably had some level of that fear before, but the era with C really "brought it home" and "rubbed it in".
Mind you, one thing I've learned between then and now is that if people are treating me like that, it's time to leave. In retrospect it's clear that I went on trying to resolve things with C long past the time when "staying with it" was healthy. So if a similar thing happened now, it wouldn't turn out that way.
The second story is of just one fleeting incident.
I was in a group of people organising something, and a close friend of mine N was also in the group. And in the hectic middle of the event, I needed to talk to N (about something I thought they ought to know), and N was rushing around being busy and wouldn't listen. And I got very frustrated and a bit upset.
Also around that day was R, who already knew N but whom I had only just met. R picked up on my frustration with the situation with N, and began to talk to me about it. I didn't want to talk to R about me and N (sensitive territory, with a long history by then). But R hadn't asked me if I wanted to talk about it, they'd just spontaneously started. And I felt uncomfortable with that - sort of invaded - and said fairly bluntly that I didn't want to discuss it.
R did not take that well. It was like an affront to them that I didn't want to entrust them with that bit of my business. (It's probably relevant that I had been having conversations earlier in the day with other people where they did entrust me with their business, and R was aware of that.) And R's response was to have an outburst at me about how I thought I was a star and "untouchable" and I was trying to set myself above everyone else. Or something like that.
From the way R interpreted my saying "leave it", it felt like they'd been watching out all day for an opportunity to help me with a problem, not out of pure generosity but so that I'd be "back down on their level".
See what I mean? I'm carrying around this version of the world where people want you to have problems! They need to construe some kind of parity between your problems and their problems, otherwise the imbalance means to them that something's not right!
And obviously in reality this is not true of everyone. I have lots of friends now who are "happy for me" if I'm happy even if they're not as happy just then. And I can be happy "for" people myself if they're happy even if I'm not. (In fact it can be quite reassuring and inspiring - like a reminder "happiness is possible".)
I'd want them to have compassion for me, and I might not want them to go on at length about their jammy luck. But that's different from wishing they'd have a problem to equal mine, or trying to cause them one.
(This also reminds me of what seems to be quite a common theme on LJ - people feeling slightly cautious about posting how everything's going really well for them, when they know that some people who'll be reading it are going through a bad time.)
So this is all quite profound stuff, because I'm thinking: what would it be like to live a life where I'm willing to risk not having any problems? Not that if I eliminated all trace of self-sabotage, I wouldn't naturally have difficult times anyway: but that's not all the time, and even then there's a choice about how to construe the difficult bits, as I know very well. What if I were to give up ever trading on "having a problem" to buy acceptance from people who want everyone to be approximately as unhappy as they are? Then I'd have to accept the chance of being envied sometimes and maybe sometimes disliked. But fuck it, why should I sabotage myself even slightly in order to humour a few grumpy people, how fucked up is that??!
I think I'm onto something here :-)
I started out wanting to think about some things on which I tend to move slowly, and one of them is my accounts (which are on my mind at the moment due to the tax return deadline on 31 January).
Initially, I was remembering a slightly similar area where in the past I'd started wondering "Have I got some kind of psychological resistance to this?" but eventually concluded "Naah - it just is complicated, and all slowness is easily explained by logistical factors". I thought it was possible that this was one of those and I was making 2+2=5 (as they say).
But I also had a little inkling that maybe there was some kind of thing going on which explains why I never seem to get my tax return in till the last minute, and which explains why for the last week I've been not doing it :-)
When I started looking at that, I realised that part of it was, if not exactly a logistical factor, a simple habit: that a lot of the time, I'm busy, and I have this habit of ranking things by urgency. "Can this wait? - Yes - OK leave it for now then". And of course that would tend to push things like the accounts right up to just before their deadline. Whereas in fact there are some things where a better question or thought would be more like "How about I polish off some of this now? and I'll thank myself for it later". (And indeed I do apply that sometimes, even sometimes to aspects of my accounts.)
I also realised that there's one stage of doing my accounts which I particularly dislike, which is when I get to the things which aren't entirely straightforward but require subjective decisions. Like whether to bother stocktaking some area where I've got supplies, or whether to count something as a business expense, or whether to throw away a receipt which I'm pretty certain was business but where I can't now work out what it was. And it seems like in a way I've been using the deadline to push me through the stage where I finally have to deal with those.
And I thought: well, even if I want to keep using the deadline to push me to do these last few tricky bits, that's still no reason not to do all the rest of it much earlier. The whole job doesn't have to be permeated with that tricky flavour - some of it is simple.
But the really juicy insight was yet to come:
I have this sense that, although I have genuinely struggled in the past with the sheer complexity of organising (even finding :-) ) that many bits of paper and that many bits of data, nowadays one of the main factors in not doing my accounts till the last minute is to have something to join in with when people are moaning about their lives! ::haha::
It actually runs deeper for me than that somewhat flippant formulation makes it sound. But that's the outline of my realisation.
It is such a British thing to have a moan. And sometimes it would be conspicuously weird and socially risky to say "my life is wonderful, flawless, I have no problems". ("All right for some.") And having a big old load of undone accounts hanging around is a really good card to play in that situation, because (a) to most people that sounds quite impressive as a problem, and (b) it isn't an invitation for nosey people to stick their nosey fingers into my business. (Partly because other people mostly don't seem to feel like they're full of good advice on how to do accounts, and partly because even if they do poke at it a bit, it just isn't very sensitive territory for me.) Perfect!
So in that way it's comfortable and defensive for me to allow this "problem" to persist year on year.
The deeper level is a whole perennial issue for me about being privileged and lucky, and how I am about that and how other people are about that.
In describing myself as privileged, I don't mean that I come from a specially rich family, although we weren't specially skint either. Nor did I go to a posh school; but I do consider myself educationally privileged, partly in that I was brought up to think for myself. Then there's having had an unabusive and generally fairly sensible upbringing and having through luck and caution escaped any traumatic encounters with scary people (touch wood); being white in a white-majority country, reasonably physically fit and naturally fairly thin, which save me a lot of prejudicial bother; plus having enough to eat, not being at war, having mostly-free healthcare, and all the things which many people take for granted which are privileges of being in this part of the world at this time.
Plus, an aspect of those combined pieces of luck (mainly health and the educational privilege of a good grounding in emotional wisdom) is a resilience which allows me to keep the downside in perspective. Which is itself something not to be taken for granted. I mean, it's not like I "lead a charmed life", but I can usually put stressful or painful events into a context that includes love and beautiful sunsets.
As for other people's attitudes: Two historical stories spring to mind in this connection, one a sustained era of bad stuff, one a small incident.
The era of bad stuff is from a household I lived in in the early 1990s.
It was a shared house, and people moved in and out over the time I lived there.
Someone moved in (call them C), and over some months or maybe a year or so, they developed a "thing" about how I had my life arranged. I had done a mutually beneficial deal with someone else in the house, to trade away some of the prosaic domestic things that I didn't want to do. But C was having to do their own share of the same prosaic domestic things, and C didn't want to either. And if C had to, then it wasn't fair that someone else had worked out a way (however ethical) not to have to. So I was getting away with something.
(Or at least, that's what I think now was the gist of the issue. At the time, it wasn't that clear to me.)
I think initially I didn't handle it very well - I was like "if you don't like my arrangements that's your problem", which was theoretically defensible but tactless. But as the whole thing of C's complaints about me and my "selfishness" became a bigger and bigger issue, I really went out of my way to try and sort it out. I apologised for where I thought I'd been a bit dismissive, and I tried once or twice to initiate a conversation like: this is how I'm feeling about the situation, how are you feeling about it, is there something specific you want, how do you think we can resolve this? But none of that worked, and the atmosphere got horribler and horribler until I was basically hiding in my room whenever C was home in order not to encounter them. And eventually I solved it by moving out.
After moving out, I gradually started to feel better and "more like myself", and only as it wore off, a year or so later, did I realise the degree to which C had successfully convinced me that I was a bad person.
It helped when one day I was introduced to my successor in the old household, M (whom I hadn't met till then), and found out that M had been having an extraordinarily similar experience with C.
(C accused M of not doing their fair share of the housework. M said: let's draw up a rota then. C refused: they "shouldn't need to do that". - No, because of course we should all know by telepathy the one true way of dividing housework according to C!)
It also helped when I discovered a wonderful essay by Joanna Russ, anatomising a particular pattern where person A, who's given away a lot of their power, will behave in a very hostile way to person B who still has theirs, because it was obviously B's job as the more powerful one to take care of poor little A, and how dare they not. There was a phrase in the essay something like "A assumes that B has no feelings, or that if ze does, hurting them is a meritorious act". I still remember the moment when I read that sentence and recognised it as how C had been treating me towards the end.
Some years later, I told this whole story to a wise friend H, and H said they thought that I was being emotionally abused in the relationship with C. (I use the term "relationship" in its generic sense. C had been a fairly close friend of mine at one stage but never a lover.) I was quite taken aback, because it had never occurred to me to frame the events in that context or think of myself as abused, but looking at the lasting effects of it on me, I had to concede that H had a point.
And although obviously C never said this, I feel convinced that part of what was going on was that my life looked "unfairly" better/luckier to C than their own. And one of the effects which I think has remained with me is a fear of that situation where someone else looks at me and envies what I've got, and treats me with hostility as a result.
To be fair, I think I probably had some level of that fear before, but the era with C really "brought it home" and "rubbed it in".
Mind you, one thing I've learned between then and now is that if people are treating me like that, it's time to leave. In retrospect it's clear that I went on trying to resolve things with C long past the time when "staying with it" was healthy. So if a similar thing happened now, it wouldn't turn out that way.
The second story is of just one fleeting incident.
I was in a group of people organising something, and a close friend of mine N was also in the group. And in the hectic middle of the event, I needed to talk to N (about something I thought they ought to know), and N was rushing around being busy and wouldn't listen. And I got very frustrated and a bit upset.
Also around that day was R, who already knew N but whom I had only just met. R picked up on my frustration with the situation with N, and began to talk to me about it. I didn't want to talk to R about me and N (sensitive territory, with a long history by then). But R hadn't asked me if I wanted to talk about it, they'd just spontaneously started. And I felt uncomfortable with that - sort of invaded - and said fairly bluntly that I didn't want to discuss it.
R did not take that well. It was like an affront to them that I didn't want to entrust them with that bit of my business. (It's probably relevant that I had been having conversations earlier in the day with other people where they did entrust me with their business, and R was aware of that.) And R's response was to have an outburst at me about how I thought I was a star and "untouchable" and I was trying to set myself above everyone else. Or something like that.
From the way R interpreted my saying "leave it", it felt like they'd been watching out all day for an opportunity to help me with a problem, not out of pure generosity but so that I'd be "back down on their level".
See what I mean? I'm carrying around this version of the world where people want you to have problems! They need to construe some kind of parity between your problems and their problems, otherwise the imbalance means to them that something's not right!
And obviously in reality this is not true of everyone. I have lots of friends now who are "happy for me" if I'm happy even if they're not as happy just then. And I can be happy "for" people myself if they're happy even if I'm not. (In fact it can be quite reassuring and inspiring - like a reminder "happiness is possible".)
I'd want them to have compassion for me, and I might not want them to go on at length about their jammy luck. But that's different from wishing they'd have a problem to equal mine, or trying to cause them one.
(This also reminds me of what seems to be quite a common theme on LJ - people feeling slightly cautious about posting how everything's going really well for them, when they know that some people who'll be reading it are going through a bad time.)
So this is all quite profound stuff, because I'm thinking: what would it be like to live a life where I'm willing to risk not having any problems? Not that if I eliminated all trace of self-sabotage, I wouldn't naturally have difficult times anyway: but that's not all the time, and even then there's a choice about how to construe the difficult bits, as I know very well. What if I were to give up ever trading on "having a problem" to buy acceptance from people who want everyone to be approximately as unhappy as they are? Then I'd have to accept the chance of being envied sometimes and maybe sometimes disliked. But fuck it, why should I sabotage myself even slightly in order to humour a few grumpy people, how fucked up is that??!
I think I'm onto something here :-)
no subject
.... Interesting....
Oh, I have "Weather" going round my brain at the moment. Can you point me at your website? I'd like to buy one of your CDs.
no subject
Oooh! I feel honoured :-)
Can you point me at your website? I'd like to buy one of your CDs.
It's www.single-bass.co.uk. But I must confess that the only album I've yet done doesn't have Weather on it, due to my glacial slowness in doing recordings. Sorry!
no subject