Lost in Translation

Havi has been talking a lot recently about Monsters – the parts of yourself that are holding you in a stuck pattern. Havi encourages addressing your monsters, identifying with them, seeing what they need, and helping them see what you need. As part of my progress toward Life On My Terms, I’ve wanted to address my monsters for a while, and today I got the opportunity to do that. I woke up this morning believing that my monsters were goblins, part of a tiny but teeming army, all gnashing their teeth and bearing spears. After listening to Havi’s Habits Detective recording this afternoon, I became convinced that what I was really seeing were just the foot soldiers – each of them a part of the stuckness but under the control of a General – and that the General was the Monster with whom I needed to deal.

I was expecting to have a conversation with my Goblin General when I sat down this evening. I started sketching my Monster – part of engaging these monsters is visualizing them – and I was surprised.

Hello, Monsters, I said. “Monsters”. Because: I see three of you. All three had little goblins scurrying around below them, carrying out orders.

The first was – is – me, but colossal. A parody of overweight. Hand in a bowl of popcorn and candy, too heavy to even sit up, having to look over his massive stomach to meet my gaze. You’re how I see myself, I said. You want to protect me from disappointment.

He nodded, with effort. “Look, giving up isn’t so bad. You get to relax all the time. You get to eat tasty food. And you’re still alive, right? I mean, you’ve lived through everything so far. Why not assume that’ll hold?”

I turned my attention to the second. He was me, too, but just a head, with no body, floating next to the first. I’d thought I’d recognized his expression out of the corner of my eye, but when I really looked I realized I was mistaken. I thought he was angry, passing judgment, telling me how awful I was. Instead he was worried, eyebrows raised, brow furrowed a little, his frown one of compassion rather than upset. You’re trying to protect me too, I said, just in a different way.

“Do you really want to put your work out in front of everybody?” he asked. “You don’t really think it’s any good, so why should you think anyone else will think so? And since you don’t think you’re improving, you’re probably right. No sense in continuing to practice if you’re not going to get any better.”

I looked at the third. This was difficult, because he was a long way off. He was recognizably me even at that distance, but the me I’d like to be in my wildest dreams – successful, thinner, and happy. You’re trying to protect me by staying away from me, I called out.

He shouted back: “It’s such a long way to your goals, and you’ll have to move so slowly to get here. It’s so much easier and pleasant to stay where you are; I’m just trying to save you effort. And you remember how much you dislike driving long distances? Getting here is even harder than that.”

I sighed, and spoke so they could all hear me. O my Monster Selves, I said, thank you for trying to protect me. I know that you want me to be happy and you’re just doing your jobs. It’s hard for you to see me try and fail.

But I need something from you: I need to move forward. I need to get going again. I need to start taking risks and putting myself out there and getting things done.

Self-Image Monster, I said, I won’t live through becoming you. I am already dangerously unhealthy. I need to change in order to live. Instead of encouraging me to give up, would you please protect me by reminding me that that’s not how I want to be?

The first monster nodded again. “But,” he said, “you have to make me a promise. I want to change too. I’m your self-image and if you can’t live being me, then I can’t live being me either. I want to change.” I agreed.

I turned to the second. Concerned Monster, I need you to drive me to improve instead of discouraging me. Help me keep moving forward by helping me recognize what I have left to do. You’re good at seeing my shortcomings; help me turn them into successes instead.

The Concerned Monster was recalcitrant. “You’ll still get laughed at and judged,” he said. “You’ll still get hurt.”

Let’s give it a trial, then, I told him. Until the end of the month. If nothing horrible has happened, then we’ll keep going.

“Okay,” he said, “but only if I get to decide what counts as horrible.”

I turned to the third and pulled out a megaphone. Future Monster, I am willing to move as slowly as you need me to, if you will help me by standing still, so that I know that my journey has an end. When I reach you I promise that you can move away again so I have something new to aim for. I won’t stop just because I’ve reached you.

He said nothing, but a green sign popped up next to me. It had “Future Me: ?? Miles” written on it in white Futurist lettering. I took that as a positive sign.

The little goblin armies had scattered. They were nowhere to be seen.

I got up and opened my eyes, and here I am.

Your thoughts

Like Havi, I’m practicing asking for what I want. Here’s what I’d like to receive in the comments:

• Your experiences with your monsters.
• Support and friendly chatter.

What I don’t want:

• Criticism of my methods or results.
• Other kinds of thrown shoes.
• Shoulds, judgment, and other kinds of negative thoughts.
• Non-productive “advice”.

Thanks for reading!

Written and drawn over the course of two hours today. Consciously minimal cleaning-up.

I’ve decided to adopt a new model for goal-setting, because resolutions and concrete goals just aren’t doing it for me. I still haven’t figured out – a month and a half in – how I want this year to pan out, but I do have some things I’d like to change and things I’d like to do.

I’m taking a three-prong approach to this, because it seems like the most logical way to go about it. All of the below start with “I want to…”, but they’re divided into sections according to their function.

Intentions

These are aspects of myself that I’ve decided I want to change, or actions that I want to take. They’re not endpoints; they’re processes and beginnings. (You might recall my issues with process, and focusing on these is a way to work on that.) They’re roughly analogous to Havi’s “My commitment” section in her Very Personal Ads. My current intentions are that I want to

• improve my posture;
• exercise more frequently;
• eat better (by which I mean both higher-quality food and food that’s better for me);
• do at least one thing each day that makes me actively happy;
• spend at least one hour each day learning a new skill;
• spend less time in front of the computer; and
• write more often.

Desires

On my paper list, this went under the heading “What I Want”, but I figured for the formal writeup it’d be better to have a consistent naming scheme. These are the desired results of the intentions. They’re deliberately vague, to represent that this is, in fact, a process; I’ll never be done improving. I can’t just get to 180 pounds, say, and decide that okay, I’m done that agenda item; by keeping my desires nebulous, I’m reminding myself to keep moving forward.

As a result of my intentions, I want to

• feel healthier, lighter, and more active;
• improve my skill in things I actually enjoy doing;
• be generally happier with myself and my life; and
• help my family be happier with me and with their lives.

Milestones

These are concrete, but they’re not goals; a goal implies an endpoint. Rather, they’re signals that I’m moving ahead in my intentions and achieving my desires.

In the pursuit of my intentions and desires, I want to

• release a Flash game;
• finish 10,000 words on a single writing project;
• have someone commission art from me; and
• hold a brief conversation in a modern non-English language.

Your thoughts

Like Havi, I’m practicing asking for what I want.

What I’d like to receive in the comments:

• Your intentions, desires, and milestones.
• Thoughts on how I could start on my intentions.
• General support.

What I don’t want:

• To quote Havi, practical concerns (“you realize you need X because…”).
• Negative thoughts.
• Shoulds.
• Judgment.
• Non-productive “advice”.

Thanks for reading!

I sit on the horns of a dilemma.

On the one hand, I want to write a blog that provides actual value and has readers who are there for the content.

On the other hand, I want a place to talk about the issues I’m dealing with.

Lost In Translation is, sadly, kind of a middle ground, and suffering for it. On the one hand, I feel somewhat safe talking about my issues here, because frankly, I don’t have a lot of readers and so I’m relatively insulated from shoe-throwing. On the other hand, I feel like I should be providing value with my blog, and so I tone down the discussion of issues (and often don’t discuss them at all). On the gripping hand, I never post any content that’s not All About Me because I feel like anyone who came here, saw that, and then went back into the archives and saw just me and my subscription would be disappointed and frustrated.

And yet I don’t really want to start Yet Another Blog, because it’s already hard enough keeping up with two.

Back to the horns for now.

I’ve been staring at this blank pagetext-entry box all day – seriously, I opened the tab at 8:45 AM and haven’t closed it since – and I can’t start writing because I’m scared that I’ll write the wrong thing or say it in the wrong way.

The irony of this will become apparent in a moment.

I’ve been struggling with a lack of motivation for years. In the best-case scenarios, I get projects started but I can’t get them finished, except for the most trivial tasks like washing dishes. Most of the time, my ideas don’t even make it off the drawing board, and it’s not for lack of quality of the ideas – it’s that I just can’t get going on them. For a long time, I thought it was related to fear of failure – but I don’t so much fear failure as expect it. A while back, one friend suggested that it was fear of success, that I was sabotaging myself because I was scared of what would happen if I followed through. But I don’t think that’s it either – I yearn for success. I actively want to be successful.

I think what’s actually happening is that I’m afraid of the process.

I’m afraid that I’ll screw it up – not that the end result will be bad, but that my method for getting to the end result will be bad. I’ll do something wrong and the whole thing will have been for naught and everyone will laugh at me, or I’ll leave a step out, or I’ll go with an outmoded model of how things are to be done and not realize it. It’s not about trying and failing – it’s about trying wrong.

Which is why this post has been so hard to write. What if I’m doing it wrong? What if there’s a Right Way to write posts like this and I don’t know about it? What if…

Hey, nobody said fears have to be rational.

Anyway. At this point I feel like one of those stereotypical City Slickers who shows up for a safari with three suitcases full of everything they could ever possibly need, plus additional stuff strapped on just in case. What I need is to convince myself that moving forward is more important than knowing the map perfectly. That’s not to say that I’m going to strike out completely unprepared – but I need to figure out that I don’t need to be prepared for every eventuality either. Most of the time, there aren’t actually any tigers anyway.

It occurred to me today that I’d never satisfactorily answered this question to anybody, even though I’ve been asked many times. Unfortunately, that’s because it’s a two-part answer and requires a logical leap.

The first part is Ether.

To understand this you need to go back a little over a hundred years. Physicists of the 19th century were struggling to understand how light got from the sun to the Earth, and why it behaved the way it did; the belief that light was a particle explained many of its behaviors (like reflection) but not others (like refraction). To explain this, scientists proposed a medium through which light traveled, the luminiferous aether. Invisible and omnipresent, it allowed light to travel through what was otherwise assumed to be a vacuum, and faster-than-light propagation of waves caused by the light explained the odd non-particle behaviors.

Naturally, Einstein showed up in the early 20th century and screwed the whole thing up with Special Relativity, but that’s neither here nor there.

In the mid-70s, engineers at Xerox developed a computer-networking protocol that was superior both in speed and in usability to the then-prevalent but highly-proprietary Token Ring and Token Bus systems. Unlike the Token systems, each system on Xerox’s network could see each other system, regardless of whether the systems were linked serially (that is, each computer hooked to the next in sequence, like elephants in a row, trunk-to-tail), hubwise (a central core into which each computer hooked, like an octopus), or otherwise. The new networking protocol, in effect, allowed the computers to pretend that there was an invisible, pervasive medium surrounding them, through which they could propagate messages to other systems, much like the sun propagated light to the planets.

In a fit of pique, the Xerox engineers (who were now working with Digital and Intel to finalize the standard) named their protocol after the luminiferous aether, and thus Ethernet – the networking protocol by which the vast majority of local internet nodes communicate – was born.

The second part is jammer, and although it’s a lot simpler to explain, I’ll wager that fewer of the people who read this will have run across the origin of this part before.

To understand this part, we need to go back to the late Age of Sail, just before the advent of steamships. There were two major classes of shipping vessels then: the clippers, which held a smaller cargo and were less maneuverable but were much faster, and the windjammers, which were larger and slower, but carried more cargo, were more maneuverable, and – speed aside – were generally more capable ships than the clippers. (Both of these, sadly, were displaced by steamships, which – unlike clippers and windjammers, which were both sailing ships – were not reliant on the wind to get from point A to point B.)

Combining the two gives us Etherjammer: a large, flexible, maneuverable ship that plies the open Ethernet; not the fastest ship in the fleet, but adaptable and able to deal with a wide array of tasks.

(Yes, it’s a metaphor.)

1.

Yesterday, a friend asked me about something I’d come up with in late 2008: the Letter from Next Year. The basic idea is that at the end of the year, you write a letter from the perspective of you, a year from that point, telling the story of the previous year (in other words, the year you’re about to face). Then, you revisit and revise every so often, seeing whether the letter’s still in tune with your values and intentions, and making any changes – to the letter and to your life – that are necessary to keep things going the way you want them to.

You may be aware that at the end of the summer, my site was attacked by “script kiddies” and infected with a PHP script injection that put malicious Javascript on all of the index pages on my site. The only way I could get rid of it for good was to delete everything on the site and start fresh – and because I was down to nothing, I figured it was as good a chance as any to start fresh here. So my Letter from 2009 was no longer on the site. Thankfully, I’d made a backup of my blogs before I deleted them, and so I was able to track down the Letter and repost it. (You can find it in the links at the top of the site, or just click here.)

2.

Of course, half the point of a Letter from Next Year is sitting down at the end of Next Year and seeing how well it meshed with what actually happened. For 2009, I dramatically underestimated the effect that depression would have on me, and there were a few things that I didn’t anticipate at all, such that we’re in quite a different place than I thought we’d be now that 2010 is dawning.

• I never actually launched smalltownchef.com. I still have designs on it, but I haven’t figured out a way to do it that doesn’t a) conflict with any work I’d do on Nourish or b) require me to do much more experimental cooking than Holly generally allows me to do (she has a valid point; on our budget, if I experiment and screw it up, we have that much less to eat on for the rest of the month). Naturally, because I never launched the site, it’s not showing ads and doesn’t have a single reader, much less a 200-person forum or a cookbook-in-progress.
• I left Butler Hill in June when my contract expired. I stopped drawing a regular paycheck from Johns Hopkins on December 11, although I’m still on the books as a casual employee; I’m basically there for emergencies and in case they want to start up another web survey. I never picked up as much contract work as I wanted to, and the contract work I did pick up I tended to foul up in one way or another, whether due to depression, lack of skill, or just plain procrastination.
• Instead of writing, Holly returned to school to get a BA in professional and technical writing. She is writing professionally now, but it’s as a copywriter and marketer, not as a fiction/children’s author. It’ll come, though.
• Alex is in fifth grade, and while he’s doing well academically, he has a lot of social trouble, and we may have to take him out and homeschool him for a while until he gets over some of his anxiety.
• We did not move to the coast; we’re still right here in Richmond, much to our chagrin. Almost all of our friends have moved or are moving, and we’re still here largely to provide continuity for Alex and because Holly is finishing her degree. We do live in a different house; it’s much nicer, but at the same time a little more cramped because it has much less storage space. There is no separate study; Holly and I tend to sequester ourselves in a bedroom when we need space. And we still don’t have a dishwasher.
• To my dismay, I took up none of the exercise activities I wanted to in 2009, and thus have remained roughly the same size. I’ve tried a few times, but it didn’t really stick.
• To my further dismay, I’m not really writing, drawing, or playing music much these days either. I’d like to, but there always seems to be something else on my agenda that I need to do first, and when I do finish the things I have to do, I just want to relax and not deal with Personal Development. Naturally, I am still playing World of Warcraft, but I only have two 80s and one 70+, and I don’t play nearly as much as I thought I would.
• We never took those vacations, and we still can’t afford to fly.
• As for the income… I don’t think we made half of what I projected, and if we manage six figures in 2010 I’ll be astonished.

Oddly, I expected that that would be harder to write than it was. I guess I’ve come to terms with more of this than I thought. (Doesn’t mean I have to continue the patterns in the new year, though.)

3.

Even though 2009 didn’t shape up nearly like I thought it would, I still think Letters from Next Year are a good idea. They’re more pliable than resolutions, and they’re more forgiving of slip-ups and failures – and since you’re walking into them with the idea that you’ll be altering them regularly to make sure they’re still in line with your values and goals, they’re more useful than resolutions, which are yardsticks both to measure and to rap your knuckles. Letters from Next Year are also inherently optimistic; they’re the best-case scenario of what you want to happen, so they’re more useful for keeping hopes up.

Therein lies the problem: I don’t actually know what I want 2010 to look like, at this point. So much is in flux that I could end up anywhere, and I have no idea which direction I want to face. I’m going to have to think on this year’s letter for a while. Hopefully I’ll have it up by the end of the week. In the meantime, if this has inspired you to write your own letters, please link or post them here in the comments. I’m dearly curious to find out what you want your 2010 to look like.

About two weeks ago I signed up for Freak Revolution. Freak Revolution is basically about a bunch of misfits changing the world, and not being judged for who they are in the process. “The world will not be changed by those who fit in” is the title of the manifesto (I think; it’s what’s on the cover, anyway). It’s a good cause and a good bunch of people, and I figured I might benefit from being a member and other members might benefit from my presence. I filled out the application and Pace and Kyeli, who organized Freak Revoluton, approved my application and invited me to hang out and introduce myself.

I haven’t been back to the site since.

It has nothing to do with whether or not I want to be part of the site, part of the movement. I do. And it has nothing to do with any of the people who are in Freak Revolution; some of my favorite people – Naomi, Havi, Seth (I feel like I should call him “Mr. Godin, sir”, although I think that defeats the purpose) – are part of Freak Revolution.

I just feel insufficiently like a freak.

It’s a strange thing to say, especially since I’ve largely been an outcast – whether or not it was self-imposed, whether or not it stemmed from my own social anxieties and depression – for most of my life. But it was never because I was weird. It was because I was a recluse and horrible in social situations – not Asperger’s so much as crippling shyness – and so I pretty much defaulted to introvert and outcast, because the other option was extroversion and life of the party.

I’m not the second-best practitioner in the world of a branch of yoga that turns your brain into a delicious, salty pretzel. I don’t forget to wear a shirt to an impromptu video-conference. I’m just me. I’m not weird at all. I’m not really much of anything. I have depression and social anxiety and a degree in Classical Studies from which the only fruit harvested is the subtag of this blog (Radices cocta simul illo cupisne?, and according to my generally-prevailing philosophy, that tells you just about everything you need to know about me.

But I’m tired of boiling myself down to nothing, like a hard-boiled egg forgotten on the stove. So tonight I’m going to list five weird things about me, and maybe that will give me the nerve to go talk to the people at Freak Revolution. Here they are (the weird things, not the people), in no particular order:

1. The pets outnumber us three to one. I don’t mean fish, either. We have lots of animals in this house. They’re generally free-range, too, although most of the dogs sleep in crates at night.
2. I have a degree with which I do not ever intend to do anything. I started college in 1997 intending to be a professor, left in 1999 to raise a family (this stemmed from a birth-control failure; readers, do not fool yourself into thinking that any method has a 100% success rate), and came back in 2005 to finish my degree. At that point I had two years left, and I could either finish in Classical Studies and get my degree in two years, or find a major that actually appealed to the 2005 me and take 3-4 years to finish. I chose the route that got me the degree, and graduated in 2007 with a BA in Classical Studies. Now I have eight years of Latin and three of Greek, plus countless hours studying ancient architecture, art, literature, and culture, and I have no real desire to ever put it to professional use.
3. I would rather help others than help myself. I put off getting things for myself in favor of other people getting what they want. I help with no expectation of recompense, and am always surprised when people want to pay me back. It’s not a self-sacrifice thing, or a holier-than-thou thing – one of the things that really recharges me is making other people happy, so I do it as much as I can, even when it means I don’t get something else that I want.
4. I used Apple’s GarageBand to create a fifteen-minute “song” of a thunderstorm. It helps me relax and concentrate.
5. I really want to write music for aquariums, planetariums, and zoos. I loved the National Aquarium, the Science Center, and the Zoo in Baltimore when I was growing up, especially the music they used to enhance the experience. I’d love to be one of the people writing that music. It ties in to another of my lifelong goals – to design theme parks and other educational/entertainment venues.

I still feel insufficiently weird. Naomi successfully faked being English for six months. Havi tended bar in Israel. I have cats and dogs, and want to make theme parks. Still, I guess it’s better than nothing. Here goes…

Here’s the big secret: I don’t know a goddamned thing.

This isn’t one of those Socratic “The only thing I know is that I know nothing” bits, either. Socrates was talking about logic and reason, and never taking anything for granted – begin everything by accepting that you might be wrong, and go from there. That’s a good goal, and it’ll get you a lot farther than blind dogma, but it’s not what I’m talking about.

No, what I mean is this: I have no idea what I’m talking about. Seriously, I don’t know why you people are reading what I’m writing. I have more than a thousand people (or robots or small dogs with evolutionarily-improbable opposable thumbs) following me on Twitter, and I’m making this up as I go along. I have no business giving anybody advice or speaking on any subject, really, because life has shown me that what I’m really, truly good at is taking a good thing and screwing it up. Seriously, if I’d been born with a silver spoon in my mouth it would have been tarnished by the time the doctor slapped my ass. (Speaking of which, I managed to screw up being born – I got stuck coming out, and the doctors had to push me back in so they could do a C-section. You’d think I would have taken the object lesson more seriously.)

On the other hand -

I suspect that most people in the world feel like this.

I don’t have any proof. I sure as hell don’t know, and there’s an interesting fallacy that makes us feel like other people are like us, so maybe I’m totally wrong, but I have a suspicion that the overwhelming majority of us feel like we’re in the tall grass most of the time. We’ve got a tenuous grasp on whatever it is that we’re supposed to be good at, and we fight and struggle and kick our own asses to live up to the expectations of other people, in part because even the people who feel like they’re falling apart at the seams feel like everyone else has it together.

So maybe I’m not alone in not knowing anything.

And maybe knowing that helps.