Eccentric Flower:201104/Unaddressable

One of the problems one quickly encounters when one keeps a public journal/weblog/whatever is the issue of filtering. Put plainly, there are times when you want only a certain group of people (often a very specific group) to see something, and no website tools that presently exist handle this well enough. Furthermore, the consequences of getting it wrong can be very bad.

There is no benign here. None. Even when I write an entry which I have mentally directed to certain people but for entirely positive reasons - i.e. there's no harm in letting other people see it, there's nothing nasty in it, I just had the idea that there were only certain people for whom it would be of interest - as I say, even in that case which looks wholly harmless, it would still not do to say at the top "I wrote this entry for [$person] and [$otherperson]" ... because what will happen next is that, as sure as night follows day, someone else will say, "Hey, what about me?" or "I can't believe you thought I wouldn't be interested in that," and get mildly annoyed.

And that's the best case.

The worst case would probably be when I urgently need to bitch about one person who may read this to other people who read this. I don't actually need to do this very often, although there was a period on LiveJournal where I very badly needed to talk about the difficulties and stresses I was having in communication with someone who was mentally ill. Unfortunately those LJ filters need to be translated into equivalents here by hand; right now the ported LJ years are readable to everyone but not linked (that's one of the reasons why they're not linked, because I haven't done that tedious legwork), but the person in question is the only reader I have who routinely goes back through my archive and looks at old entries, and she found some of the ones where I talked about the difficulty of communicating with her, and got offended.

It's safe to discuss this now because, frankly, our relationship has come to the point where the things I said privately then I now tell her to her face; there is nothing left to lose there, no skin that is not already flayed raw, no feelings left to be hurt. But I should hope that most of my friendships would not come to that pass. I am paranoid and protective about my friendships, because they are so hard for me to form and I make them so seldom. What I want is a place where I can gripe safely about you to others without taking even the slightest risk that you will find out about it, or that it will endanger the friendship in any way. Because the aggravation, the grit in the soup, will pass, and if I'm careful it will pass harmlessly; but if my aggravation leaks to you, it could cause permanent damage.

Why talk about it at all? Because sometimes that's necessary for me to get past the aggravation. Sometimes I need to discuss it, to process it with someone, or it will never go away. The best people for doing that, unfortunately, are other people who know you, so I can ask them "Would you give me your opinion on this aspect of [$person] that's irritating me?" and they can tell me why I'm full of shit and I can say, "Oh, well, if you think so," and assume I'm being neurotic again and dismiss myself. This is extremely dangerous terrain, to be talking about [$personX] with [$friendofpersonX] about them behind their back. But if I'm looking for analysis of [$personX] I can't very well go to someone who doesn't know them, can I?

Nor can I just do the sane thing and discuss the matter with [$personX] themselves, because 1) most people don't actually know how they present themselves to the rest of the world very well (me especially, as I've demonstrated here many times!) and 2) the topic is often pretty offensive since it's usually me being, as I say, kinda neurotic.

So there's a person. Let's call him/her X. Now, despite the worst-case scenario above, the people who I'm about to discuss anonymously do not read these pages (either there is no evidence they've ever come by, or they have visited so infrequently that they don't count). So don't worry that I'm talking about you (another pitfall of this damned filtering issue).

I have kind of a standing grudge against X. I find the grudge completely justified, but I also admit that it's neurotic and most other people would say it's ridiculous. It may also be germane that I didn't take well to X the one time I met him/her in person. X, as far as I can glean from scant evidence, is not aware this grudge exists.

I am also - let's call it professionally jealous of X, whom I believe is doing something I could do better and who wanders in a circle of intelligent people whose accomplishments I envy and that I wish I could wander in.

I have kind of a nervousness around Y. I like Y a great deal but I have never shaken the suspicion that Y finds me annoying, doesn't like me very much, has never re-warmed from some minor slights and missteps I have made in the past toward Y and Y's spouse Y', so I tend to avoid posting on Y's sites or making any direct attempts to communicate with him/her, even though I am always interested in hearing about Y's domestic life and I miss not having more frequent contact with/information on him/her.

Y and Y' are in this same circle of accomplished people that I have such mixed feelings about. Y' in particular is so competent at what he/she does that I wish I had never learned his/her profession. Also in this circle are M, whom I have grown estranged from for several reasons, some of which are far more valid than others, but at least one of which is also tied to resentment of his/her publishing success with material that I personally don't care for at all; J, a person who is so brilliant on so many levels that I haven't tried seriously to keep up with him/her for more than a decade; R, whom I like a great deal but whom I suspect dislikes me, and whose Twitter feed I don't read because I suspect that if I ask for permission to read it I will be intruding into a universe where I am unwelcome; Z, whom I was friends with once, but there is now a disheartening silence between us; and so forth and so on.

I'm not blind. It is abundantly clear to me, as it surely is to you, that matters of envy and competence are deeply tied into this. But that's too pat an answer. All of you here, after all, are intelligent, competent people, and I don't have the same social neuroses dealing with most of you. (I admit that I don't know some of you well enough to fully assess your competencies, but I'm willing to take it on faith, especially since if I say "most of you" someone will speak up and say, "No, I'm a bum and a loser!" and it will likely be untrue, so let's just skip that, okay? Leave the self-flagellation to me in this space. I'm the house pro.)

The problem really only comes into play when the competencies/interests of the people I'm socially unsure of overlap with such few competencies/interests as I admit to having of my own.

For example: Robert is a competent lawyer. His competency does not intersect mine, so these neuroses do not kick in. We can even talk about writing and law, our respective competencies, relatively safely. If he were getting paid for writing (I mean fiction, of course - not legal writing, which he does a great deal of, I imagine he does well, and which I mean no disrespect toward), then our relationship would be much, much shakier than it is now. The interesting thing is that it wouldn't matter if he were good at it. If he were a good fiction writer, I'd bring one set of neuroses to the table; if he were a poor one, I'd bring a different set.

The ugly truth is that since I have utterly no competitive interest in the law, Robert is safe from my ego. Or, more precisely, my ego is safe from Robert. There are aspects of the law that are of interest to me, but I don't mind being trumped/corrected by superior knowledge because I don't feel any competition there. I like talking about chemistry, and when Peter steps in to tell me where I've gone wrong, I don't resent it. I like talking about the cognitive sciences, and if Joy speaks up, the discussion will only get richer for it, not degenerate into a spitting match. But I cannot safely talk about fiction with Marissa except in the most removed way; I must tread very carefully. It's okay if we talk about what did or didn't like about a particular book, but if it shifts into a writing discussion (which it could do without warning at any time), klaxons go off in my head. (I don't imagine they do in hers, but then she is less neurotic than I am).

This is not the sole reason that I feel my friendship with Marissa is at least one sigma more fragile than (for example) the ones I mention by name above - there are also other obvious factors, such as the fact that I've met her only once relatively briefly in person, whereas I've seen Joy three or four times, Peter and Robert too many times to count. But fragile I feel it is; and I won't understate the effect my writing-related bundle of neuroses have here. (Marissa, who is friends with a whole slew of pro writers with only occasional bloodletting, will read this and think it is all me being nuts. Which it is.)

If Z were not deeply involved with F/SF, his/her long silences would probably be written off by my brain as just being busy/preoccupied/lazy about updates; not optimal, but benign. Because Z is deeply involved with F/SF, I interpret the long silences as being actively uninterested in communicating with me because he/she just got tired of my fiction neuroses.

It shouldn't change everything. I know it shouldn't. But it does.

I'm sure that if I took a poll, very few of you would claim to be highly brilliant and highly competent and in general on top of your game. Most of us seem to feel like we're kind of muddling along and faking it all the time, I gather. It's interesting to see how many people secretly believe that they are fuckups, or at least contain a solid inner core of fuckupry.

In my particular case, a great deal of my neuroses stem from the fact that I feel like I only do one 1) constructive thing 2) well and 3) I have chosen not to do it because 4) I find it an unpleasant labor.

I numbered that because it needs a little breaking apart. I do a lot of other things pretty well that I don't consider constructive. Massive accumulation of random knowledge and trivia is something I do like breathing, but unless one is going to go win one's retirement fund on Jeopardy! (I'd freeze up like a deer in headlights the moment the cameras came on), it isn't really a constructive skill. Constructive here means either 1) you can generate some money from it or 2) it will garner enough approbation from one's peers to achieve modest-or-better egoboo. I don't consider "I like doing it" sufficient grounds for "constructive." In fact, most of the things I like doing are not constructive, which is the problem.

I don't really like writing. I like having ideas. I'd love finding a really good artist and collaborating with them; I think many of my ideas would be better drawn. (I don't like drawing either. It's hard work and it never comes out the way it sounds in my head, which at least with writing I can do.)

I don't much like any of the things I could see myself doing for a living. I am not a great programmer; I succeed because I have found a niche for myself which is so declassé that real programmers don't want to do it; it isn't sexy enough. It's fine for paying the bills though, and I usually don't have to work at it too hard. I don't have to work at writing too hard, but it doesn't pay bills.

I am an extremely lazy person whose overlap between "things they like and enjoy" and "things the world cares about" is zero. I don't want to be around writers because while I love to talk about writing, I don't feel I am entitled to talk about it; I don't have the street cred. I don't talk about programming much for the same reason. I can't discuss algorithms with you; I don't understand them. I am a utility programmer. I do the stuff you wouldn't touch with an eleven-foot pole. I am envious because my competitive instincts kick in readily, but I then am forced to admit that I have nothing to compete with, because I am simply too apathetic to try harder. And slinking away from the race really hurts, every single time I do it.

I'm in my forties. The clock is running out. I now no longer expect to be great at anything, I no longer expect to leave any sort of indelible mark in the world. I do as little work as I can get away with most days to keep my job; I go home, I play computer games or read the web or watch movies; I eat, I sleep, I walk, I do almost nothing else. My office and my basement are crammed full of the bones of abandoned projects where the brain wanted to chase a thousand ideas and the rest of me said it simply was too goddamned much effort for no return.

How can I show my face in a circle of people who actually will leave a mark, who actually know what they're doing, who actually have the will to write upon the face of the world?

I would desperately like to be welcomed into the circles of the competent. But I have to do something to earn it first. And there doesn't seem to be anything I want to do. Hasn't been for many years now, ever since I realized that writing down the ideas diminished them rather than improving them.

I've been constructing a fantasy world recently (this is where all the tweets about the ramifications of FTL telepathy and the topography of Mars and the height of the troposphere and other stuff like that have been emanating from), and one of the things I notice about that world is that its fictional inhabitants seem to be pretty omnicompetent. They're hands-on people who never met a physical medium they couldn't do something with. In terms of practicality it is often nil, but that doesn't bother them; their economy is set up so they can go make jewelry or carve wood all they want.

The point is that they have both the will and ability to do so, and since this story will never actually get written, I don't mind indulging what is clearly a fantasy fulfillment for me. I'd like to be handy and reasonably artistic. I'd like to be able to make a piece of furniture that is not only functional but good-looking. I have friends who can pretty much do anything with their hands. It makes me jealous.

(And no, the things I have done, refitting a bathroom or replacing a toilet or rewiring a circuit, don't count, because I don't think those things involve skill - I maintain that anybody could do them if they just got the right, lucid explanation of how. Book larnin'. Whereas whenever I try to make furniture, it never quite works. I can cut a piece of wood into two pieces and then have those two pieces not fit back together properly again along the same cut. I don't quite know how I do it. And I digress.)

Even in things where I believe I am or could become competent (which is not a big set because I have a dim view of my ability to do anything but book larnin' or scribbling), I find myself saying, "I could do that, but I don't/won't." In fact I find myself saying it over and over. In every aspect of life. It is an answer that bores and disgusts me even more than it does you. I wish, I wish sincerely, I could find something I cared about enough to actually put in the effort to do. (I even play computer games half-assedly.) If I had one aspect, just one, where I could say, "Yes, 1) I do this 2) well, and 3) I'm proud of it and 4) other people respect it" (all four clauses are required!), then I think I would be far less nuts about all the other places where my neuroses are constantly kicking me for not performing.

Of course, if I ever did that, I'd spend so much time doing that right that I'd never be on the internet. Which is one thing all those people I envy and resent have in common: They don't spend the whole day refreshing Twitter or checking site feeds. They don't see everything I say immediately, the way I see what they say. Sometimes they don't see it at all. This is because they are all out, a lot of the time, doing things - making stuff or earning an honest living or raising children. And whenever they aren't here, I know they're out doing things, and it hurts.

*world shifts back into alignment*