mf

(I just posted this on tumblr also.)

Right so I've rarely tried to articulate this before so I have no idea how wacky it is going to sound to other people:

Sometimes I struggle in a “weak sense of self” kind of way, where if someone, particularly an authority figure, projects an inaccurate personality on me, while ignoring my attempts at correcting them... it’s like I start to worry that this is what my life is always going to be like from now on and I can never make it stop?

In general, all it takes for me to snap out of it is one close friend chatting to me for a few minutes and it’s like the world rights itself. But. I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas about like... objects? Resources? That can act as sense-of-self security blankets? Like for emergencies.

I’ve held onto a lot of mementos, souvenirs, notes, paperwork and other reminders, and for a long time I didn’t really know why.

I also used to take a lot of notes, photos, recordings, for no specific reason. Which I used to think was pointless, but now… I wonder. I was taught, as a child, not to “dwell” on things, and to think that there was something wrong with me if I did; now I wonder if my brain was trying to create workarounds somehow.( Read more... )

I read this tumblr post a while ago and had thoughts about it. The post is all quotes from people who have felt (or still feel) that love is something they have to earn. I kept wanting to reach through the internet and tell them -

When you feel like the value you have as a person is something that can be quantified, and when you feel that it is your job to figure out what people find entertaining/charming/adorable and to be that, and when you feel like people might like you one day because you “got it right,” and they might not like you the next day, whether you changed anything or not, and when you feel like that's just normal, that's just how things are - ( Read more... )

Last month, when Mary Simon was appointed as the new Governor General, I made some comments about language politics on twitter, and a friend asked:

"Is there like a class/race divide on who can speak French or not in Canada?"

And anyway ( here is a slightly modified transcription of a thread about language politics in Canada )

Maybe this is coming up for me because I read an article about friendship breakups. Maybe it was the particular word choices in a psychology video. Or maybe... I don't know.( Read more... )

so when in 2019 I went for a cognitive evaluation, the psychologist made this comment:

"You express a lot of doubt."

He said that after we were done, referring to the objective portion of the tests. Memory questions, IQ questions, response speed questions, etc. Apparently, when I was answering, say, general knowledge questions, I nearly always added "I think?" or "I'm not sure" or "I'm pretty sure, but..."

"Do other people not do that?" I asked him.

"No, they don't."( Read more... )

I've been careful to tag entries like this "therapy" so they're easy to filter out? Please let me know if there's anything else I could or should be doing. Thank you, dreamwidth friends!

So last week my therapist asked me a bunch of questions about my relationship with my work colleagues, such as they are, and I tried to describe what worried me when I have to interact with them.

Mainly this boiled down to (1) fear of failing to guess their expectations (2) fear of being annoying. The first one has a whole subset of fears, including: fear I'll come across as controlling if I ask them what their expectations are. It's a whole Scylla and Charybdis... thing. ( Read more... )

So I'm experiencing fear.

My new therapist has given me exercises for identifying emotions, and I think that's what I'm feeling right now: fear.( Read more... )

I have a new therapist.

I broke up, so to speak, with my former therapist, in the summer of 2019. ( Read more... )

That previous post showed up as a saved draft when I came here just now! So I finished it and posted it. But what I really want to talk about is this show, The Magicians.

Ok so I tried to start watching The Magicians twice before, mainly because of the gifs I kept seeing on tumblr, but it's only this week that I gave the show another shot and finally made it past the first episode. I love something about the aesthetic.

That being said, the show makes me very angry and I guess I'm here to make a list of reasons why it makes me angry.

(1) yet another story about a special boy being more special than all of the other special people
(2) classism
(3) toxic ideas about "talent," including but not limited to the idea that trauma leads to talent, and talent = merit
(4) toxic ideas about teaching and higher education: gatekeeping, arbitrariness, testing students without warning, shouting, or otherwise favouring students who thrive in anxiety-or-fear-based environments
(5) exclusion for no apparent reason

My teaching experience is that there is no correlation whatever between the scope of someone's abilities, and their initial capacity to perform under pressure. Also, students do much better if you just do what's best for their well-being, and literally never give a thought to how "talented" they might be.

I've spent so much of my fucking life force wishing more of the parents of my violin students knew that caring about how "talented" kids are - let alone ranking those kids [shudder] - is not the same as caring about those kids's well-being. Even worse, I sometimes have to worry about that kind of vibe coming from the school administration. It just makes me want to scream "STOP FETISHIZING TALENT" "THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS" "THE PROBLEM IS YOU."

I've been seeing more and more teaching styles that are kind and supportive but also foster good, solid work ethics. Twenty years ago, the options were either "kind teachers who are laisser-faire about discipline" or "toxic shouty teachers who make sure you work diligently." (Like no one had figured out how to be kind while also making sure you put in regular hours?! Ugh.) But now I'm seeing examples of healthy teaching environments more often.

So. Well. The patriarchal classist gatekeeping I'm seeing on The Magicians makes me angry. It's regressive, imo. "Talented boy is more talented than all the other talented boys so this story is about him!" "Only the talented special people are special enough to be admitted to the specialest school that ever did special!" "THEY ARE SPECIAL BECAUSE OF THEIR TRAUMA." Like why would you promote that.

Ok that's probably all I had to say about that for now. Thank you for reading! Hope you are all well.