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Well, darnit, folks. I've got two potential posts bubbling (and a couple more sitting in pots waiting for an open burner), and somehow I can't sit down and write them. I have this much trouble with BLOG writing-- no wonder my career in fiction hasn't gone anywhere! I spend most evenings watching the Olympics, because if I skip that I'm haunted by MISSING them, even though I spend most of the time reading with the Olympics just ON in front of me. But tonight I just want LESS NOISE, so I'll write a post instead. Only I'm so good at avoiding it.
The amazing thing is that that paragraph there actually fits nicely with one of the things I wanted to post about. Here, first off, you may have seen this Tumblr post from Melissa Marr floating about the other day, even if you're not on Tumblr-- that there's actually a link to my response, which contains the link to the full original post (oh Tumblr, how I loath thy complications)-- anyway, it's about the unassertive habit of apologizing before you ask a question, before you speak, as if your voice is a horrible intrusion that has to be softened over with sorriness. You really have to read the post and my response because I'm not going to reiterate it all here, but I'm definitely jumping off from there.
Anyway, being that it's the story of my life, I clicked the Notes to see what other people may have been adding to this post. There really wasn't a whole lot added, but I caught one guy starting off with a "This is so true, but it isn't just women, I get lots of this from men, too," and, with the discussions of privilege in last week's entry/comments section still in my head, thought, "Oh poor dude, you are going to get your privileged male butt slammed for that argument"-- but actually, I DID see only one response to his long and helpful though a bit clueless-to-privilege post, (that links to both his post and the response), and it was quite polite. Which is nice, because even if it might come across as ignorant-of-the-ingrained-patriarchal-women-silencing-of-culture... I actually agree with him. Sure, the patriarchy may increase the problem, but the problem's BIGGER and DEEPER than that. And to be honest, the INSISTENCE that it's all just a matter of subtle sexism feels, to ME, like it's missing the point, trying to change the conversation, avoiding the real problem. Well, for me, at any rate.
I may be weird, but I've never felt much sexism, myself-- maybe because I've always leaned to Traditionally Female career paths; and I've always looked at anyone expressing any "girls can't"-such concepts as being Just Mindbogglingly Stupid, and not anything more dangerous. But I HAVE felt second-class. THIRD class. Worthless. Whatever. I just didn't attribute it to femininity. An adviser well-intentionally handed me Reviving Ophelia in college after I tried to explain my self-esteem struggles to him, but it really just frustrated me. It was missing the point. It wasn't my girliness or lack thereof that bothered me-- that had anything to do with my self-esteem problems. It was the bullying from other girls that I heard in my head whenever I tried to EXIST in a social situation. I always felt girls judging me (Curiously, there WAS another response to that Tumblr post that mentioned how other girls always felt more judgmental than guys. Not just me, then). Guys couldn't care less about me, and I only cared what THEY thought about me if they-- if HE-- happened to be that One Guy I happened to be madly in love with at that moment. But the girls had the power to make me feel Totally Shut Out.
Which is not to say that maybe there WEREN'T any subconscious patriarchal attitudes involved in any of this. Maybe I wouldn't have become QUITE so withdrawn if I WAS a privileged White Straight Middle Class Male. It's just that I had so many OTHER psychological issues that affected me much more directly. There was the whole twisted situation of my sister's death when I was six-- younger than my son is now-- which I've only recently started to figure out. For years all I thought to think about it was the typical Learning to Deal With Grief process everyone focused on, which was all I HEARD, and I was like, "Yeah, I'm fine. Obi-Wan Kenobi and I had a good talk. Why do we keep talking about this?" But I was totally messed up, just not with grief. With Survivor's Guilt, maybe? Annie was funny and outgoing and brave-- and only three, but clearly already she was the Cooler Daughter than I was, scaredy-cat crybaby that I was. And Only the Good Die Young, curse you Billy Joel. She got all sorts of special attention that last year, and losing her devastated everyone, so CLEARLY SHE was the Angel and I was alive because I WASN'T Good Enough to be an Angel. Surely everyone would have rather had HER around still instead of me. I was just a six-year-old kid. I had no abilities to see the logical fallacies here. But the impression stuck, the impression that I WASN'T the chosen one. The imagery I've always come back to is that I am the Dark Princess, always in the shadow of some vibrant, sparkling Disney Heroine whom everyone loves.* Maybe that Bright Princess started out as my sister, but I soon started projecting her onto EVERYONE, every girl who got the leads and solos in the school shows, every girl who wasn't picked last for sports, every girl who actually GOT whatever guy I happened to be madly in love with. I would always be second-best, always forgotten.
Okay, that's the TRAUMATIC CATACLYSM, but I was already set up to feel like an outcast, just because I'mFREAKING OVERSENSITIVE a Highly Sensitive Person. In the comments of my "Invisibility Cloak" post, E. Louise Bates recced this book, The Highly Sensitive Person, by Elaine N. Aron, which I promptly requested through the library, along with another book by her about parenting the Highly Sensitive Child. I had to laugh at how much the memories of being a reclusive child that I'd written about in that post seemed to be taken directly from this book (no wonder Louise made the connection!). Even the Dark Princess imagery is apparently common among Highly Sensitive types with self-esteem problems-- not so much the "princess" part, but the sense of being the one in the shadows to the shining other ones (it's REALLY BUGGING me, but I can't find the place in the book where I read this to cite it. I KNOW IT WAS THERE). Anyway, it's spelled out, how many things I mislearned about myself and my worth just because I spent so much of my childhood overwhelmed, on edge, and misunderstood. It's hard to shake the deep-down doubts, but I do understand and respect myself so much better from at least a mental, objective standpoint now than I used to. The scariest thing for me-- and the reason I grabbed the Highly Sensitive Child book as well-- is trying to figure out how to raise my SON to not learn these same fallacies about himself that I learned. I already feel like I messed up just because I was in such a deep depression for so much of his early childhood-- that I didn't respond to his needs properly then, and he's already got ISSUES-- with imperfection, with temper, with giving up. And his dad just DOESN'T GET IT, doesn't get that the boy's got a different way of experiencing the world than he does and so you've got to deal with him differently; and because I'M oversensitive and lacking-in-self-confidence, instead of taking a stand when the two of them clash, I just shut down and hide in my pill-buggy way.
Bringing us back to gender differences: Sam's a Highly Sensitive Boy in a society that expects him to "Be a MAN," and his own Dad is just as bad at insisting on language like that-- I really think that's hurting him more than helping him to cope. On the other hand, his sister is... well, if she's Highly Sensitive, it's only in a few particular (and very different) ways. She's extremely observant, has a freakishly good memory, and is pretty empathetic. On the other hand, she's LOUD. She has a constant stream of WHATEVER tumbling straight from her brain through her mouth without any sort of filter. For those of you who are My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fans-- she's basically Pinky Pie. (During her QUIETER moments, she's basically Dot Warner. And she has Claudia Kishi's fashion sense, and there, I'm done comparing her to fictional characters). Which is hilarious and fun in small doses. But the girl's got a Highly Sensitive Mom, and sometimes-- or most of the time-- I feel like a tape loop going, "Maddie, hush, Maddie, quiet down, MADELEINE, you're INSIDE, PLEASE take it down a notch," and there are days I wonder if I should be wearing hearing protection. (They were both like that from birth, too. Sam's baby cry struck me as weirdly quiet even with no siblings to compare him to; Maddie had POWERFUL OPERA SINGER LUNGS). Then I hear about how You've got to be CAREFUL you aren't setting your children up to conform to unfair gender standards-- do you try to keep your daughters quiet but encourage your sons to speak up? WELL YES, BECAUSE MY DAUGHTER IS FREAKING LOUD AND INCAPABLE OF SHUTTING UP, AND MY SON IS TIMID AND THOUGHTFUL AND LIABLE TO MUMBLE.
So, right, my point is, there ARE a lot of factors involved in developing a Sorry-For-Intruding personality type, and saying "Hey you should stop that!" is easier said than done. MAYBE it's phony etiquette enforced by people who think women should be seen and not heard, or MAYBE it's a REALLY INGRAINED SELF-ESTEEM PROBLEM with quite complicated roots.
It's funny, while I was composing this post (over the course of about 28 hours), my dearest best-friend-from-high-school-and-college, the Illustrious Angie, posted this note on my Facebook wall-- Timeline-- whatever it's called: "Amy is awesome. Just feeling appreciative," and it was promptly Liked by seven of our mutual Friends. How funny is THAT? JUST as I'm writing about my life of feeling like a second-rate impostor person, 8 people are, for no particular reason, Acknowledging their Appreciation of my Awesomeness in another browser tab. It was like you could all see me writing this, and all had to pipe up, "YOU'RE not second-rate! You're our FRIEND! WE LOVE YOU!" all at once there in retaliation.
Which just shows how warped our little minds can be. It's still really hard to NOT feel like you're intruding just by existing, sometimes. Angie herself-- she's brilliant, but she has trouble seeing that, too. Much of our friendship has consisted of exchanges boiling down to "YOU ARE SO AWESOME." "I'M not Awesome, YOU'RE Awesome." "No, no, not me, YOU, YOU are Awesome!" Look at her comments to my most recent post, which, even as she acknowledges that she's "a composition teacher and someone whose academic specialization is quote-unquote minority literatures" and has to divide her thoughtful reflections into two separate comments just to make them fit, she still titles "Possibly Useless Ramblings" and concludes with "This probably came out sounding awful; I mean ABSOLUTELY NO criticism of YOU by ANY MINUTE PART of it -- I'm just expanding on some dialogues I've been having lately about this type of thing, and if it's utterly unhelpful then please delete it -- I promise I will not be offended." IN OTHER WORDS, this highly intelligent feminist with a whole lot of knowledge of the topic in question is doing the whole apologizing-for-the-intrusion thing in the comments of the blog of one of her best friends. Oh, us. Poor, confused people blind to our own worth.
I even do it in my own posts sometimes-- that whole opening paragraph here contains an air of "gee, sorry I'm writing, but I didn't feel like watching the Olympics tonight," and if I was writing something Proper, For Real Publication, I'd cut the whole thing. The funny thing about the Internet, though, is even though anything I post COULD be read by anybody with a connection, I feel like a drop of water in a particularly remote and uncharted part of the ocean. I feel so easily IGNORABLE... and so I don't usually feel like I'm intruding by posting anything. So I'm actually a whole lot more assertive here than I would be other places!
That said, I don't MIND knowing that what I post is being read. And there is never any need to apologize for commenting, whether you're my best friend or I have no idea who you are even online. Whoever you are, you have worth, and I like to hear from you.
Particularly because I'd like to have your permission to continue posting things. Just in case my posting is a bother.
---
*I just realized this is possibly a factor in my swooning over Faramir.
The amazing thing is that that paragraph there actually fits nicely with one of the things I wanted to post about. Here, first off, you may have seen this Tumblr post from Melissa Marr floating about the other day, even if you're not on Tumblr-- that there's actually a link to my response, which contains the link to the full original post (oh Tumblr, how I loath thy complications)-- anyway, it's about the unassertive habit of apologizing before you ask a question, before you speak, as if your voice is a horrible intrusion that has to be softened over with sorriness. You really have to read the post and my response because I'm not going to reiterate it all here, but I'm definitely jumping off from there.
Anyway, being that it's the story of my life, I clicked the Notes to see what other people may have been adding to this post. There really wasn't a whole lot added, but I caught one guy starting off with a "This is so true, but it isn't just women, I get lots of this from men, too," and, with the discussions of privilege in last week's entry/comments section still in my head, thought, "Oh poor dude, you are going to get your privileged male butt slammed for that argument"-- but actually, I DID see only one response to his long and helpful though a bit clueless-to-privilege post, (that links to both his post and the response), and it was quite polite. Which is nice, because even if it might come across as ignorant-of-the-ingrained-patriarchal-women-silencing-of-culture... I actually agree with him. Sure, the patriarchy may increase the problem, but the problem's BIGGER and DEEPER than that. And to be honest, the INSISTENCE that it's all just a matter of subtle sexism feels, to ME, like it's missing the point, trying to change the conversation, avoiding the real problem. Well, for me, at any rate.
I may be weird, but I've never felt much sexism, myself-- maybe because I've always leaned to Traditionally Female career paths; and I've always looked at anyone expressing any "girls can't"-such concepts as being Just Mindbogglingly Stupid, and not anything more dangerous. But I HAVE felt second-class. THIRD class. Worthless. Whatever. I just didn't attribute it to femininity. An adviser well-intentionally handed me Reviving Ophelia in college after I tried to explain my self-esteem struggles to him, but it really just frustrated me. It was missing the point. It wasn't my girliness or lack thereof that bothered me-- that had anything to do with my self-esteem problems. It was the bullying from other girls that I heard in my head whenever I tried to EXIST in a social situation. I always felt girls judging me (Curiously, there WAS another response to that Tumblr post that mentioned how other girls always felt more judgmental than guys. Not just me, then). Guys couldn't care less about me, and I only cared what THEY thought about me if they-- if HE-- happened to be that One Guy I happened to be madly in love with at that moment. But the girls had the power to make me feel Totally Shut Out.
Which is not to say that maybe there WEREN'T any subconscious patriarchal attitudes involved in any of this. Maybe I wouldn't have become QUITE so withdrawn if I WAS a privileged White Straight Middle Class Male. It's just that I had so many OTHER psychological issues that affected me much more directly. There was the whole twisted situation of my sister's death when I was six-- younger than my son is now-- which I've only recently started to figure out. For years all I thought to think about it was the typical Learning to Deal With Grief process everyone focused on, which was all I HEARD, and I was like, "Yeah, I'm fine. Obi-Wan Kenobi and I had a good talk. Why do we keep talking about this?" But I was totally messed up, just not with grief. With Survivor's Guilt, maybe? Annie was funny and outgoing and brave-- and only three, but clearly already she was the Cooler Daughter than I was, scaredy-cat crybaby that I was. And Only the Good Die Young, curse you Billy Joel. She got all sorts of special attention that last year, and losing her devastated everyone, so CLEARLY SHE was the Angel and I was alive because I WASN'T Good Enough to be an Angel. Surely everyone would have rather had HER around still instead of me. I was just a six-year-old kid. I had no abilities to see the logical fallacies here. But the impression stuck, the impression that I WASN'T the chosen one. The imagery I've always come back to is that I am the Dark Princess, always in the shadow of some vibrant, sparkling Disney Heroine whom everyone loves.* Maybe that Bright Princess started out as my sister, but I soon started projecting her onto EVERYONE, every girl who got the leads and solos in the school shows, every girl who wasn't picked last for sports, every girl who actually GOT whatever guy I happened to be madly in love with. I would always be second-best, always forgotten.
Okay, that's the TRAUMATIC CATACLYSM, but I was already set up to feel like an outcast, just because I'm
Bringing us back to gender differences: Sam's a Highly Sensitive Boy in a society that expects him to "Be a MAN," and his own Dad is just as bad at insisting on language like that-- I really think that's hurting him more than helping him to cope. On the other hand, his sister is... well, if she's Highly Sensitive, it's only in a few particular (and very different) ways. She's extremely observant, has a freakishly good memory, and is pretty empathetic. On the other hand, she's LOUD. She has a constant stream of WHATEVER tumbling straight from her brain through her mouth without any sort of filter. For those of you who are My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fans-- she's basically Pinky Pie. (During her QUIETER moments, she's basically Dot Warner. And she has Claudia Kishi's fashion sense, and there, I'm done comparing her to fictional characters). Which is hilarious and fun in small doses. But the girl's got a Highly Sensitive Mom, and sometimes-- or most of the time-- I feel like a tape loop going, "Maddie, hush, Maddie, quiet down, MADELEINE, you're INSIDE, PLEASE take it down a notch," and there are days I wonder if I should be wearing hearing protection. (They were both like that from birth, too. Sam's baby cry struck me as weirdly quiet even with no siblings to compare him to; Maddie had POWERFUL OPERA SINGER LUNGS). Then I hear about how You've got to be CAREFUL you aren't setting your children up to conform to unfair gender standards-- do you try to keep your daughters quiet but encourage your sons to speak up? WELL YES, BECAUSE MY DAUGHTER IS FREAKING LOUD AND INCAPABLE OF SHUTTING UP, AND MY SON IS TIMID AND THOUGHTFUL AND LIABLE TO MUMBLE.
So, right, my point is, there ARE a lot of factors involved in developing a Sorry-For-Intruding personality type, and saying "Hey you should stop that!" is easier said than done. MAYBE it's phony etiquette enforced by people who think women should be seen and not heard, or MAYBE it's a REALLY INGRAINED SELF-ESTEEM PROBLEM with quite complicated roots.
It's funny, while I was composing this post (over the course of about 28 hours), my dearest best-friend-from-high-school-and-college, the Illustrious Angie, posted this note on my Facebook wall-- Timeline-- whatever it's called: "Amy is awesome. Just feeling appreciative," and it was promptly Liked by seven of our mutual Friends. How funny is THAT? JUST as I'm writing about my life of feeling like a second-rate impostor person, 8 people are, for no particular reason, Acknowledging their Appreciation of my Awesomeness in another browser tab. It was like you could all see me writing this, and all had to pipe up, "YOU'RE not second-rate! You're our FRIEND! WE LOVE YOU!" all at once there in retaliation.
Which just shows how warped our little minds can be. It's still really hard to NOT feel like you're intruding just by existing, sometimes. Angie herself-- she's brilliant, but she has trouble seeing that, too. Much of our friendship has consisted of exchanges boiling down to "YOU ARE SO AWESOME." "I'M not Awesome, YOU'RE Awesome." "No, no, not me, YOU, YOU are Awesome!" Look at her comments to my most recent post, which, even as she acknowledges that she's "a composition teacher and someone whose academic specialization is quote-unquote minority literatures" and has to divide her thoughtful reflections into two separate comments just to make them fit, she still titles "Possibly Useless Ramblings" and concludes with "This probably came out sounding awful; I mean ABSOLUTELY NO criticism of YOU by ANY MINUTE PART of it -- I'm just expanding on some dialogues I've been having lately about this type of thing, and if it's utterly unhelpful then please delete it -- I promise I will not be offended." IN OTHER WORDS, this highly intelligent feminist with a whole lot of knowledge of the topic in question is doing the whole apologizing-for-the-intrusion thing in the comments of the blog of one of her best friends. Oh, us. Poor, confused people blind to our own worth.
I even do it in my own posts sometimes-- that whole opening paragraph here contains an air of "gee, sorry I'm writing, but I didn't feel like watching the Olympics tonight," and if I was writing something Proper, For Real Publication, I'd cut the whole thing. The funny thing about the Internet, though, is even though anything I post COULD be read by anybody with a connection, I feel like a drop of water in a particularly remote and uncharted part of the ocean. I feel so easily IGNORABLE... and so I don't usually feel like I'm intruding by posting anything. So I'm actually a whole lot more assertive here than I would be other places!
That said, I don't MIND knowing that what I post is being read. And there is never any need to apologize for commenting, whether you're my best friend or I have no idea who you are even online. Whoever you are, you have worth, and I like to hear from you.
Particularly because I'd like to have your permission to continue posting things. Just in case my posting is a bother.
---
*I just realized this is possibly a factor in my swooning over Faramir.
