If I can communicate the 20 different angles I’ve considered
approaching this blog from in a meaningful way, hopefully it will
serve to amplify the theme, which is in fact, communication.
Information is always being conveyed. No matter how much you’d
maybe like to hit pause or hide away, your very status as a person is
telling something to somebody. It’s not just that you talk, it’s
how you talk, who to, and what about. No one cares that you have hair
until it looks like you spent time making look nice or are relaying a
message about just waking up. The trick seems to be creating your own
message verses allowing people to hear only whatever it is they’re
telling themselves about you.
I, rather frequently, state my goals. Whether it’s monetary
achievement, personal gratification in different kinds of
friendships, or forcefully asserting ideas about conversation and
awareness of various things I consider problems, my agenda is rooted
in more than leaving you with an impression that I may be a hippie
because of my hair. And, while I don’t always act like it, this
leaves me with a concern over how, if, and when I try to communicate
something. The why is obvious, because in theory, if I’m effective,
“things” will get “better.”
So I’m immediately drawn to people who I can talk to. People who
don’t flinch at how I say something and actively pursue the reasons
I said it. People who can step back and help prepare the word soup
without threatening to drown me in it. People who aren’t afraid to
put any and every idea they may hold dear on the table to be
scrutinized. This fundamental principal, this habit, I think is a
prerequisite to anything even resembling “progress.” Some might
say it’s to be scientifically minded.
Well before you start to bother talking to other people, you need
to be aware of what you’re telling yourself. How that dialogue gets
started and the reasons you develop to preserve it can be vastly
complicated. Even as someone who puts out what he thinks, generally
sober minded and after much forethought, I can still find myself
burdened by previous ideas, habits, or ruts that I dug myself in the
past. I have to go back and read my own reasonable position to refute
the craziness I’ve allowed my head to go in the moment. To change
an automatic overtly compelling response like that is incredibly, if
not impossibly hard.
So then my dialogue about that response has to change. I have to
better identify which feelings or thoughts are worth reading into.
I’m starting to play in that stupid emotional realm again now, so
when I get jealous, am I really changing my ideas about sex overnight
and looking to protect some societal notion of integrity about
relationships? No, even if it seems like it would feel really
good to fix the shitty feeling in the moment. It’s
acknowledging, not irrationally capitulating. You don’t fix a car
spinning out by frantically turning the wheel the opposite direction.
It’s prompting me to think about where the butterflies are really
hiding.
And it takes practice. A lot of all the time daily awareness to
when you’re overselling yourself on a story. Doubt is an
uncomfortable place until you realize the things you’re basically
sure of came out of a healthy skepticism about them. Your reasons get
stronger and can stand up to deeper scrutiny. Your goals get a little
more polished. Your analogies become leaves on the wind; watch how
they soar.
I understand that if it can go wrong in me, it can do the same in
others. I will forever be embarrassed by my first violent blood bath
stabs at writing or conveying a message. Naturally, if I conceive of
most people as the incorrigible dramatic miscreants that I so
glaringly resembled at sixteen, I understand why they might take my
words, meticulously etched upon my family’s finest parchment, and
want to light them on fire. Change is hard, but sometimes it’s only
as hard as you’re willing to make it. Incorporating a new idea
doesn’t always have to feel like life or death...of your
personality, character, or credibility.
There is the context of your mind. The one ingrained in you by
virtue of being human, the one bombarding you with advertising and
social cues, and the one you cultivate with your inner dialogue. And
they’re all competing. We’re still fight or flight mammals but
with little reason to generally fear for our lives. We’re tapped
into an infinitely growing list of “everything” with a point and
click and are prompted to decide something about it all. This very
independently of whether or not our opinion is needed or necessary.
It can be more than a little distracting and destructive to try and
build a mental or social framework to fall into while getting
swallowed up by this hole. It’s like an animal that keeps growing
more and more hair until you can’t cut enough to identify it’s a
dog. Find your inner dog.
There is a social context. There are still plenty of terrified
atheists and gay kids who don’t want to get the shit kicked out of
them for swimming too hard against their family or society’s
current. You wouldn’t consider it a good thing for them to, upon
escaping that climate, retain ideas about their deserving of hell or
them being evil and disgusting. But that happens, in less extreme,
but just as compromising ways. I constantly poke at and speak against
religiosity for this reason. The hair’s a knotted mess. Those
tangled webs of arguments and empty definitions are where my concern
for effective communication came from. And no, it’s never private
or personal, you’re always saying something.
The fact this is a blog changes how I write. The fact that it’s
geared towards people who (should) know a ton about me and might have
been privy to a conversation or ten that provokes blogs slants the
message. I think it’s important to know how to write cited detailed
analyses rooted in history and evidence. I think it’s just as
important to power through lines of reasoning, however potentially
absurd, and find the true heart of how and why a message will
resonate with you or how and why you’re going about explaining
yours. If you’re not appreciative about the prospect of being
wrong, when it’s the prerequisite for learning anything worth
knowing, how do you respect yourself? How could I take pride in what
I do, or call what I write work?
It’s lucky for me that the loudest messages are, not
coincidentally, the easiest to hear. We all tend to react in
predictably angry or fear based ways if our foundations are rocked. I
know when you’re going to fuck the girl you shouldn’t to spite
your ex. I know how you’re going to deflect or blame me for picking
at your faith. I’d bet there’s an arsenal, conscious or
unconscious, that you’d be dying to enlighten me about my
ideas or behavior if I pursued something about you too aggressively.
This, the glorious fight/flight entanglement both to fend off the
present threat and then to flee, perhaps in breaking the
relationship, so as to never have to deal with such an unpleasant
line of thought again.
I say let them run. It simply communicates to me your hapless and
likely hopeless, circumstantial existence. The mountains of ideas you
move and impact you hope to have on the world will be helped by those
left behind. All 5 of them.
