Like Trying to Look Out the Window to See Inside

There is no such thing as objective self-image. Comment and say I'm boring. Maybe I am.

Maybe the definition of boring is relative or arbitrary.

Why does it matter?

It matters because people tend to view themselves by the judgement of other people. If you're in a group, and you get left out of that group, it undermines your worth. You've been judged. You lose self-esteem.

You don't get hired for a job, afterwhile it starts getting depressing. It starts being a commentary on yourself.

Then there is the other side of the coin. The "no one can make you feel bad but you" kind of arguement. The "I'm right if I say I'm right." Make no arguement, it's highly valued by American culture, and it works out better for people with this outlook in the American culture.

The problem is the American culture socializes the first and expects the second. You're judged by your appearance. That's something other people judge. Yet you're better off deciding you like the way you look. Why care about the opinion of other people?

Yet in many cases we are expected to work in groups and to work amongst the opinions of other people. There is a necessary skill to distinguish or at least to make a reasonable value judgement between what you think and what other people think.

So, in the course of daily living, despite the subjectiveness of our own judgements of ourselves, should we be too harsh?

Self-judgement, like the title of this post suggests, is a lot like a person trying to look out a window to see inside a house. You may see reflections of it, sure. They aren't going to be clear. You may make out a general face shape, an eye color, and if the light is just right you might catch a very accurate picture. Yet when the light changes again, the accuracy goes away, and you don't know whether the blurry face is the more truthful picture or the sharp figure you saw briefly for a moment.

We're humans, we trust statistics. In this metaphor, say you believe what you experience most often, the blurry face is the truth. Except it isn't more accurate.

Ultimately, like anything else in a relative universe, value is relative. So the question of how hard one should judge themselves depends upon the benefits, and unfortunately, the benefits are relative to context. If you are rude and unwilling to admit you are rude, then most likely you're going to suffer from it. However if you percieve yourself as a failure, then you're also likely doomed to a series of self-fulfilling prophecies.

It also depends on what matters to you, personally. Do you want to know the truth about yourself? It's a valid question in modern culture. Some people don't. Feel free then to view yourself however you see best fit.

If you do care, then realize that it is a guess at minimum. You will rely on the judgement of other people versus the judgement you give yourself. The best way to go about this is to decide what you think is important, outside of yourself, first. Because it is easy to get bogged down in things such as one's social status as a commentary of their worth. Financial status is another big indicator people like to use. And success. Fame.

You're basically defining the context of value in your life as you see it. Because until you know value, how can you judge value in yourself?

Most people do judge themselves too harshly because they make a list against themselves like a prosecutor when they need to. The crimes of the things they haven't done, the people they haven't impressed, and the jobs they haven't gotten. Some of these things wouldn't have meant anything had they actually obtained them. It's the fact that 'couldn't' is the twin god of 'should' for some people (myself included), and they drive life with the insatiable whip of 'never doing enough'.

There's also the people who judge themselves too harshly and use 'can't', so that graduate students and high school drop-outs are both unhappy with themselves.

The people who are happy with themselves (that strange, rare breed of creature), they are finding that middle ground. They are realizing that they can improve themselves without falling to the prey of being 'not enough'.

There are too many things in life that are subjective for any value to be defined concretely in any terms. We are free to give ourselves whatever value we want, given that we have the strength of will to keep it.

Even after I say all of this, I think it is a precarious situation full of dynamics that happen from that odd angle. Looking out to look in. Without comparisons there is nothing to be relative to. Nothing to be better or worse than. It's a great tragedy that experience is external.

Truth out of Metaphor

The title of this blog post comes out of something I was thinking about earlier today. I read somewhere it is dangerous to use metaphor in psychology, because although it is a tool of explaination, it ends up being limiting.

I had another dream about black widows last night. I've always wondered what it meant, because I have very few reoccuring dream themes, and up until recently very few nightmares (recently being the last two years or so). In some of the dreams I know there are black widows that have infested my room.

In this particular dream there was just one, and I was trying to get rid of it with wasp spray. Except it was hiding, the wasp spray wasn't working like it should, and (oh yeah) it was slightly larger than a grapefruit (and ended up being a family of spider-human people, but that's not the part of the dream I'm focusing on, just the part where it was completely a spider).

I've searched dream journals, which tell me that I don't trust some relationship I have. Which I know isn't accurate. I just feel it isn't accurate, and I know all dreams are a very personal thing. So I searched the internet, and I searched the internet, and I came across this:

"I see that I cannot rid my energy field of negativity. There is nowhere to place the ugly and dangerous parts of life that is outside life; just as we are never rid of radioactive waste, in spite of burying it deep in toxic dumps. My aura continues to infinity and includes everything-- spiders, wasps, lovers, and angels alike. I have been bothered this week by disharmonious stimuli from my environment over which I have no control--early morning contruction workers, barking dogs, machines malfunctioning, rude check-out clerks. From my dream and waking omen, I see I’ve arrogantly defined these things as disharmonies and given them the authority to threaten my peace of mind."

- The Present Moment: A Daybook of Clarity and Intuition by Penney Peirce

http://www.intuitnow.com/pdfs/2VisTimesMAM02.pdf

I remember one of the few incidents I came across a live black widow. I had promised to feed and water the dogs for my grandmother, so I went out to give them water. Their dish had been flipped over, so when I flipped it over to put water it in, I found a black widow was in the bottom. I freaked out, and I went and got the wasp spray, and I sprayed it and sprayed it for the longest time. It took forever to die, as if poisonious creatures couldn't die by poison. It took me a long time to go back into my backyard.

Now, I've been having a hard time recently. I feel like I majorly screwed up with a professor during an email because I handled it poorly. Why did I handle it poorly? Well I felt it was because of the mental issues I have. I've been fretting and worrying that this mistake will haunt me for the rest of my undergraduate career, and not just that, but that I will make these sorts of mistakes again.

What the passage above made me realize is that the dream is about the negative stresses in my life I feel I can't control. Spiders are a natural phenomenon. Even black widows. They will end up in your house. You can't avoid living with them. You don't have any sort of control over what they do, no way to get rid of them.

In some ways, the issues I have from my childhood and the mental issues that it has left me are like that. I struggle to act normally, to not let them affect anything, but like black widows, they are there. I can't completely control them. Nor can I control the irrational fears and anxieties, nor can I control a society that has no sympathy for me and further, that I don't completely understand nor relate to.

Thus from a dream, an unconscious metaphor if you will (if you aren't in another theoretical camp, and even if you are, in this instance using a dream as a metaphor), I have come to some truth about my present situation. I am acting like there is something I can do that is going to make these things controllable. Like I can put them somewhere else, somewhere that is not my life, so that I don't have to deal with them any longer. Get rid of them. But they are things that I am going to have to live with, because they are a present reality. Like black widow spiders, even though they are there, I still have to live and sleep, and I can't let fear of them overtake my life.

Does the metaphor fit completely? No, probably not. Coming back to my original point, the only reason metaphors are constricting is because one might expect the two things being compared to fit completely. They never will. Black widow spiders and social phobias attatched to mental issues aren't the same thing. My mother said I was like a cat today because when I wanted affection I got very close, but when I didn't I was pretty withdrawn. This doesn't mean that I am completely like a cat. There are many differences between me and a cat. But the metaphor helps to get to a core truth. Sometimes that core truth can lead you places; sometimes things are similar because of similiar underpinnings in functioning. So that if I am like a cat, maybe there is something in basic cat behaviour that is manifested in my behaviour. If I follow that metaphor I might find something out about the things involved.

So metaphor, I don't think is completely dangerous. Bad science is dangerous, because it'd allow people to support inaccurate ideas reached through faulty metaphors. With any proper science behind it, though, following ideas through metaphor could be a great tool for brainstorming.

On an ending note, I think that the use of wasp spray to try to kill things accurately represents trying to kill a part of my personality that just won't die. Sometimes mental illness is like that.

On another note, I do think truth is universal, and that in the end, all things are connected. I do believe that is some of the power behind metaphor. Everything, is, after all, just atoms trying to find stability while being acted upon by forces of physics. Everything after that is starting into the theoretical concept of a self. And yes, it is time to start asking yourself if that exists. Not everyone has answered yes. Not that you can prove about atoms or physical forces either.

Relativity makes everything uncertain, and I really do believe everything is relative. We just try to put it into our own contexts.

Who Am I?

I've finally found something to post.

It's a puzzling question, at least for me, to be asked who I am. I'll start listing you a variety of traits, things I like, but at the end of the day the question "Who Am I?" is haunting. I can't even answer the question "Am I?".

Lately, it's been strikingly obvious that I'm at odds with society as I know it. I say society as I know it, because that's specifically what I was told by someone else. She [this lady] told me that many people get along in the world, making their way, and enjoying their interest in their free time. They were happy overall. The reason I wasn't happy was myself. Me. I. Myself. As it were.

The Buddhist say that this concept of self is one of the things that gets people into trouble. Not going to elaborate much more on that at the moment, because it's been glaringly obvious these past few days that I also need to brush up on Buddhism as well.

What the point of this post is, an introductory post I've been avoiding because I hate trying to say who I am, is that personality is a relative constuct depending on context. And, as I have come to understand, I have put myself into a sub-societal context in which my behaviours aren't abnormal to that particular context, but they aren't normal to the society at large.

The people with whom I align myself weren't the people who fit in with society. The authors- the Virginia Woolfs and Ernest Hemmingways, the Sylvia Plaths and Emily Dickensons and Katherine Mansfields- did not function in their respective societal contexts. The philosophers I admire- the Russells, the the Benthams, etc, so forth- weren't exactly the height of societal functioning. In fact, I think Russell delighted in going against society as much as he could and deemed fit. Even the psychologists- the Freuds and the Skinners- weren't exactly well fitting with society. Society didn't exactly appreciate the Baby Box, nor was Freud greeted with much praise by society when he proposed his psychosexual stages.

Not to say I am a master of anything. I have not had the life experience nor the time to see what I am capable of yet. I haven't learned what I am or can be. "Who am I?" How is someone of my age to know? I do not even know what I am not, which is by far the easier question.

Now to take this understanding and apply it to the stress of job hunting and the stress of being academically evaluated by my betters, that's a lot more tangible, and it's going to take a lot more fortitude. Wish me luck.