ON THE VALUE OF BEING JUDGED, THE LURE OF SAMENESS, AND FITTING THE PIECES TOGETHER
Thursday March 7 and Friday March 8, 2019
Dear Sarah,
Everything feels a bit in draft mode this week! Picking up the pieces of work, life, job, career, future, past, plans, dreams, speculations — putting things together, seeing what works with what. Heavy on the pieces — draft mode is my general sense that there’s something there among all the sediment but I haven’t excavated and articulated the full skeleton just yet. It’s been a flurry of a week with all kinds of pieces in all kinds of places. There’s a weird momentum to it, knowing that draft mode is not the same as edit mode, knowing you just have to get all the pieces together in one place and then start to move them around until the puzzle edges start to fit together in a way that makes sense. Still, I’m exhausted!
I’m thinking back on your letter from last week, and wondering if a fear of what other people think is somehow a fear of oneself, of simply being oneself? To play with a familiar phrase — is it better to be judged, and possibly judged harshly, than never to be judged at all? It may be my mood today, or the fact that I'm older today than I was yesterday, than I was a year ago — but what happens if you or I are judged? What does it really look like? I’m inclined to judge, to evaluate, in general, and I often keep it to myself, the judgments running parallel to my interactions with and feelings about people otherwise. I try not to throw stones. I judge in part because I want to turn back to myself and say, Can I do better? Not exactly with the intention of doing better than someone at something — but just doing better, myself. If the process of judging yields a sense that someone is not doing well I feel for them, and know that I’ve been there. As I thought about your letter and thought about judgment, I had a moment of realization: that judgment is neutral. I often assume that if I am judged I will be judged negatively — but what if I am judged positively? Then can a judgment be a good thing?
It still feels natural to fear being judged, being evaluated — but I realize more every day that I, and you, develop resiliencies when things somehow don’t go as planned. On the whole, surprises are dealt with. Injuries heal. Errors are corrected. Offenses are patched up, soothed into a place of amenable communication. Or things change dramatically, break apart completely, and still — as long as you haven’t killed anyone and no one has killed you — somehow you keep on keeping on. It would actually appear to be true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger — like one long, painful (and, I suppose, refreshing!) workout wherein you keep building muscles you never knew you had — little ones around your bony knees and threading across your back and winding down your arms. If someone challenges you, it is a chance to react, to test your response. If you don’t like how it goes, you can play back some mental video and think about how it could have gone differently. Add a new tool to the toolkit for the next time.
I’ve spent so long fearing negative judgment that I forgot that a judgment can be a moment of recognition, a reckoning, a yes or a no, and a reason to move on to the next thing. I also think that everyone is a maker in this world in some way, everyone has a medium, and some people work in the medium of critique and analysis. Someone will make a thing — say, a book, that takes one or five or ten years or more to write, wringing and forming and shaping and ordering and binding words together to build a thing that did not exist previously, was loose bits here and there that had to be gathered over time — and it is the purview of another number of people to critique it. Did you like it or not? Did the words connect up with ideas in your head in a pleasurable way, or in a way that made you shudder, or simply yawn and set it down? Should other people read it or not? What is it like, what is it not like? What is it trying to be like? Is it trying to be like anything? Is it its own thing? I imagine if you’ve written the thing in this example, it’s a bit as if your own body and blood are being critiqued, spilled out there in front of you. Does the fact that someone might hate it mean it shouldn’t be done in the first place? At one time I think my subconscious answer to this question was Yes. Now I feel my mind changing, ready to make something someone else might hate, or that they might love. To make something that would, ideally, draw some feeling or response. And if the response is negative, or if it is positive, I will find some way to deal with it.
To come back around to draft mode — getting these odd thoughts down on paper, so to speak, and sharing them with you, gives me an opportunity to say to myself, What did I mean by that? Drawing the words out of my head, externalizing these ideas as they flow through, makes them something different, something firmer, something to talk about. This is the delight of draft mode, where ideas, plans, dreams, are both real and still in process. Now, and every week, I am glad to share this drafty letter with you!
Until next week,
Your friend,
Eva
March 7, 2019
Dear Eva,
I have been thinking this week about how our growing stack of letters feels like a good metaphor for our lives — we keep adding to the pile; when can we stop and sift for connections / learnings / truth within it? It feels like there is never enough time to look back, never a chance to stop and make sense of what is behind in order to live better in what lies ahead. For me, there is always an elusive, shape-shifting heaviness to a task like this that is not even yet a task but instead just a vague recognition that meaning is passing by unnoticed. All of this is to say — we must eventually peek back to see what we have wrought!
I have a strange instinct to want to end the letters at exactly one year simply so I can then finally turn my attention to finding patterns and insights within them, combing them like a beach full of hidden treasures. But if the letters are like life, then how insane to want to tie it off and stop living just to make sense of the past! I wonder why pausing to reflect is so difficult? There must be small ways to chip away at it. I have to fight my tendency to want to wait until I can do it holistically because that time will probably never come. Again, as with life.
Lately, I feel a renewed desire to learn a new medium like drawing. I feel like there are so many things I want to explore and say that can’t be tapped by words alone, the only medium I know. For example, I have an image in my head of a single human in a bed, enveloped by all the words that weigh into her daily life — from the mundane to the existential, the professional to the personal. So many layers in a life! Layers imposed from the outside, layers within ourselves. How can we ever expect ourselves to make sense of it all? Rather than frantically ripping down layers in all directions, why can’t I just calmly acknowledge all of them? Why can’t I just be at peace with all I do not know, cannot express, will never experience? This takes me back to our ever-growing stack of letters, each one a minuscule layer of our interior lives. Can I accept that I may never see how they all fit together?
In your letter last week, you talked about magnets. I like this. It struck me that this push/pull is precisely on point when it comes to the inner ring of people we know and love the most. The connection deepens with time, just as the familiarity has its way of sometimes repelling us. I have always been more comfortable having just a small number of very close relationships than with a wider network of loose ties. Of course, I have both, but I am most at home with my close friends and family. I like to feel known. But I also know I must sometimes resist. The new, the unfamiliar — they help me keep evolving. Without it, I can sometimes sink so far down into the well-worn grooves of my most intimate relationships, start repeating predictable patterns, presuming I know what a loved one will say before even giving them a chance to say it, reflexively drifting into archetypes of myself rather than just being me.
I have an inherited tendency to want my closet companions to know everything I know, to love the same things, to be thinking the same things. I even get a tiny pang of disappointment when I find out a close friend doesn’t share my love for a favorite TV show, or when Bill refuses to listen to podcasts (at all! quelle horreur!). Sameness is easy, validating, warm. But sameness is also dull, unnatural, lazy. Over the arc of our relationship, Bill has helped me recognize my subconscious urge for sameness with the people I love most. He challenges me, and not just by refusing to listen to podcasts. But we are also merging over time. Sometimes, I find myself yearning to tell Bill every single thing I experienced during the day, everything I learned in the podcasts I listened to, every new thought I had. I wonder when intimacy becomes a blurring of the self with another? Will Bill and I eventually become a single person in two bodies? Answer: no, because he will never listen to podcasts. And like any two magnets, we will push each other away just as we pull together.
Your friend,
Sarah