Dispatch #051421: Fragments

Welcome to Dispatch #051421, a series of fragmented thoughts written over the course of the past two weeks.

Boundaries

Sometimes it feels like I’m melting into the floor and I wish I had scotch tape to hold me up against the wall (as if that would keep me from melting). I have been wondering lately if this sensation represents what it’s like to ignore a boundary.

But to ignore a boundary necessitates that one exists, or at a minimum — that it can exist.

I’ve been thinking that to find yourself wanting them (boundaries, that is) — even more to set out and make them — is the ultimate proof of burgeoning self-respect. A tell that you’re coming to know your own sense of worth. Joan Didion wrote,

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

By a definition I am still working on: to discriminate is to protect oneself. To put up the boundary first. To love is to keep your heart open while doing it and to remain indifferent is, I think, to know that in discriminating, you are protecting yourself from yourself — the love part from the fear part.

Fear

I was at a 3-year-old’s birthday party last Friday. There was a magician there who was blowing balloons and contorting them into the shapes of animals. Occasionally while the magician was creating his renderings, a balloon would pop.

The first time it happened, my daughter looked at me startled and began to cry. “I don’t like that noise,” she said. “It’s scary.”

We walked over to the magician who was blowing the balloons and I showed her what he was doing — blowing them up and bending them into the shapes of different animals. She asked for a duck and he made one for her. While he was making it, another balloon popped. Again, it startled her. I explained that the noise was coming from the balloons that were being bent into shapes. They did that when they popped.

I think she understood because it happened several more times before we left the birthday party but the popping noise did not interfere again with her having a nice time. Presumably, she stopped being scared.

It made me think about fear and what it is really. I wrote down a definition: the gap between what we know and what we don’t. It’s different from acting in fear which seems to connote some level of resistance — a resistance to acknowledge the gap or to bridge it. To make the unknown, known.

Semantics

“Keeping up with the Jones” is a phrase derived from a 1913 comic strip that ran in a number of papers for nearly 3 decades.

In the strip, the McGinnis family contorts itself into various shapes, jumping through precarious loops to keep up with the Joneses. The latter family is never actually featured even though they’re the enigmatic centerpiece that rules the former.

I’m sure you know how it goes — the McGinnises never get happy, their ability to become fulfilled stays clouded beneath the hamster wheel they’re paradoxically running on in order to get still.

I know this only because last week I had this thought: what are we really doing when we try to keep up if not stating that we want to fit in? Further, is there a more natural human impulse than the desire to fit in — to find your people and be of those people?

Who among us does not yearn for this willing assembly? Not everyone will try to keep up and we’ll do it in manifold ways but for those of us who do try, how does it feel when we know that we’re doing it — contorting ourselves into things we are not to feel like we can be accepted?

How easy or how hard does it become to dispel the behavior as such?

If I know, for example, that I’m trying to keep up, but am too self-conscious to acknowledge I’m doing it, do I start to think the underlying longing (to fit in) is bad? Do I get embarrassed because, in practice, I see myself trying to keep up? Does that make me want to suppress the very human desire beneath it?

But then see, if I can look at what I’m doing with a dose of indifference — an open heart and discriminating mindset, if I can say to myself, “I’m trying to keep up; what’s this really about?” what space does that afford me?

Can I see that actually, I yearn to fit in — to be seen, as it were?

Does seeing it encourage me to get off the treadmill? To see that I’m not being seen? That in fact, I don’t even see myself anymore?

What about when you’re the observer — have you ever been one? — when you already fit or have closed yourself off to the possibility that you can fit, even established your own terms: you don’t want to fit! — and you’re watching the loops in which another one runs, through which another contorts themselves, do you find that you tend to judge it?

Sometimes I have.

Before you’ve really wrapped your head around what is happening, it’s so easy to judge but then I think, who among us has not bid for connection, to be part of something bigger than themselves!, wherever they thought they could find it?

Cynicism is not a superpower

Recently, I discovered that I’ve been walking through life under the impression that being cynical makes me smart. The thing about this cynicism is that it’s pretty self-centered. I don’t assume I know what motivates another person, that their speech or action comes from any place that’s not fundamentally human and therefore if misguided, ultimately forgivable, but often, I neglect to extend to myself the same grace.

Lately, I've been thinking about when I'm at my most generous -- kindest, most compassionate, eager to give. In those moments, cynicism is rarely close by. 

Makes me wonder how I've defined smart. If I’ve conflated it with trying to protect myself. What have I been trying to protect?

The world will crush her

When my daughter hugs me, she first charges towards me with her arms cast wide open until she lands in my chest and wraps those arms around my neck. Her eyes are shut tightly and she is grinning so effusively that I can hear it through her teeth. Sometimes the impact is so great that both of us fall back to the floor. This interaction between us, which happens quite often is the closest I’ve come to physically touching love.

Last week, I thought to myself that the world is going to crush her. It made me sad to think on the one hand because it’s a thought that is cynical as hell. It made me sad to think on the other because I’m pretty sure I meant it.

She’s got that idyllic it, you know? The relentless, unflinching desire to love everything, everyone, all the time.

Doesn’t know where to place it occasionally.

Sees kid coming over, gets excited to play then finds her head buried in sand.

It’s so breathtakingly naive, so disarming and sincere — makes me wonder if this is how we start to get cynical. If what we’re trying to protect with the cynicism is ourselves from getting hurt. If the layer-upon-layer of hurt feelings that pile up when we expose the innocence of our nascent openness starts to build a callus over the rest of our feelings until suddenly, we can’t access any of them. The breathtaking naivete is dead. But hey! At least we’re not hurt.

Not consciously at least.

I think there’s someplace between fully open and closed, where a dose of cynicism, while it may not be a superpower, is pretty damn helpful.

We use it to preserve this part of ourselves that I am growing to know as something tender and young and, yeah, naive. It’s like a spirit or a will, I’m not exactly sure, and the cynicism represents a burgeoning boundary around it.

A marker of respect for that tender, young, naive thing.

And sometimes it does betray us — the thing, I mean. We take down the boundary and let the thing show and then the thing gets hurt. Often it’s not on purpose but it can make you believe that you need to amp up your cynicism. So you amp up the dosage and that seems to work so you keep doing it, thinking it’s brave. For you, it is brave. For me too.

Until suddenly you can’t see anymore. Your definition of bravery starts to falter and the vulnerable sensation of letting the guard down and revisiting the thing becomes so seductive that you set out to do it again.

And you do. And then you show it to someone else and sometimes it backfires but sometimes it doesn’t. And suddenly, it’s braver to keep trying. To keep figuring out where it fits. To look at the lessons — the missteps, the mistakes, (the things you did right too) and then to apply them all sincerely.

I was wrong when I said the world will crush my daughter. It can’t do that on its own. It will try to teach her and either she’ll respond to its lessons or she won’t.

I’ll keep asking for those gigantic hugs.

Signing off your truly,

Leandra