talk and musings
Feb. 13th, 2003 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
memevectorCurrently in Canterbury staying with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
36, kimble and barakta. Last night was my talk at the Kent University LGBT soc.
A strategic suggestion (fromkimble I think) had been that this year's talk should be on a more obviously student-attractive theme than last year's - not that I'd necessarily talk about different stuff, but we'd give it a more crowd-pulling title.
It occurred to me that it would be cool to do something on love, sex & relationships that would be sort of like "things that the 20-year-old me could have done with knowing". This would give us a good excuse to put "sex" in the title. The one we went with in the end was "Love, sex & partnership: what do you want & how are you gonna get it?"
My idea for the structure of the talk was roughly like this...
- A bit of stuff about cultural programming (e.g. fairy tales)
- Love: the difference between eros and agape, and a longish fave quote about how falling in love can be part of your evolution as a person, kind of thing
- Sex: a spiel about under-acknowledged variables in sexual preference, which I've done in several of my "diversity"-themed talks, which was inspired by an essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. And then a somewhat similar thing about varieties of BDSM, and varieties of BDSM context/dynamics, which I'd also done before.
- Partnership: the difference between what I call partnership and its absence
- A bit about people's capacities and "finding your people"
- A little exercise I made up called "The true valentine's card", which was a thought experiment about picturing someone you'd like to be closer to and then imagining what you'd really like to say to them if you could say anything (this was kind of an audience-participation bit so they wouldn't just have to listen to me for ages)
- Asking for what you want: some thoughts & quotes on how rewarding it can be to make someone an offer even if they say no, and musings around that general subject
- Maintaining it when you've got it: some various wise quotes on "how to do relationships".
After I'd spoken, we had a little break, and then a question and answer bit which went in a sort of "general discussion" direction. Discussion was quite lively compared to the two most similar events I've done (here last year and Sheffield University LGB at the end of 2001). Perhaps the room helped - it was small enough that it was pretty easy for people to hear each other.
Somewhat to my surprise, the most controversial bit seemed to be what I'd said on "finding your people". Did that mean that until you'd "found your people" you were always compromising to fit in? And didn't I think that some people didn't need to find anyone in particular and they could work things out by themself? Maybe that was just me, and I shouldn't generalise that whole thing to everyone in the world. Etc.
It was very interesting! And I was left wondering to what degree it was a case of
a) There is something universal in what I was saying there, but it came out wrong so that people didn't recognise it
and to what degree it's a case of
b) That's my issue, but it's been so fundamental for me (and for loads of people I know) that it's never occurred to me that some people just didn't have it.
I mean, I know that was my least "finished" area of the talk, so there's quite a good chance that it was also the least clearly put section. But I wouldn't want to assume it was only that.
So what do I mean about this "finding your people" business?
Well it seems to me that there have been certain turning-point "find-a-community" moments in my life where suddenly I was going "Yeah!".
Part of it is to do with common experience. And part of it is to do with similar ways of thinking. Perhaps the crux of it is "What conversations is it possible to have with { these people / this person } and be understood?".
A classic example of it is the first night that I went down to the local bi-women's group. This was my first in-person encounter with "the bi community", although I was close friends with one bi person by then (who was themself not really linked with the community at that point, but living more of a half-gay, half-straight life), and I'd already discovered soc.bi on the net. That evening had that quality of "Yeah! These are my people!". Some of the people I met that night are still now friends that I see fairly often.
Another example is my friendship with [someone I'll temporarily pseudonym] N. One thing we had in common (I say "had" because we've been out of touch for a few years now) was a very similar relationship with death. I am what seems to me unusually present to the reality of death - that any of us might die any day, that this day could be my last, that when I see anyone it might be the last time I see them. I mean, that is the reality, but it's one that most people don't seem present to most of the time - you only have to observe how most people drive on the motorway to get a sense of the prevalent delusions of immortality :-/ And N was very very similar to me in that regard - more so than anyone else I've ever had the conversation with. We both had that sense of our own mortality, and it gave each of us sometimes a terrible sense of urgency and "Not done enough yet", but also sometimes an amazing sense of "isn't life miraculous and aren't we lucky to be alive". And it was just really sort of relaxing to not have to explain that one, and be able to talk about how the world looks from there. There were other areas as well where we had very fundamentally similar, but not necessarily particularly common, outlooks on life.
(As a sidelight on that, I'll add that a more typical response to anything I might say along those lines would be something like "Well yes, but you can't live your life thinking about that all the time". There is a sense in which I do live my life thinking about that all the time - not like every minute, but it certainly informs many many many of my choices - so telling me that I "can't" is pretty much equivalent to saying "You're so weird that I can't even conceive of what it's like to be you". So that's the background against which it was an oasis to meet N, who just "got it".)
Similar thing with meeting36 - suddenly there was this whole world of conversation available about genderqueer, and I'd never ever met anyone who thought like that before, except to some degree me!
Not quite so dramatic, but it's also noticeable to me that if I had to write a list now of "top ten valuable listeners in my life who know most about my life at the moment", probably more than half the list (includingippola and wandra) are people I didn't even know five years ago. So it kind of seems like there's a continual slow refinement going on of "meet new people, recruit the ones I'm most "on the same page as" to be my close friends, allow some older friendships which seem less rewarding or less current to lapse or go intermittent".
Looking back on it, in a way I'm kind of amazed that people were arguing about this last night. Because even if there are people who've never had any experience like that, a LGBT meeting is about the last place I'd expect to find them. I would have thought there was an element of "these are my people, yay" involved in almost any coming-out-into-a-community (even though you might not feel like the whole community under that label was "your people"). So maybe that's evidence for something not being clear in how I explained it. (I didn't say as much about it last night as I have above, because I was watching the clock a bit by then.)
One thing that occurred to me afterwards is that for some people it might be a very unpalatable idea that there is such a thing as "meeting your people" that they are yet to do. Because of the implications about the state of your life now. To me, it's a really optimistic notion - the idea that there will be further evolution & discoveries possible for me when I discover the next person who's gonna open some doors and rock my world with their understanding. But for some people it might have sounded like "Life tasks: find your people: not yet ticked off. Memevector's done it, you haven't, therefore you're one down and lagging behind". It might sound like "you're not there yet" and they might find that intolerable.
But the thing is, it's not a binary. In my concept of how this works, we've all accomplished it to some degree any time we make a choice about who to talk to, and yet there's always more possible.
Somehow linked in with all this was a thing about whether people-in-general are "on a quest" in their lives or whether (again) "that's just me". I've slightly forgotten exactly how the argument went at that point.36 said afterwards that ze'd thought I'd dug myself into a hole by being too prescriptive and was trying to extricate me by asking leading questions, and I was apparently digging myself into the hole some more. So one of 36's questions was did I think everyone was on a quest. And I was saying I thought maybe they probably were although they might not be present to it all the time. And the general feeling seemed to be that this was very presumptuous of me.
Of course it totally depends on what you define as "being on a quest".
One of the arguments against it is the number of people whose only quest seems to be something like "make lots of money" or "follow my football team". Or the number of people whose only quest seems to be "Don't think of anything that might be upsetting or require a reevaluation of the world".
I suppose what I was thinking of there is the idea that it's a natural human drive or orientation or tendency to try and be happy and fulfilled. I don't feel the need to debate whether that's necessarily literally true, but I do think it's a useful and respectful default axiom to come from. (Not sure if "axiom" is exactly the word. But anyway.) What seems to be implied in the contrary, which I'm not willing to align with, is the suggestion or idea that some people are just born to be drones, kind of thing. I really don't think that. It looks to me like: every child is born with curiosity, but people also learn to limit the risk, and some people decide early on that in their environment, curiosity is just too risky. And they settle for whatever they've got so far. But my point is, it seems to me (or at least I'm willing to act as if) they always retain the potential for curiosity and change, and a shift in the environment can allow it to manifest again.
And even the "Don't think of difficult stuff" orientation could be construed as a quest for happiness. It feels to some people like that'll make them happier than dealing with the difficult stuff. Some might suggest that they might be mistaken in how they're going about trying to be happy, but I don't think that's an implausible motive to impute to people.
Another area of potential (and last night, I suspect, actual) misunderstanding is in what I'm implying about my relationships with people who are very different from me and in a sense not [what I'm terming here] "my people".
One of my critics last night said that if I only hung out with people the same as me, then I would never get any new ideas or learn anything, because it would be a closed system - a circle - and that I could learn much more by deliberately looking for people who are different from me. Answering that was a bit of a "where do I start?" scenario - it just so isn't like that! I mean (a) of course no-one is so identical in thought to me that I don't learn anything from them, and (b) I live in the world, and people to meet who are different from me have never, ever been in short supply!
Part of the background, which I'm realising is not evident unless I make it evident, is the degree to which I've made a lifetime habit of visiting other people's worlds. I like to know how the world appears to other people - how they've got it construed and what obstacles they're facing and what they've discovered. I think I've always been quite good at "translating". Like, being able to explain one person's reality to another, in such a way that the first person goes "Yeah, that's what I meant". Sometimes even redescribing someone's reality so that they recognise it more clearly themself. I don't mean that absolutely always happens - sometimes I miss the mark for lack of a correlating experience in my own life. But sometimes. (Which is also partly what my songs are "for" - I want people to be able to recognise their own realities and go "Yeah, been there, that's how it is".)
There's a thing I call "tracking" - which is where as someone speaks, you go along mapping their reality by reference to your own understanding, so that when they stop, you're "there with them" and you can say it back to them or add something and they go "Yeah!"
And (a different angle) although this wasn't always true for me, nowadays I feel like there is no-one in the world I couldn't find some common ground with. Everyone is "my people" in that sense. And there's no-one in the world I don't care about at all, with the possible exception of my next door neighbours from last year who repeatedly deprived me of my sleep, and for whom I can't currently seem to muster any compassion.
So I'm absolutely not saying "always stick to your own kind and never mind the rest".
But I have learned through long experience that expecting "any randomly-selected person" to understand my world is a route to disappointment and frustration. Causing that is not necessarily within my power. Regardless of how I speak, some people aren't gonna get it: because they have no point of reference in their own experience from which to get it, or because apprehending the reality of my life would interfere with their cherished beliefs that they're not willing to give up, or because they think in such a different way from me that (even given identical experiences) the world will never appear to them as it appears to me.
So this is absolutely not about "can I connect with other people". My experience is that I can always do that (to some degree) by getting into their world. This is about who shares my world, and the nurturing / support / "space to play" that I get from having other people around who can share my world.
Yeah.
Hmm, I think if I'd got it that clear before last night, they might have understood what I was talking about :-)
It's about reducing the amount of my life in which I'm "on my own with it" - on my own because no-one else I know is dealing with that question in such a way as to even be able to understand where I've got to so far, let alone tell me a new answer.
And there's a difference, as well, between knowing what I mean "in real time" as I describe and speculate while exploring something, and being able to understand it after some translation. I did once know someone (A) who thought so similarly to me that I could go top speed without losing them (at least on certain topics that we were both interested in & familiar with), but I don't see A often nowadays. What I've got a lot more of now than I did is people with experiences in common, so with them I do have a pretty good approximation of "tracking" (albeit usually with some translation "on the fly" by me, mostly in being a bit more linear in expression than I am in thought). But people who can "track me" wherever I go, without my needing to run any kind of "are they still with me" awareness, like I can do for other people sometimes and like A did for me, is a resource I've never had as much of as I could use. Part of the reason I like Thinking Sessions is that, while the listener does "track" as well as they can, the structure is designed not to be reliant on how perfectly they succeed in that. It's a way of having someone "be there with you" even if they don't totally understand what it is you're dealing with.
So, going back from there to the question of "is it universal or is it just me?": a part which I suspect may be universal is that anyone does better when they have at least one person who can pretty much understand where they're coming from, as compared to a world where they're dealing with stuff that no-one else understands.
On the other hand, what may be more specific to me and others like me is the frequency with which I don't have even that one person.
Yes, there must be quite a few people who think similarly to me (in terms of the NLP stuff on visual-based/audio-based/kinaesthetic-based brain processes & metaphors) - mostly metaphor'd in a very spatial (primarily visual/kinaesthetic) way, well suited to maths, music and logic. And I slightly know a few other people who have gone as far into language and ontology as I have. And obviously I know lots of people who identify as bi and/or queer and/or genderqueer and/or feminist.
But it's the intersection of all those sets that's frustratingly small. In fact, probably zero (empty set) among people I know. (Shaun was a pretty close match to me for those variables combined - thought processes evidently similar to mine, bi, ontology/computing/music backgrounds - but ze's dead now. Sadness.) So there are conversations I'd like to have, where the only person I can really have them with is me! Though I do know people who can share pretty large chunks of my world, e.g.ippola, 36 and wandra (not exactly the same bits in each case).
I think it's this experience of "no-one to talk to about X" that people relate to when they agree with me that "finding your people" is important.
Perhaps there is also a variable of how much your process of figuring things out involves the attention or contribution of another person. Perhaps the critic last night who said "But some people work things out by themselves" just works things out in a really different way from me, which never needs other people. (Not that I don't figure stuff out by myself, of course I do, or how could I ever get into this place where no-one else knows what I mean?!)
But it could also be that they simply have always had the "at least one person who pretty much gets it", and so have never had the experience of repeatedly missing that resource. (though, again, it's not really binary - there are degrees of "getting it".) Or on the other hand, maybe they've always not had it, and so never realised that something was available from it that they didn't already have. I'm sure there must be people who go through life never meeting the others "like them" and never knowing what they missed. There are enough love stories (both autobiography and fiction) where a sudden "meeting of minds" opens vistas never before thought possible by someone. Well, I mean, what if they
hadn't met that person? It's always partly chance.
The really fab thing about this, though, is like "who am I gonna meet next year?" or even "next week?" Which is not in any way to dis the friends I've already got, or to write off the possibility of more intimacy and more explorations with them. It's just a sense, from all my experience of meeting certain people and going "Yeah! At last I can have THIS conversation!!", and what an immense difference that makes, that there is an extraordinary amount of untapped possibility. Like, there is still so much else that I could explore if I had someone else to explore it with who was on the same journey. "On the same page". With a few jigsaw pieces that I haven't got yet, and a curiosity about the jigsaw pieces Ive got and they haven't.
36, kimble and barakta. Last night was my talk at the Kent University LGBT soc. A strategic suggestion (from
kimble I think) had been that this year's talk should be on a more obviously student-attractive theme than last year's - not that I'd necessarily talk about different stuff, but we'd give it a more crowd-pulling title. It occurred to me that it would be cool to do something on love, sex & relationships that would be sort of like "things that the 20-year-old me could have done with knowing". This would give us a good excuse to put "sex" in the title. The one we went with in the end was "Love, sex & partnership: what do you want & how are you gonna get it?"
My idea for the structure of the talk was roughly like this...
- A bit of stuff about cultural programming (e.g. fairy tales)
- Love: the difference between eros and agape, and a longish fave quote about how falling in love can be part of your evolution as a person, kind of thing
- Sex: a spiel about under-acknowledged variables in sexual preference, which I've done in several of my "diversity"-themed talks, which was inspired by an essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. And then a somewhat similar thing about varieties of BDSM, and varieties of BDSM context/dynamics, which I'd also done before.
- Partnership: the difference between what I call partnership and its absence
- A bit about people's capacities and "finding your people"
- A little exercise I made up called "The true valentine's card", which was a thought experiment about picturing someone you'd like to be closer to and then imagining what you'd really like to say to them if you could say anything (this was kind of an audience-participation bit so they wouldn't just have to listen to me for ages)
- Asking for what you want: some thoughts & quotes on how rewarding it can be to make someone an offer even if they say no, and musings around that general subject
- Maintaining it when you've got it: some various wise quotes on "how to do relationships".
After I'd spoken, we had a little break, and then a question and answer bit which went in a sort of "general discussion" direction. Discussion was quite lively compared to the two most similar events I've done (here last year and Sheffield University LGB at the end of 2001). Perhaps the room helped - it was small enough that it was pretty easy for people to hear each other.
Somewhat to my surprise, the most controversial bit seemed to be what I'd said on "finding your people". Did that mean that until you'd "found your people" you were always compromising to fit in? And didn't I think that some people didn't need to find anyone in particular and they could work things out by themself? Maybe that was just me, and I shouldn't generalise that whole thing to everyone in the world. Etc.
It was very interesting! And I was left wondering to what degree it was a case of
a) There is something universal in what I was saying there, but it came out wrong so that people didn't recognise it
and to what degree it's a case of
b) That's my issue, but it's been so fundamental for me (and for loads of people I know) that it's never occurred to me that some people just didn't have it.
I mean, I know that was my least "finished" area of the talk, so there's quite a good chance that it was also the least clearly put section. But I wouldn't want to assume it was only that.
So what do I mean about this "finding your people" business?
Well it seems to me that there have been certain turning-point "find-a-community" moments in my life where suddenly I was going "Yeah!".
Part of it is to do with common experience. And part of it is to do with similar ways of thinking. Perhaps the crux of it is "What conversations is it possible to have with { these people / this person } and be understood?".
A classic example of it is the first night that I went down to the local bi-women's group. This was my first in-person encounter with "the bi community", although I was close friends with one bi person by then (who was themself not really linked with the community at that point, but living more of a half-gay, half-straight life), and I'd already discovered soc.bi on the net. That evening had that quality of "Yeah! These are my people!". Some of the people I met that night are still now friends that I see fairly often.
Another example is my friendship with [someone I'll temporarily pseudonym] N. One thing we had in common (I say "had" because we've been out of touch for a few years now) was a very similar relationship with death. I am what seems to me unusually present to the reality of death - that any of us might die any day, that this day could be my last, that when I see anyone it might be the last time I see them. I mean, that is the reality, but it's one that most people don't seem present to most of the time - you only have to observe how most people drive on the motorway to get a sense of the prevalent delusions of immortality :-/ And N was very very similar to me in that regard - more so than anyone else I've ever had the conversation with. We both had that sense of our own mortality, and it gave each of us sometimes a terrible sense of urgency and "Not done enough yet", but also sometimes an amazing sense of "isn't life miraculous and aren't we lucky to be alive". And it was just really sort of relaxing to not have to explain that one, and be able to talk about how the world looks from there. There were other areas as well where we had very fundamentally similar, but not necessarily particularly common, outlooks on life.
(As a sidelight on that, I'll add that a more typical response to anything I might say along those lines would be something like "Well yes, but you can't live your life thinking about that all the time". There is a sense in which I do live my life thinking about that all the time - not like every minute, but it certainly informs many many many of my choices - so telling me that I "can't" is pretty much equivalent to saying "You're so weird that I can't even conceive of what it's like to be you". So that's the background against which it was an oasis to meet N, who just "got it".)
Similar thing with meeting
36 - suddenly there was this whole world of conversation available about genderqueer, and I'd never ever met anyone who thought like that before, except to some degree me!Not quite so dramatic, but it's also noticeable to me that if I had to write a list now of "top ten valuable listeners in my life who know most about my life at the moment", probably more than half the list (including
ippola and wandra) are people I didn't even know five years ago. So it kind of seems like there's a continual slow refinement going on of "meet new people, recruit the ones I'm most "on the same page as" to be my close friends, allow some older friendships which seem less rewarding or less current to lapse or go intermittent". Looking back on it, in a way I'm kind of amazed that people were arguing about this last night. Because even if there are people who've never had any experience like that, a LGBT meeting is about the last place I'd expect to find them. I would have thought there was an element of "these are my people, yay" involved in almost any coming-out-into-a-community (even though you might not feel like the whole community under that label was "your people"). So maybe that's evidence for something not being clear in how I explained it. (I didn't say as much about it last night as I have above, because I was watching the clock a bit by then.)
One thing that occurred to me afterwards is that for some people it might be a very unpalatable idea that there is such a thing as "meeting your people" that they are yet to do. Because of the implications about the state of your life now. To me, it's a really optimistic notion - the idea that there will be further evolution & discoveries possible for me when I discover the next person who's gonna open some doors and rock my world with their understanding. But for some people it might have sounded like "Life tasks: find your people: not yet ticked off. Memevector's done it, you haven't, therefore you're one down and lagging behind". It might sound like "you're not there yet" and they might find that intolerable.
But the thing is, it's not a binary. In my concept of how this works, we've all accomplished it to some degree any time we make a choice about who to talk to, and yet there's always more possible.
Somehow linked in with all this was a thing about whether people-in-general are "on a quest" in their lives or whether (again) "that's just me". I've slightly forgotten exactly how the argument went at that point.
36 said afterwards that ze'd thought I'd dug myself into a hole by being too prescriptive and was trying to extricate me by asking leading questions, and I was apparently digging myself into the hole some more. So one of 36's questions was did I think everyone was on a quest. And I was saying I thought maybe they probably were although they might not be present to it all the time. And the general feeling seemed to be that this was very presumptuous of me. Of course it totally depends on what you define as "being on a quest".
One of the arguments against it is the number of people whose only quest seems to be something like "make lots of money" or "follow my football team". Or the number of people whose only quest seems to be "Don't think of anything that might be upsetting or require a reevaluation of the world".
I suppose what I was thinking of there is the idea that it's a natural human drive or orientation or tendency to try and be happy and fulfilled. I don't feel the need to debate whether that's necessarily literally true, but I do think it's a useful and respectful default axiom to come from. (Not sure if "axiom" is exactly the word. But anyway.) What seems to be implied in the contrary, which I'm not willing to align with, is the suggestion or idea that some people are just born to be drones, kind of thing. I really don't think that. It looks to me like: every child is born with curiosity, but people also learn to limit the risk, and some people decide early on that in their environment, curiosity is just too risky. And they settle for whatever they've got so far. But my point is, it seems to me (or at least I'm willing to act as if) they always retain the potential for curiosity and change, and a shift in the environment can allow it to manifest again.
And even the "Don't think of difficult stuff" orientation could be construed as a quest for happiness. It feels to some people like that'll make them happier than dealing with the difficult stuff. Some might suggest that they might be mistaken in how they're going about trying to be happy, but I don't think that's an implausible motive to impute to people.
Another area of potential (and last night, I suspect, actual) misunderstanding is in what I'm implying about my relationships with people who are very different from me and in a sense not [what I'm terming here] "my people".
One of my critics last night said that if I only hung out with people the same as me, then I would never get any new ideas or learn anything, because it would be a closed system - a circle - and that I could learn much more by deliberately looking for people who are different from me. Answering that was a bit of a "where do I start?" scenario - it just so isn't like that! I mean (a) of course no-one is so identical in thought to me that I don't learn anything from them, and (b) I live in the world, and people to meet who are different from me have never, ever been in short supply!
Part of the background, which I'm realising is not evident unless I make it evident, is the degree to which I've made a lifetime habit of visiting other people's worlds. I like to know how the world appears to other people - how they've got it construed and what obstacles they're facing and what they've discovered. I think I've always been quite good at "translating". Like, being able to explain one person's reality to another, in such a way that the first person goes "Yeah, that's what I meant". Sometimes even redescribing someone's reality so that they recognise it more clearly themself. I don't mean that absolutely always happens - sometimes I miss the mark for lack of a correlating experience in my own life. But sometimes. (Which is also partly what my songs are "for" - I want people to be able to recognise their own realities and go "Yeah, been there, that's how it is".)
There's a thing I call "tracking" - which is where as someone speaks, you go along mapping their reality by reference to your own understanding, so that when they stop, you're "there with them" and you can say it back to them or add something and they go "Yeah!"
And (a different angle) although this wasn't always true for me, nowadays I feel like there is no-one in the world I couldn't find some common ground with. Everyone is "my people" in that sense. And there's no-one in the world I don't care about at all, with the possible exception of my next door neighbours from last year who repeatedly deprived me of my sleep, and for whom I can't currently seem to muster any compassion.
So I'm absolutely not saying "always stick to your own kind and never mind the rest".
But I have learned through long experience that expecting "any randomly-selected person" to understand my world is a route to disappointment and frustration. Causing that is not necessarily within my power. Regardless of how I speak, some people aren't gonna get it: because they have no point of reference in their own experience from which to get it, or because apprehending the reality of my life would interfere with their cherished beliefs that they're not willing to give up, or because they think in such a different way from me that (even given identical experiences) the world will never appear to them as it appears to me.
So this is absolutely not about "can I connect with other people". My experience is that I can always do that (to some degree) by getting into their world. This is about who shares my world, and the nurturing / support / "space to play" that I get from having other people around who can share my world.
Yeah.
Hmm, I think if I'd got it that clear before last night, they might have understood what I was talking about :-)
It's about reducing the amount of my life in which I'm "on my own with it" - on my own because no-one else I know is dealing with that question in such a way as to even be able to understand where I've got to so far, let alone tell me a new answer.
And there's a difference, as well, between knowing what I mean "in real time" as I describe and speculate while exploring something, and being able to understand it after some translation. I did once know someone (A) who thought so similarly to me that I could go top speed without losing them (at least on certain topics that we were both interested in & familiar with), but I don't see A often nowadays. What I've got a lot more of now than I did is people with experiences in common, so with them I do have a pretty good approximation of "tracking" (albeit usually with some translation "on the fly" by me, mostly in being a bit more linear in expression than I am in thought). But people who can "track me" wherever I go, without my needing to run any kind of "are they still with me" awareness, like I can do for other people sometimes and like A did for me, is a resource I've never had as much of as I could use. Part of the reason I like Thinking Sessions is that, while the listener does "track" as well as they can, the structure is designed not to be reliant on how perfectly they succeed in that. It's a way of having someone "be there with you" even if they don't totally understand what it is you're dealing with.
So, going back from there to the question of "is it universal or is it just me?": a part which I suspect may be universal is that anyone does better when they have at least one person who can pretty much understand where they're coming from, as compared to a world where they're dealing with stuff that no-one else understands.
On the other hand, what may be more specific to me and others like me is the frequency with which I don't have even that one person.
Yes, there must be quite a few people who think similarly to me (in terms of the NLP stuff on visual-based/audio-based/kinaesthetic-based brain processes & metaphors) - mostly metaphor'd in a very spatial (primarily visual/kinaesthetic) way, well suited to maths, music and logic. And I slightly know a few other people who have gone as far into language and ontology as I have. And obviously I know lots of people who identify as bi and/or queer and/or genderqueer and/or feminist.
But it's the intersection of all those sets that's frustratingly small. In fact, probably zero (empty set) among people I know. (Shaun was a pretty close match to me for those variables combined - thought processes evidently similar to mine, bi, ontology/computing/music backgrounds - but ze's dead now. Sadness.) So there are conversations I'd like to have, where the only person I can really have them with is me! Though I do know people who can share pretty large chunks of my world, e.g.
ippola, 36 and wandra (not exactly the same bits in each case). I think it's this experience of "no-one to talk to about X" that people relate to when they agree with me that "finding your people" is important.
Perhaps there is also a variable of how much your process of figuring things out involves the attention or contribution of another person. Perhaps the critic last night who said "But some people work things out by themselves" just works things out in a really different way from me, which never needs other people. (Not that I don't figure stuff out by myself, of course I do, or how could I ever get into this place where no-one else knows what I mean?!)
But it could also be that they simply have always had the "at least one person who pretty much gets it", and so have never had the experience of repeatedly missing that resource. (though, again, it's not really binary - there are degrees of "getting it".) Or on the other hand, maybe they've always not had it, and so never realised that something was available from it that they didn't already have. I'm sure there must be people who go through life never meeting the others "like them" and never knowing what they missed. There are enough love stories (both autobiography and fiction) where a sudden "meeting of minds" opens vistas never before thought possible by someone. Well, I mean, what if they
hadn't met that person? It's always partly chance.
The really fab thing about this, though, is like "who am I gonna meet next year?" or even "next week?" Which is not in any way to dis the friends I've already got, or to write off the possibility of more intimacy and more explorations with them. It's just a sense, from all my experience of meeting certain people and going "Yeah! At last I can have THIS conversation!!", and what an immense difference that makes, that there is an extraordinary amount of untapped possibility. Like, there is still so much else that I could explore if I had someone else to explore it with who was on the same journey. "On the same page". With a few jigsaw pieces that I haven't got yet, and a curiosity about the jigsaw pieces Ive got and they haven't.
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Thinking (lite)
Date: 2003-02-12 10:00 am (UTC)It could be both.
While it may not be possible to determine if 'everyone is on a quest', it is possible for you to interpret your own perceptions of people in such a way that you can say that 'I see the world as if everyone is on a quest'.
If that's useful to you then as long as it causes no harm, it's fine by me.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-02-12 01:09 pm (UTC)Just wanted to say thanks for coming to stay; doing the talkie; and just being interesting in general. Think a lot of interesting ideas have been thrown around and discussed. I think if nothing else doing the talk in reality had allowed you to realise areas of your thoughts which need to be reworded or re-evaluated in their appropriate contexts.
Hugs
Natalya
(no subject)
Date: 2003-02-12 03:13 pm (UTC)But it's the intersection of all those sets that's frustratingly small.
My Evil Ex used to call this "the whole orange". It was a large part of why I fell in love with her. She was like an oasis in the desert, at least until the Evil part kicked in.
Lots of other thoughts about the community aspect of "finding your people". Must catch up with you sometime soon when more awake :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-02-13 12:35 am (UTC)I understand the 'in the midst of life, we are in death' thing. I was thinking about it last night on the way back from a more-deaths-than-usual opera and how it contrasts with an ex who was genuinely surprised they made it to their 30th birthday (and beyond).
I'm not surprised I've got to 40, I greatly appreciate the things that have made it possible - from medical advances to a prolonged period of relative peace, to sexual choices twenty years ago - but I am aware just easily it could have been different and how fragile individual life is.
I'm not sure where it comes from for me - having a parent in the emergency services? - but it's fairly deep. Having friends die over the years and now one of the ultimate demonstrations of that fragility - a baby - have just reinforced it.
Hmm, how do other people living in a major terrorist target not think about this? Probably the same way a huge number of bisexually behaving people simply don't have a sexual identity.
I wonder if it's easier to be a drone, to accept some of the stuff we don't, yet not accept some of the things we do - like the reality of death. How are you on the life after death issue?
One of the things that makes me go, 'yes, I have found my people' in the bi community (amongst other places) is the diversity. We're not all the same.
Mind you, it can sometimes feel like it's a diversity of white middle class men and... white middle class women :))
(no subject)
Date: 2003-05-04 11:57 am (UTC)How are you on the life after death issue?
Well my working hypothesis (not sure if that's the word) is "When you're dead, you're dead".
If that's not the case, then I suppose I'll find out in due course :-)
There's a sense in which I consider that people "live on" in the memories of their friends and in what they accomplished while they were alive. But that's different.
(no subject)
Reading your entry has been quite enlightening as well. I agree with the whole "death" thing to some extent. I tend to be quite impulsive and although I often think ahead, I'm always aware of how things can change really abruptly. I also believe in some form of stability and I guess that's were my beliefs kick in. I mean, a lot of people have faith in some higher power that gives them the assurance that life will go on and that they will fulfill their goals.
~Dimitri
P.S.: I really liked the badges. I bought a couple for friends and they loved them. Thanks for making them available to us.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-02-13 10:16 pm (UTC)Completely unrelated to anything, I have written the Disability Access Guidelines for BiCon which you said ages ago that you might be able to help with. I've emailed what I have so far to your uncharted-worlds address. Let me know if you can't get to that email for whatever reason, or if you don't have time to look at it in the next week or so.
Thanks,
helen-louise