The wisdom to know the difference
Oct. 12th, 2011 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistOne of the things I dislike most in people is a tendency to rewrite history, on a personal level. This is no doubt because I do this myself, and I'm not nearly as bad as I used to be.
We hate in others what we hate in ourselves, and I'm hardly a paragon of good behavior, though I'm trying hard to get better and be more honest with myself, and the people close to me.
I had an easy childhood, I did well in school without having to try hard. I got used to not failing. So I inevitably ran up against some really unpleasant obstacles when that effortless success stopped, in my early twenties.
Without even realizing what I was doing, I turned to revisionism. In the depths of the depression that genetics and circumstance had brought me to, I frantically tried to get rid of the cognitive dissonance of not being the person I had always been led to believe I was (smart, good at school, someone who liked school, bound to go on to great things, etc.); understandable, perhaps, but there were several problems with this.
First, it wasn't any fun. It was adding to my misery, though I didn't know it. Second, it was making things worse. I was covering over the identity crisis, trying to make sure it'd never been there, rather than working through it and getting to the other side. Putting off the short-term hurt for long-term gain, I set myself back a lot and it's possible I'm still dealing with some of the repercussions of this.
Of course apart from disliking in others what we most dislike in ourselves, the problem with other people's tendency to revisionist history is that sometimes I'm a part of it. A version of me lives in a lot of people's heads, just as I carry around a version of many of you in mine. It's dependent on how long I've known you and how well and in what contexts so it might not be very much like your idea of you at all, which probably emphasizes different things and has forgotten about others that I remember well. And vice versa.
So it's entirely possible for someone's idea of me, or mine of them, to go off the rails. Which is no fun; you just want to run up to people and yank yourself out of their brain (or yank them out of yours! oh how satisfying that would be) so they can't do you any more harm. But that unfortunately is not entirely possible. There's nothing i can do about the ex who infamously told the internet that I put her off dating cis people. There's not even anything I can do about my mom telling my extended family to buy me stuff for Christmas that I don't like and never wanted -- it doesn't have to be a conscious antagonism born out of animosity.
So I have no easy answers, it's an ongoing battle to not be too hard on myself or mean to other people, but I feel better for having written this.
We hate in others what we hate in ourselves, and I'm hardly a paragon of good behavior, though I'm trying hard to get better and be more honest with myself, and the people close to me.
I had an easy childhood, I did well in school without having to try hard. I got used to not failing. So I inevitably ran up against some really unpleasant obstacles when that effortless success stopped, in my early twenties.
Without even realizing what I was doing, I turned to revisionism. In the depths of the depression that genetics and circumstance had brought me to, I frantically tried to get rid of the cognitive dissonance of not being the person I had always been led to believe I was (smart, good at school, someone who liked school, bound to go on to great things, etc.); understandable, perhaps, but there were several problems with this.
First, it wasn't any fun. It was adding to my misery, though I didn't know it. Second, it was making things worse. I was covering over the identity crisis, trying to make sure it'd never been there, rather than working through it and getting to the other side. Putting off the short-term hurt for long-term gain, I set myself back a lot and it's possible I'm still dealing with some of the repercussions of this.
Of course apart from disliking in others what we most dislike in ourselves, the problem with other people's tendency to revisionist history is that sometimes I'm a part of it. A version of me lives in a lot of people's heads, just as I carry around a version of many of you in mine. It's dependent on how long I've known you and how well and in what contexts so it might not be very much like your idea of you at all, which probably emphasizes different things and has forgotten about others that I remember well. And vice versa.
So it's entirely possible for someone's idea of me, or mine of them, to go off the rails. Which is no fun; you just want to run up to people and yank yourself out of their brain (or yank them out of yours! oh how satisfying that would be) so they can't do you any more harm. But that unfortunately is not entirely possible. There's nothing i can do about the ex who infamously told the internet that I put her off dating cis people. There's not even anything I can do about my mom telling my extended family to buy me stuff for Christmas that I don't like and never wanted -- it doesn't have to be a conscious antagonism born out of animosity.
So I have no easy answers, it's an ongoing battle to not be too hard on myself or mean to other people, but I feel better for having written this.
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-12 04:52 pm (UTC)Interesting and, I think, important stuff.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-12 06:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-12 02:06 pm (UTC)It sounds like a happy experience, so OF COURSE I don't remember it.
Part of it is, of course, that I don't tend to engage in any history. I don't talk much about experiences after I've experienced, and so I don't cement them in my memory. It's a sad state of affairs, but I think I can accept it, for the time being.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-13 02:34 am (UTC)I have a habit of dwelling far too much on the unhappy things, so the movement towards not dwelling on anything may be a reaction to that. If I could retain happy memories more than unhappy ones, I think I would, even if that represents attachment. As it is, I don't remember happy events because I selectively remember the traumatic ones.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-12 07:42 pm (UTC)I wish I had your eloquence. I'm still trying to get beyond communicating about emotions with grunts.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-13 07:17 pm (UTC)And thanks; I'm never gladder than when my writing means something to somebody.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-13 07:04 pm (UTC)I recently had a funny event which confirmed this, I was out with a friend of mine who is about as right-wing as I could possibly tolerate to be around, and an acquaintance who is known to be a real live Tory. The acquaintance asked my friend a question about some issue of the day, interested in his opinion because friend was the most left-wing person he knew. This gave me an inward chuckle, because for me it's the complete opposite.