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cosmolinguistMy parents called me this evening. "We never hear from you," Mom said.
"I never hear from you either!" I countered (cleverly, right?).
"Well, yes, but we're the parents," she said, as if that made sense. "We like to know how our kids are doing."
I'm not doing anything, though. That is, in fact, a big problem I have with my life right now, as regular readers of this LiveJournal may remember. But I can't tell her about that. So I just tell her I almost did things last weekend but then there was a snowstorm. That seems to satisfy her. She asks about jobs, of course, and I feel guilty. Then she tells me about other people's babies and wedding decorations and possible engagements. I say "right" and "mmmm" and "yeah" a lot. She asks if I want to talk to Dad, so I do. We don't have sports to talk about right now but he tells me the numbers I need to check my bank account over the telephone, which is an idea I like. All my friends can check their bank accounts online, but I have no such luxury from my bank.
The call ends; my cell phone tells me I talked to them for sixteen minutes, but it seemed longer. I go back out to the living room and listen to the boys play Civ III--they can be awfully entertaining--and read a book. Something occurs to me and I mutter it out loud: "Oh, I didn't even tell them I was going to England..."
(I can't believe I'm supposed to be doing that in a few weeks. It seems a lot more unreal than it did the last time, somehow. The idea that I could just walk out of this house and walk on to a plane and walk off again in Manchester is the sort of idea that I know is true but I never actually think about that much. Thinking of packing again and finding a ride and, yes, telling my parents some time before this happens--these things seem bizarre to me, so I've been mostly ignoring such thoughts. I'm thinking a lot about what will happen when I get there, but not at all about how to extract myself from Minnesota again. And there's a reason for that. Just thinking of telling my parents about this makes me more tired than the entire sixteen-minute phone conversation had.)
"Your problem is that you aren't assertive enough," Matthew tells me.
I look at him and think about this for a second. "Yes," I say. He's absolutely right. "That's ... one of my problems," I add, almost laughing under my breath, because there seem to be an awful lot of problems with me right now.
But, yes, he is right. I can be assertive, but I have to do it deliberately, at least with my parents, because my instinct or reflex or habit with them is to concede, to not do anything they don't like or, if I do, to keep them unaware of it.
Andrew said I grew up a lot when I was there last summer. Just looking at me, he said, he could see it. Maybe it's because, to get to England at all, I had to not do what my parents wanted and I couldn't just sneak this in--transatlantic jaunts aren't exactly subtle, especially when you don't come back for five months.
Matthew added, "One of the reasons you're so indecisive is because you don't assert yourself. You're just too worried about pissing people off."
And that is an obvious thing I'd never quite thought about in that way before. He's right. I don't really know what I want. And maybe I don't know because I'm habitually trying to make everybody else happy.
And that tendency does affect my ability to even recognize what I want, never mind getting it. For example: I remember once when I was in high school trying to tell my dad that I didn't exactly love being Catholic, something I'd been thinking for years but never wanted to say because it seemed pointless and painful. He asked me what kind of religion I wanted instead. I don't know if I said anything, but I remember thinking that I had no idea; I didn't know anything about other religions because I'd always been so put off by the one I got stuck with that I never cared much about the rest. And it's not as if I knew anybody who knew anything about most of them, anyway. What I didn't think at the time, but which I think was equally true, was that even if I'd had encyclopedic knowledge of all world religions, I still might not have been sure which (if any--though "none of the above" is not a religious choice either of my parents would appreciate) I liked, because I've never been good at knowing what I want.
So I started thinking tonight about what I want. Just what I want, and not what anyone is going to think about it. I thought of some interesting things. No obvious answers, no epiphanies, but maybe a to-do list that can get me a little closer.
Not long ago, a friend of mine told me that my mom was kind of like her mom, and we were both reacting to them in about the same way. She said something about how you think about how Mom's going to react to what you do or say or anything, and plan for that reaction, and think about what will happen then, and you think about what you'll do after that ... and all of this is so complicated and happens so often that you soon get used to it and sort of don't realize that this isn't normal for everyone. My friend learned that this isn't normal when she started going to co-dependency recovery group meetings, or something. I knew that she did this but didn't think that co-dependency could possibly have anything to do with me; I thought the word meant something else and not this thing which did indeed sound rather close to aspects of my own life.
This realization--this isn't normal, you can do what you want--made my friend understand that she didn't have to do this stuff any more ... which sounds obvious but is a really big deal if it's happening to you, a really big weight off your shoulders. And she didn't have much trouble thinking of what she really wanted, or in doing that (more or less). So she's doing all right now, which is really good. My situation is less extreme--my mom isn't as crazy as hers, I don't think, and my personal situation never got as obviously bad for me as hers did for her. But the extreme badness kind of helped her fix it, and now she's telling me that a word I never thought of before may have some relevance to my life.
So I don't have to care what anybody else wants. I can just do what I want.
I've always known that, of course, but whenever I thought it or (especially) when I was told so by another person, my immediate thought was always Yeah, once I figure out what that is... Sometimes I'd say it out loud, sometimes I wouldn't, sometimes it made me smile ruefully and sometimes it made me sad, but the thought was always there.
Still, I was told not to worry too much about not knowing what I want to do with my life, because that's normal or expected (or date I say encouraged?) or something, in people my age. We don't have child labor and arranged marriages these days, so adolescence lasts a long time and we're unsure of how or when we really grow up, when we've really made it.
Both my parents' kids are floundering a bit now. I said this to my dad and he made a sympathetic noise and said he's getting close to retirement age and still doesn't know what he wants to do. And that made me feel good, for some reason. I mean, it's bad that he has to look for a job again and bad that he can't afford to retire any time soon even if he had one, but I still felt good to hear him say that; I thought it made the other, more painful, bits of the conversation worth it. I think it's just because my dad is cool. That means that someone can be 55 years old and not know what they want to do and still be a cool person that I like.
My dad actually does know what he wants, though: he wants to keep his farm, he wants his wife and kids to be happy and okay, he wants to work days (he could've gotten a job working second-shift, he tells me, but in recent years he's been avoiding that because he did it for so long and now he wants to be home more or less when my mom is, which they both think is a good idea), somewhere not too far away that pays a wage they can live on. He's trying to get that, because that's what he wants.
I don't remember if, when I was little, anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. But if they did, I don't think I had much to tell them. Nothing that I remember, anyway, nothing stands out. (Not like my brother who, I remember, wanted to be a race car driver, a football player, an airplane pilot, all the crap you'd expect from a little boy.) Then for a while I would've answered with "I want to be happy." Because that's true; I do want that. Also because I liked that answer; it was safe. It wouldn't embarrass me when I got a little older, it wouldn't turn out to be totally wrong, like so many kids'. They say they want to be an astronaut, or the first woman President of the USA, but then they end up selling insurance or driving a minivan and if anyone knew their childhood dreams they'd just laugh. I didn't want to be laughed at. I didn't want to be wrong. I didn't want to turn into something I wouldn't recognize. So I had a safe answer, which I could use not just when (or if) I was asked, but even inside my head and on the crappy attempts at journal entries I made in those days.
I always knew, though, that I had no idea of what exactly I meant by being happy, or how to make myself happy. If or when I said such things out loud, though, I just heard that it was okay to not know. And, also, don't worry so much and don't take yourself so seriously. It's just life, right? You screw up. Everyone does. Get over yourself.
I don't like screwing up, though. Recently my whiny LJ entries and IM conversations with people have elicited many responses in the "it's okay to screw up" vein, and because of that I realized that I have never really thought that screwing up is okay.
But ... I don't know ... life is short. And there's no reset button.
Of course, the irony of that is that all this worry about not messing anything up is likely to give someone a life with no fun and a premature ulcer, which is exactly the sort of thing anyone would regret. I know the folly of trying to be perfect; I read How to Be a Perfect Person in Three Days when I was a kid, which taught me that perfect people only get to drink weak tea and sit around like they're waiting for a movie to start, because the only way to be perfect is to do nothing at all.
Well, I've gotten really good at doing little more than nothing at all, and I think I've about had enough.
This doesn't mean my life is going to change drastically in the next five minutes or anything. But we'll see.
"I never hear from you either!" I countered (cleverly, right?).
"Well, yes, but we're the parents," she said, as if that made sense. "We like to know how our kids are doing."
I'm not doing anything, though. That is, in fact, a big problem I have with my life right now, as regular readers of this LiveJournal may remember. But I can't tell her about that. So I just tell her I almost did things last weekend but then there was a snowstorm. That seems to satisfy her. She asks about jobs, of course, and I feel guilty. Then she tells me about other people's babies and wedding decorations and possible engagements. I say "right" and "mmmm" and "yeah" a lot. She asks if I want to talk to Dad, so I do. We don't have sports to talk about right now but he tells me the numbers I need to check my bank account over the telephone, which is an idea I like. All my friends can check their bank accounts online, but I have no such luxury from my bank.
The call ends; my cell phone tells me I talked to them for sixteen minutes, but it seemed longer. I go back out to the living room and listen to the boys play Civ III--they can be awfully entertaining--and read a book. Something occurs to me and I mutter it out loud: "Oh, I didn't even tell them I was going to England..."
(I can't believe I'm supposed to be doing that in a few weeks. It seems a lot more unreal than it did the last time, somehow. The idea that I could just walk out of this house and walk on to a plane and walk off again in Manchester is the sort of idea that I know is true but I never actually think about that much. Thinking of packing again and finding a ride and, yes, telling my parents some time before this happens--these things seem bizarre to me, so I've been mostly ignoring such thoughts. I'm thinking a lot about what will happen when I get there, but not at all about how to extract myself from Minnesota again. And there's a reason for that. Just thinking of telling my parents about this makes me more tired than the entire sixteen-minute phone conversation had.)
"Your problem is that you aren't assertive enough," Matthew tells me.
I look at him and think about this for a second. "Yes," I say. He's absolutely right. "That's ... one of my problems," I add, almost laughing under my breath, because there seem to be an awful lot of problems with me right now.
But, yes, he is right. I can be assertive, but I have to do it deliberately, at least with my parents, because my instinct or reflex or habit with them is to concede, to not do anything they don't like or, if I do, to keep them unaware of it.
Andrew said I grew up a lot when I was there last summer. Just looking at me, he said, he could see it. Maybe it's because, to get to England at all, I had to not do what my parents wanted and I couldn't just sneak this in--transatlantic jaunts aren't exactly subtle, especially when you don't come back for five months.
Matthew added, "One of the reasons you're so indecisive is because you don't assert yourself. You're just too worried about pissing people off."
And that is an obvious thing I'd never quite thought about in that way before. He's right. I don't really know what I want. And maybe I don't know because I'm habitually trying to make everybody else happy.
And that tendency does affect my ability to even recognize what I want, never mind getting it. For example: I remember once when I was in high school trying to tell my dad that I didn't exactly love being Catholic, something I'd been thinking for years but never wanted to say because it seemed pointless and painful. He asked me what kind of religion I wanted instead. I don't know if I said anything, but I remember thinking that I had no idea; I didn't know anything about other religions because I'd always been so put off by the one I got stuck with that I never cared much about the rest. And it's not as if I knew anybody who knew anything about most of them, anyway. What I didn't think at the time, but which I think was equally true, was that even if I'd had encyclopedic knowledge of all world religions, I still might not have been sure which (if any--though "none of the above" is not a religious choice either of my parents would appreciate) I liked, because I've never been good at knowing what I want.
So I started thinking tonight about what I want. Just what I want, and not what anyone is going to think about it. I thought of some interesting things. No obvious answers, no epiphanies, but maybe a to-do list that can get me a little closer.
Not long ago, a friend of mine told me that my mom was kind of like her mom, and we were both reacting to them in about the same way. She said something about how you think about how Mom's going to react to what you do or say or anything, and plan for that reaction, and think about what will happen then, and you think about what you'll do after that ... and all of this is so complicated and happens so often that you soon get used to it and sort of don't realize that this isn't normal for everyone. My friend learned that this isn't normal when she started going to co-dependency recovery group meetings, or something. I knew that she did this but didn't think that co-dependency could possibly have anything to do with me; I thought the word meant something else and not this thing which did indeed sound rather close to aspects of my own life.
This realization--this isn't normal, you can do what you want--made my friend understand that she didn't have to do this stuff any more ... which sounds obvious but is a really big deal if it's happening to you, a really big weight off your shoulders. And she didn't have much trouble thinking of what she really wanted, or in doing that (more or less). So she's doing all right now, which is really good. My situation is less extreme--my mom isn't as crazy as hers, I don't think, and my personal situation never got as obviously bad for me as hers did for her. But the extreme badness kind of helped her fix it, and now she's telling me that a word I never thought of before may have some relevance to my life.
So I don't have to care what anybody else wants. I can just do what I want.
I've always known that, of course, but whenever I thought it or (especially) when I was told so by another person, my immediate thought was always Yeah, once I figure out what that is... Sometimes I'd say it out loud, sometimes I wouldn't, sometimes it made me smile ruefully and sometimes it made me sad, but the thought was always there.
Still, I was told not to worry too much about not knowing what I want to do with my life, because that's normal or expected (or date I say encouraged?) or something, in people my age. We don't have child labor and arranged marriages these days, so adolescence lasts a long time and we're unsure of how or when we really grow up, when we've really made it.
Both my parents' kids are floundering a bit now. I said this to my dad and he made a sympathetic noise and said he's getting close to retirement age and still doesn't know what he wants to do. And that made me feel good, for some reason. I mean, it's bad that he has to look for a job again and bad that he can't afford to retire any time soon even if he had one, but I still felt good to hear him say that; I thought it made the other, more painful, bits of the conversation worth it. I think it's just because my dad is cool. That means that someone can be 55 years old and not know what they want to do and still be a cool person that I like.
My dad actually does know what he wants, though: he wants to keep his farm, he wants his wife and kids to be happy and okay, he wants to work days (he could've gotten a job working second-shift, he tells me, but in recent years he's been avoiding that because he did it for so long and now he wants to be home more or less when my mom is, which they both think is a good idea), somewhere not too far away that pays a wage they can live on. He's trying to get that, because that's what he wants.
I don't remember if, when I was little, anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. But if they did, I don't think I had much to tell them. Nothing that I remember, anyway, nothing stands out. (Not like my brother who, I remember, wanted to be a race car driver, a football player, an airplane pilot, all the crap you'd expect from a little boy.) Then for a while I would've answered with "I want to be happy." Because that's true; I do want that. Also because I liked that answer; it was safe. It wouldn't embarrass me when I got a little older, it wouldn't turn out to be totally wrong, like so many kids'. They say they want to be an astronaut, or the first woman President of the USA, but then they end up selling insurance or driving a minivan and if anyone knew their childhood dreams they'd just laugh. I didn't want to be laughed at. I didn't want to be wrong. I didn't want to turn into something I wouldn't recognize. So I had a safe answer, which I could use not just when (or if) I was asked, but even inside my head and on the crappy attempts at journal entries I made in those days.
I always knew, though, that I had no idea of what exactly I meant by being happy, or how to make myself happy. If or when I said such things out loud, though, I just heard that it was okay to not know. And, also, don't worry so much and don't take yourself so seriously. It's just life, right? You screw up. Everyone does. Get over yourself.
I don't like screwing up, though. Recently my whiny LJ entries and IM conversations with people have elicited many responses in the "it's okay to screw up" vein, and because of that I realized that I have never really thought that screwing up is okay.
But ... I don't know ... life is short. And there's no reset button.
Of course, the irony of that is that all this worry about not messing anything up is likely to give someone a life with no fun and a premature ulcer, which is exactly the sort of thing anyone would regret. I know the folly of trying to be perfect; I read How to Be a Perfect Person in Three Days when I was a kid, which taught me that perfect people only get to drink weak tea and sit around like they're waiting for a movie to start, because the only way to be perfect is to do nothing at all.
Well, I've gotten really good at doing little more than nothing at all, and I think I've about had enough.
This doesn't mean my life is going to change drastically in the next five minutes or anything. But we'll see.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-25 08:58 am (UTC)I think there is a heavy inclination in the UK to do exactly the opposite of what your parents want, it makes for a cruddy teenage spell but comes back right, sometimes. My folks kicked me out of the house on my 16th birthday, I didn't return until I was 23 when we got on fine. I have never, ever had the slightest inclination to please them or avoid doing things that might upset them, they never consulted me about their choices.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-25 12:30 pm (UTC)One of the major reasons I need to move out is so that I don't feel so "judged" by my mom. It's easier not having to explain things because she doesn't know about them.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-25 02:53 pm (UTC)Yep, been there done that...
furthermore...
Date: 2005-01-25 03:00 pm (UTC)Whether someone believes this is a healthy thing to do has a lot to do with whether it is felt that perception of power/authority is valid.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-25 03:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-25 05:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-25 08:35 pm (UTC)This is true of all writing, I suppose, but it seemed especially important for me to try to get it right last night--whether it was the topic, or just my mood, I don't know, but this is definitely a piece of writing that's important to me right now. So I'm glad to hear that it makes sense. :-)
I know this is stuff you've told me. That's probably part of the reason we both recognize it as such: your ideas helped shape my thoughts on the subject, whether you and I are aware of it or not. It's stuff lots of people have told me.
There's a big difference, though, between being told something--even if you recognize the validity of it--and really feeling it for youself, coming to perhaps exactly the same conclusion yourself, instead of being led there by someone else.
I know you know that, too, so I don't really have to say it at all, but I'm not saying it to impart information upon you, I'm saying just because this is what I wrote when I was thinking of it for myself and not all those times that I was being told by other people, so it's different and it's worth writing down, I think.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-25 03:23 pm (UTC)It's no wonder I can occasionally articulate things you're thinking. I've had a lot longer to figure out how to say it. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-25 03:43 pm (UTC)This is one of the reasons I've always been happy that people older than me will talk to me. They've had time to think about lots of stuff.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-25 10:58 pm (UTC)Not terribly topical, but I stumbled across this online and thought you might enjoy it.
http://marnanel.org/counties
Do You Mind?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-31 05:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-04 09:08 am (UTC)I really hope I can get *some* of my thoughts together in the next days, because I'm so knee-deep in having absolutely no idea what to do with myself that it's not even funny anymore.