who only by moving can balance

I have been thinking a lot, lately, about how somewhere along the line I shifted from "terrified that my supervisors would know everything I was doing was wrong" to "willing to tell them they're wrong and then go find the data to back myself up"; from imagining my viva making me shut down with panic to, honestly, kind of looking forward to it.

I was scared of my supervisors -- the primary authority figures in this part of my life -- thinking poorly of me. I was terrified, similarly, of examiners-as-authority-figures thinking poorly of me.

Put in those terms, I think one facet of what's shifted is that I have, really and truly, started to view my supervisors and examiners as my equals. And from there, bearing in mind the very human need for ritual, all of a(n apparent) sudden I seem to be thinking about the viva less as an inherently hostile environment where I will inevitably be set up to fail (I don't think my trauma is terribly disguised, here) to... a rite-of-passage, that recognises and -- through a particular social alchemy -- realises that I, too, am an authority figure.

I'm very curious about how the ripples from the event will wind up affecting the rest of my self-concept and self-confidence.

Via star-anise, the following excerpt from Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (Byung-Chul Han):

... psychic maladies such as depression and burnout define our times. In contemporary American self-help literature, the magic word is healing. The term refers to self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance. Yet perpetual self-optimization, which coincides point-for-point with the optimization of the system, is proving destructive. It is leading to mental collapse. Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation…the only pain that is tolerated is pain that can be exploited for the purposes of optimization. But the violence of positivity is just as destructive as the violence of negativity. Neoliberal psychopolitics, with the consciousness industry it promotes, is destroying the human soul, which is anything but a machine of positivity (Positivmaschine). The neoliberal subject is running aground on the imperative of self optimization, that is, on the compulsion always to achieve more and more. Healing, it turns out, means killing.

Until reading this, I'd always found this kind of argument baffling and alienating, but for some reason this iteration-articulation of it has, I think, made things click into place.

The gap in my understanding arises, I think, from the fact that I was making myself actively ill with perfectionism, with stress, with Getting Everything Done, up until the end of my first year of university, when I did very well in my exams and therefore, as best I can tell, proved to my hindbrain that I Could Do This, and abruptly started prioritising... well... self-care and healing, instead. I read the stuff about self-optimisation, I took it to heart, and I decided that the thing I wanted to do was get better and so I... did.

It has been slow and occasionally faltering, but now I eat regular meals and I sleep approximately regular hours at night and I (try to) listen to my body about when I need to stop and then I do that...

... and this means I did worse in all my subsequent exams and I can't even pretend to hold a full-time job and I take naps during the day and I have slowed way, way down. I recognise that I am lucky that (for now) I live in a country where the social security net is such that I can do that, such that I have the material option of not working myself to death --

-- but the disconnect is around the crux of the thing, the definition that "self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance". I'm just... working toward a different definition of "efficiency" and "performance", I think, and for whatever reason the self-care advice actually worked for me, actually practically directed me towards my own health as centre and priority, rather than my output.

I'm not sure how much of that is down to the precise disability activism context I found myself in, but -- it itched at me, to not understand why so many people were finding so harmful a broad genre of advice I had found intensely -- well -- healing.


There's also, of course, the part where I curate my reading intake fairly heavily, so probably a lot of what they're talking about is not in fact at all what I think of given the keywords in question -- but still. It's a relief to have puzzled it out.

(For the princely sum of £15, no less.)

Boots are polished and out by the window, though, and probably very grateful for it they are too, given how long & how desperately they've needed a clean.

It is an interesting tension, for me, between not-my-religion and definitely-my-cultural-heritage, but observing Heiliger Nikolaus is a link to my grandmother and also an excuse to clean my shoes, so here we are, and in the morning I'll get up early to go to lab & they'll contain treats & I will pocket some of them to take with me.

A remarked to me the other day that People Are Terrible At Predicting Their Own Future Behaviour, But Pretty Good At Predicting Their Friends', which... he knew... because he read it online somewhere at some point.

I have therefore spent a little while this evening trying to track down sources for this, because it possibly Explains A Lot about things I find frustrating about human interaction, and also possibly gives me something solid to consider when trying to work out if, as I am often told, I really am atypically self-aware & self-reflective.

The first thing I turned up was a 1996 paper asserting that, based on two studies, self-prediction of future behaviour was more accurate than predictions made by "knowledgeable others" (here being mothers or peers), especially when predicting negative outcomes. Hmm, I thought.

But then! I found an article that is probably roughly what he was talking about, being a pop-psych review of the work of David Dunning (as in the Dunning-Kruger effect, which turned out to be a bit more complicated than that) on, well, self-assessment (and the extent to which it's a learnable skill). Dunning himself wrote up an overview for the BPS, which I will read in more detail at some point when it's not Definitely Getting On For My Bedtime, but -- having hunted down the links I'm leaving them here in case any of you lot feel moved to weigh in.

Here is an article in the Paris Review: The Crane Wife. I found most of it luminous and compelling, in ways that made my whole body feel more alive, and then the concluding paragraphs -- about connection and autonomy and agency -- somehow left me unsatisfied.

But it reminds me: the sensation it gave me, that I think is what is now described as ASMR (passim), is something that throughout childhood I described at least sometimes as "a goose walk[ed/ing] over my grave". It was the best approximation I had; I'm not sure whether that usage is typical, or more widespread, or wildly unusual, but I remain curious about ways we have of talking about this thing.

The t-shirt I wore to cast my second vote today:



(I was a proxy. It didn't occur to me until after I'd already cast my first vote that of course this was the most appropriate clothing I owned for the occasion. For your amusement: the album title is Fixed Ideals.)

Beneath the cut, a very similar photo, minus the t-shirt. It's exactly one year since I got top surgery. NSFW, probably.

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not braining content notes for this but There Are Some

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Stubborn positivity:

1. A came home via the big supermarket the other evening, bearing gifts: specifically, cut-price nonsense geometric chocolates in a variety of flavours. I had in fact been eyeing that very box up every time I went past and feeling like I couldn't possibly justify getting it, so it was a Very Nice Surprise.
   
2. Movement: my knee is still coping with increased resistance + cardio at gym, and I'm starting to feel like I'm getting meaningful exercise out of it, as well as increased stability/physio work.
   
3. Kew is putting on a massive bullshit sculpture trail this summer, which I found out yesterday, and I am really looking forward to it. I am intending to make at least one evening-opening visit, along with hopefully multiple daytime visits. (Specifically, it's bullshit abstract glass sculpture by the dude responsible for the V&A chandelier, which I'm enormously fond of.)
   
4. I have used up all the ravioli filling... and still have an eighth of the dough left, so that's going to get turned into another batch of tagiatelle, I think. (Dinner was ravioli. It was good.)
   
5. M posted new fic and I spent Some Time rolling around in it and asking yet more questions.
   
6. A is making great strides towards (i) sorting the Piles such that we can meaningfully get rid of them and (ii) putting things on Freegle (after Freecycle didn't bite). Order is emerging from chaos and it is doing my brain a good.
   
7. I managed to leave the house today while it was actually still light -- down to the end of the road for a Pokémon raid (hiiii Shinx). AND on the way back from the gym we got a NEW SPECIES, which, yes hurrah good there had never previously been one of those spawned that I could actually get to.
   
8. w8rose does a raspberry-and-passion-fruit cheesecake, it's currently cut price, and it's exactly what I wanted.
   
9. I do in fact have a bunch of useful How To Humaning-related expertise, and I am in fact managing to help people make their lives better using it, and they are in fact learning principles and frameworks from me such that they can work more of this shit out for themselves independently, and I am pretty fuckin' proud of them.
   
10. I am, very shortly, going to go curl up in a bed that doesn't actively hurt me, underneath an anger blanket, with a hot water Adam, and I am going to sleep.
    

it's just about exactly a decade since I started binding. As of about six months ago -- counting the post-surgical binder -- I stopped, again, for good. It's lovely.

My immediate reaction to Captain Awkward #1141 was "-- SWEETHEART do I EVER have some advice for you --"

... and I'd already composed half a reply in my head, and then got to the bottom and found comments were, entirely understandably, turned off.

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A thing I learned yesterday and forgot to mention: charity shops are called solidarity shops.

This morning we were Mostly Asleep (which is, er, not surprising, at least on my part); once we had wrangled ourselves into clothes and through the boulangerie I got A to plot us a route to the Musée d'Orsay, where I dragged him round the Impressionists and had a lot of feelings about Monet; we had lunch in the cafe behind the clock, accompanied by a baffling dessert -- floating island with pink praline in custard flavoured with poppy -- before Investigating the way to the van Gogh. I am NOT SURPRISED I didn't find it last time, okay. (We also paused by all the scale models of Great Exhibition and opera house buildings, while attempting to navigate the lifts.)

Subsequently we wandered down the river a little to Notre Dame, where A was baffled by the sheer architectural scale and especially the little red doors; along the way I was particularly charmed by a set of three adjacent doors getting progressively bigger -- one small narrow single-storey, one slightly taller double door, and immediately adjacent that a bloody enormous two-storey-high set of double doors with a balcony and a two-storey window right above them. We also v much appreciated the various blocks that had just... had another entire house dumped on their roof, because why not.

And then ever-so-slowly back to the hotel, via the exterior of the Centre Pompidou and the Centre LGBT and dinner & some Pokemon & an adventure in public transport i.e. a bus that believed in two wheelchair spaces.

Somewhat clarified thoughts on Impressionism: part of what makes it work so well for me in person and fall so flat in reproduction is the fundamental three-dimensionality of the oil paint. Given that three-dimensionality, and given Monet's depiction of light, and given my short-sightedness, and given the light in the exhibition space, I end up feeling a very strong sense of realness, of miscellaneous complex sensory input: sun-warmth and movement-of-plants-in-wind and smell-of-hay-dust and all that sort of thing. In conversation with A I articulated that at least some of what's going on is that the nature of Impressionism is representing a probability envelope, if you will, of places the scene might be, in contrast with the static frame of photorealism: Monet's paintings look like how I perceive trees-in-motion without my glasses. Combined with the way the three-dimensional painting of the surface catches the light and my own motion, I perceive motion in the static-yet-not canvases, too. Which turns into "wind ruffling plants or grass" and "hay-dust haze" and "moving ripples in water", which means I want to sit and stare at all of the overlapping pictures for a very long time.

To my amusement, this works much better for me with the intimate landscapes than the buildings or the mountains; on a scale or in context where I wouldn't expect the subject to move (even if I might expect changes in light or cloud!) I don't get sucked in in the same way.

So yes. There you go. Probability-envelope articulation, along with why-reproductions-leave-me-cold.

(I was also very pleased by coincidence of the lit buildings and the brightest stars and their reflections in van Gogh's Starry Night Over The Rhône, which I hadn't previously noticed.)

Tomorrow, if we wake up in time: a flying visit to the interior of the Centre Pompidou, and then hooooooooome.