: The elusive “self-love”
Went downtown with some new friends, people I consider more fashionable than me. We stopped by a Carhartt store. They immediately knew how to find the good stuff, layer shit together, idk. Made a bunch of good-natured jokes about how they would “drip me out.”
At some point I walked by a mirror and realized just how abysmal my fashion sense really is. My wardrobe consists of precisely two kinds of clothing: Things I can wear to work, and things I can’t. My getting-ready routine is basically this:
clothes = work_clothes if today() in weekdays else other_clothes
while not fully_dressed():
cloth = clothes.pop_random()
try:
cloth.wear()
except:
pass
On this particular occasion I was wearing a poorly faded aloha shirt and jeans that were about 2 inches too short in the legs. Freshly laundered, poorly coordinated.
There is a part of me that wishes I were better at this. I feel envy when I look at people who put effort into their clothing and use it to their advantage. But every time I try to put in that extra effort, maybe coordinate colors or something, someone comments on it (“you look nice today”), which subjects me to the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Seen.
I have never had a great relationship with my corporeal form. I don’t like it when people notice what I look like, how tall I am, how I am shaped. It’s not that I’m an unattractive person, more that I find the suggestion that I “am” this body (as opposed to the soul inside of it) to be offensive. This is difficult to communicate to people, especially since so many people’s entire identity revolves around perfecting their body, e.g. through fashion and exercise.
But as I walked out of the store, having bought nothing, I tried to think the following thought instead: It’s alright to be me. It’s alright to care about different things than other people. Some folks customize their wardrobe and some folks customize their, uhh, text editor config (messing with Zed at the moment).
Baby steps on the epic journey of self-acceptance…
: Caring too much about the world as an OCD symptom
I heard a podcast a while ago (probably years ago tbh) about a dad who got obsessed with global warming and conscripted his whole family into being climate activists. This meant giving up a bunch of vacations (air travel) and weekends to attend climate rallies and hours-long “coaching” sessions where he helped his daughter perfect her stump speech so she could rouse the crowd.
The podcast framed this as a moral dilemma: On the one hand, if you really believe that climate change poses an existential threat to the future of humanity, then weekends and public-speaking lessons are small sacrificies to make—that’s what the dad argued. On the other, the decision to become a full-time activist for any cause isn’t one you can reasonably make on someone else’s behalf; it’s one thing to convey to your kids your passion for climate activism, and another to force them into joining in.
My impression was that if the father’s actions began with a kernel of good intentions, he spun out of control because he suffers from moral perfectionism, aka “scrupulosity,” a common OCD trait. He fixated on climate change as the nexus of all his problems, and determined that any other difficulty could be justified if it meant progress against that goal. This sounds tyrannical, but if you squint, you can see how it’s a self-soothing behavior: it excuses Dad from having to weight competing objectives; he can just proceed according to a simple algorithm: is it good or bad for the environment? Beyond political hardliners, you also see scrupulosity in highly religious types, as well as a subset of people in highly morally charged careers like medicine and teaching.
One of the core dynamics of OCD, in my experience, is the tension between control and powerlessness: The world is a dangerous place, so I must exert maximal control over the corner I inhabit, or else anything bad that happens to me is somehow my fault. Scrupulosity.
I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately with people who are, in their words, “Actually doing weirdly OK despite the state of the world.” They are still employed, they just got pregnant, they took a well-deserved vacation. And unfortunately, the happiness associated with these facts is eating them alive. They experience massive guilt about the rays of sunshine in their life, when the awful news about war and gas prices is such a short series of taps away.
I say “they,” but I am in this point a little. I found a way to spend some time in Europe, eat a bunch of good food, read books, write my journal. I’m holding steady despite everything. I want to celebrate that, but deep down I feel it’s not the right moment.
: Detected and repelled a love bombing attempt; what is my reward?
Guy from a schmancy B2B company took our company’s team out for drinks.
He inappropriately massaged my shoulders, kept calling me “buddy,” and made a big show of paying for everything on corpo card.
I ended up walking to the bus station with him and he gave a big spiel about how he loves spoiling his friends, hates being stingy with his money. Then he asked what my biggest luxury spending category was. I said probably fountain pens. He mocked me, saying that’s not even real spending and he meant like “a car or something.” Then he pivoted to talking about the fancy art pens his friend had gotten him into and took one out of his bougie messenger bag and tried to give me one. I rejected the gift.
The encounter left me with two thoughts:
- There is a certain type of guy who is really butthurt about not being able to sexually harass women anymore, and views me as the next best thing: a man (therefore not a legitimate victim) but also sort of cute, and feminine in ways that don’t rise above the threshold of “actually a woman.” This is the type of guy who catcalls me on the subway, the type of guy who sexually assaulted me that one time, and the type of guy who thinks my dignity can be purchased with a $15 pen.
- I get no prize for fending off a probable narcissist and creep, other than the awkward feeling that all the evidence I have against him is circumstantial and maybe I rushed to judgment. There is no party or cash, no movie where I get to see how much better my life plays out.
Bye…
: You're a hypocrite if you criticize beauty pageants but watched the Olympics
Headline was ragebait; now we are gonna do a gratitude post because world is a fuck.
I bought another fountain pen. Being in Europe is nice. I like that people generally follow the rules and don’t mess with you. The abundance of good, cheap food is also a plus. I do think it’s weird how much Europeans’ lives revolve around food, drink, and soccer, none of which are particularly important to me, but it works to my advantage in the end, because I can get my cafe time in at 10am before everyone wakes up and enjoy the quiet of the morning.
: Re: “are you actually multiple people at once?”
In response to “are you actually multiple people at once?” by muffle.
I’ve thought about this idea a lot. On the one hand, it’s self-evident that you’ll show different parts of yourself to different people, especially in circumstances like work vs. home where there are social rules about what is/isn’t acceptable, but also in order to have a more lush social life: I have friends with whom I don’t discuss politics because it’ll never be a good time, for example; this doesn’t necessarily mean I am less of myself around them, only that those are the terms of that relationship.
On the other, we love to call each people fake bitches when they switch sides and try to flatter and cajole whoever they are with at a given moment. It seems there’s an authentic way and an opportunistic way to be a multifaceted person; we need a way to differentiate those two so that we can avoid being predated by the opportunistic types. That begs the question of how to define authentic, which in turn suggests that there’s an authentic self at the bottom of it after all.
Maybe, in the end, we are allowed a few relationships where we are 100% ourselves. As much as I am multifaceted, I think that my fiancee knows all of the facets of me, even if those facets aren’t necessarily “facing” her; she knows what face I put on for all of the important other people in my life and what that means about my priorities, values, etc. I would even go so far as to suggest that the degree to which one person knows and trusts another is related to the selection of “yous” they allow each other to see.
Asking “Who are you?” is like asking “How far is Innsbruck?"—it depends from where.