sometimes, change is highway traffic on a cottage weekend

There is an inspiring story in The Brain That Changes Itself about a man who lost almost everything before he turned four--his mother died, and then his father, overwhelmed by taking care of seven children, shipped him off to the opposite coast to be raised by an uncle and aunt when he (the man in question) got very sick. He had no memories of any of these events, and was unable to connect them to his lifelong inability to form relationships with women or be close to anyone. Until he entered therapy at the age of 58. It enabled him to eventually understand the impact of these non-remembered events on his personality and undo their effects. It took him four years.

Four years.

Four years to learn it. Four years to unlearn it. Fifty-four damaged years in the middle.

That depresses me.

Why does change have to take so long? Why can't there be a pill, an antibiotic for the mind, something to selectively wipe out unhealthy patterns over the course of a week or so, with a handful of side effects? Why does it have to take us so long to decide to change in the first place? Why can't human beings come with service lights, like cars?

Give me one good reason. Except that we're not cars.

Did you know that, according to studies quoted in the same book, oxytocin may be less of a bonding hormone than an unbonding hormone? When you look at its role in other species where a mother and her offspring imprint on each other, such as sheep, oxytocin is not released for the first litter, only subsequent ones. The theory is that oxytocin allows the brain to reorganize itself, unlearn all the other patterns of affection and association, thereby making room for the new litter. In human beings, oxytocin is released during labour, breastfeeding, and orgasm for both sexes (men experience the release of a different hormone on the birth of their children, to similar effect). Think of the implications: oxytocin might allow you to unbecome the person you used to be, in order to allow you to become the person you are going to be next. If you are a mother and you recall those first few months after your first child was born, and remember that sense of not being the same person, of being reorganized and essentially turned upside down and shaken out by the feet, that feeling is very close to the actual neurological truth. Oxytocin rewrote you.

It does the same thing when you fall in love, by first enabling you to unfall in love with the last partner, allowing you to change to accommodate the new connection.

What I want to know is, why can't there be an oxytocin for other times when you need your brain rewired? Why can't there be a pill or a shot of some other hormone that will make your brain plastic and flexible enough to unwrite old damaging scripts so that new scripts can be written over top of them, in less time and with less struggle? It would make everything so much easier. Just think: I'm sick of losing my temper this way. Or, I'm tired of falling in love with jerks. Or, I don't like how needy I am. And then you get a jolt of a little something that doesn't just paper over it or mask it with chemicals, but gets rid of that part of you a little faster and a little easier so you can replace it with who you want to be a little sooner than you otherwise would.

I don't care if it's cheating.

Change is always a tough, long slog; but there are times when it doesn't feel like it, and other times when it really, really does. You end up being a little kid in the backseat of your own head, going, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" And at the same time, the driver shouting "No!" for the ten millionth time and acutely aware of the five hundred miles left before you can next get out and pee.

Sometimes it doesn't help that you've already driven a thousand miles, all you can see are the five hundred left to go. And there you are, putting along in your fuel-efficient car at a responsible speed, thinking, "Where is my jet car? Weren't we all going to get jet cars in the 21st century? Where is my transporter? Why can't I travel faster than the speed of light?"

At those times, even seeing all the people stranded outside of smoking cars in ditches on the side of the road, having a picnic with apparent unconcern, will not appease you.

Posted by Andrea at 10:27 AM | Comments (7)

Reinvention

Julie's Hump Day Hmm this week is "How far would you go for yourself or someone else?" This was the first answer that came to mind.

"Solitude" is a story by Ursula le Guin story in The Birthday of the World where an anthropologist visits a planet without a society. There are humans on this planet, they have a culture; but they do not appear to congregate or form bonds. This anthropologist moves in with her two young children and tries to crack the culture's codes.

The adults never speak to each other. When they need to communicate, they speak to children in the presence of the adult they need to share something with, and in this way information is passed along. Each adult woman lives in a hut she makes with her own hands with her children. Men congregate in tribes on the outside of the villages; a man and a woman will have sex for a brief time and then separate, and she will raise the child within the village while the man returns to his tribe. They call this state of radical independence "being a person." In the end, when the anthropologist tries to leave with her children, the older daughter cannot readjust to a world where people are so rude as to talk to each other, to tell jokes and laugh, and so she fights until she is allowed to go back and make her own hut and raise her own children by herself in the village.

This resembles my immediate family to an uncomfortable degree. Everyone built their own hut with their own hands, metaphorically speaking; everyone met their own needs by themselves. On the rare occasions when communications had to be made, they were made indirectly in the presence of safe third parties. Connections were brief and meaningless and formed for pragmatic ends, and dissolved when the need that gave rise to them was past. It's only now as an adult, looking back, that this seems as crazy to me as it probably seems to many of you. Even now, the thought that people might actually tell each other how they're feeling about something, say what they would like to change, and have the expectation that a change might result from that conversation seems slightly shocking, almost taboo. Like walking behind the counter at a baked goods store, helping yourself to a couple of muffins and cinnamon rolls, chatting cheerfully with the staff about the weather, and strolling away without paying.

I carried this into my marriage, and so did my spouse. Needless to say, in most cases marriages will not thrive where each party considers themselves a self-sufficient island of one, making reconnaissances for necessary goods and services at unpredictable times, communicating indirectly via third parties, and expecting that whatever needs exist will somehow be met through this convoluted chess match.

It took almost a year from the date of the separation until I was willing to even begin to face my role in the breakdown of that marriage. It's the sort of breakdown where it would be very easy to claim victim status--and I'm skirting the edges of my gag order here--and that status is one that others have occasionally tried to shove me into. "It wasn't your fault," they say; "you were deceived and manipulated!"

That's true. I was deceived and manipulated. But, just like that Austrian wife who you can't help but think must have wondered what her husband was doing over the course of twenty-four years in that new extension he had built on the house and which he protected with a keyless entry, I wasn't just deceived and manipulated. I did a lot to foster, encourage and tolerate that situation; and it's only beginning to occur to me now, as I look back and see how different I was and how much some of my previous attitudes horrify me and how destructive my own actions were, that I can actually admit to my part in that mess.

I don't stay the same person from one season to the next here, do I?

I read in Mother Nature years and years ago that attachment styles should not be understood as disorders; that, if you are born into a world where you cannot count on other people to provide for your needs or care about your feelings, then the extremes of avoidant attachment styles--even sociopathology--are adaptive. Our ability to form different kinds of relationships depending on how people treat us as infants and young children has an evolutionary basis; be born into a cruel world, learn to be cruel. Be born into an indifferent world, learn to be indifferent. The people in "Solitude" are born into a world where they are required to meet every need they might ever have on their own, and their families are the microcosm in which they are taught to do this--it's adaptive. The problem in our world is that many of us are still born and raised within a microcosm that is cruel, indifferent, chaotic or unpredictable, and we adapt to it in all of the traditional ways; then leave that world and find that the skills it gave us are completely maladaptive because our families were broken systems that did not reflect the world. When you grow up in Solitude it can be painful and disorienting to try to live in society--just as it was for the anthropologist's daughter.

I'd like to say it's culture shock just because it would fit so nicely with the metaphor, but it's not. Culture shock is a timid, tepid experience next to this one. It's more like discovering that foundational elements of your personality were never intrinsic parts of your inherent temperament, but trained defensive responses to environmental stimuli; you wake up one day and discover that your Self is a suit of rusting iron battle armour ten sizes too small that you put on for a war that's been over for a decade. Clearly happiness will be impossible until I learn to take it off and let it go: I'm not in the army anymore, I am not walking over minefields or defusing bombs anymore; I don't need battle armour.

Peeling it off is slow, hard, and often painful work, but as much as I expect it will make my life better, I'm not just doing it for me.

Frances is, in every way, the opposite of that suit of battle armour. Her sensitivity and fearlessness, the way she wears her big heart wide open on the front of her shirt, is what I find most special and beautiful about her. But the people who grow up in Solitude aren't open, sensitive or fearless. It's enough of a tragedy for someone already self-contained and introspective to be that way in the world, but for Frances to learn the rules I grew up under, to learn to be an island of one without needs or the ability to communicate or feel, would mean breaking her in a fundamental way. And it's not something I would need to consciously set out to teach her. Just being that way myself, interacting with her that way, would be all I'd need to do.

If I am going to be the mother she needs me to be, the one who can help her learn to navigate the world as the person she is meant to be, then I need to learn how to break all those rules myself. Take the pathological independence, the indirect communication, the too-literal selflessness and let it all go, make a new Self with rules that work in the world I actually live in. Leave Solitude, and take my daughter with me.

Posted by Andrea at 11:14 AM | Comments (11)

Another Change

OK. I'm going to make an admission here, and I'd like you all to promise first that if you're going to laugh, you'll do so silently and cover your mouth with your hand. Deal? Maybe? Here goes:

The aforementioned breakdown had me casting about in a lot of directions for ways out. Good god it was awful. The reasons behind it were largely unbloggable, so I couldn't go into a lot of detail about it then (and can't now), but I was hitting the end of my rope just about every day and couldn't see any reason for it to get any better anytime in the next ten years, give or take. I was spending way too much time crying quietly in the bathroom or the kitchen while Frances watched a dvd, which only made me feel guilty on top of everything else: I'd dragged her away from her friends and home and father, for this? For an apartment with a crazy mom crying in the bathroom while her brains rotted in front of the television? I had to do better, and I knew it.

My most popular post ever is still the one I wrote years ago about my falling-out with Attachment Parenting. In it, I wrote about how I hit a wall at nine months, decided I had to let her cry-it-out no matter my ideological opposition to it, and then bought every book about it I could find in the bookstore, on the principle that if you're going to turn coat you may as well turn all the way. This was similar.

My entire life, I have never asked for help nor admitted to weakness of any kind. A sort of high-sheen invulnerability was prized in my family and I adopted it wholly; a series of disasters and catastrophes made it such a matter of habit that I could no more picture casting it off than I could picture casting off my skin. My bag of dissociative tricks was well-used: count to ten, picture the issue as a physical injury, imagine you are watching a movie about it, practice what you have to say until the words are just sound and the emotional content is stripped from it. It's just pain. Keep going.

By February they had all failed me. I was not coping. Instead I was trying desperately to hid from Frances what a wreck her Mummy was.

I made a number of decisions, most of which can't be shared here, and thank heavens for small mercies because it's certainly stuff you'd rather not know. I also actually asked for help. I think I even wrote it down somewhere. Eventually, I broke down and bought (this is the part where you can't laugh) a few several maybe a dozen, I didn't count, self-help books.

Wow. I can't believe I said that in public.

That high-sheen invulnerability is sticky stuff, let me tell you. What, me? Help? Pfah.

Anyway, some were useful, and some weren't. Some of the useful ones were useful despite rather large and glaring flaws, and some of the not-useful ones nevertheless had very useful sections. On the assumption that everything of interest to me is necessarily of interest to my large and dedicated readership (still no laughing!), I propose to share with you the useful stuff. May none of you ever find yourselves where I was.

~~~~~

First up, because it's on my mind from all my recent talk about career changes, is Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman, a former head of the American Psychological Association and one of the founders of the movement known as Positive Psychology, which aims to improve good things instead of fixing bad things. It's the psychological equivalent of preventive health maintenance or wellness in physical medicine--how to improve good health instead of how to make sick people well. I picked this one up after getting sick of reading about problems and diagnoses, so I sympathize. It's a worthy aim, and he comes at it from a pretty impressive scientific background, and that's all good. But I have a few substantial caveats before I get to the useful stuff:

1. He is unbelievably critical of people who are trying to resolve childhood trauma, using such phrases as "undeservedly bitter" when describing people who are unhappy about their pasts. He makes the argument that childhood trauma, including the death of a parent and sexual abuse, has no impact on adult personality, but so what? OK, someone who starts out smart, introverted and talented at the clarinet will still be all those things if she is a victim of incest, but that does not equate to their being no impact on one's life so that their "bitterness" is "undeserved." I'd suggest, if you are trying to resolve childhood truama yourself, that you either approach this section with a mammoth grain of salt, or you put this book aside until you have some resolution in sight.

2. He then makes the standard argument about the importance of secure attachments between children and their adult caregivers, without which children cannot learn to form healthy relationships as adults. So: trauma has no impact, but if your mom frowns at you a lot you may be wounded for life.

3. He is not any kind of parenting expert but still feels free to dole out an entire section of parenting advice, based entirely on his own experiences, after arguing that genetics rules adult personality and that childhood has practically no impact! Arguments which, if he actually believed them, would render the entire concept of good parenting (not to mention his own parenting advice section) completely useless.

That aside (and I admit it's a lot) it's a useful book, and it has a handy companion website with all kinds of quizzes on it. The quizzes won't give you html code you can stick on your blog to advertise to the world how optimistic, happy, or grateful you are; but they are scientifically validated, unlike the ones on OKcupid, and have been used to measure the results of positive psychology interventions. Meaning that people who followed the sorts of exercises he includes in the book generally saw their scores on the questionnaires go up.

The one I want to talk about today (good god, I need to learn how to shorten my prologues) is the Signature Strengths questionnaire, for which, yes, you will need to register on the site (it's free) and yes it takes a loooooong time. There are a lot of questions. But at the end it will give you a list of the five good things you are best at doing, the idea being that the more often you have the opportunity to use those strengths in your everyday life, the happier you will be.

Here are mine, in order:

Creativity, ingenuity and originality
Appreciation of beauty and excellence
Bravery
Judgment, critical thinking and open-mindedness
Love of learning

I'm going to go out on a self-congratulatory limb and suggest that it's pretty accurate. (Note: all of the results are good ones. You can't fail this test.) (Note 2: Some reviews criticize his methodology for deriving the list of strengths. The criticism may be valid, but I'm not concerned here with whether or not his list of strengths is cross-culturally exhaustive or scientifically defensible, only whether or not it may be useful.)

How often do I get to use any of those at my current job? Never. What room is there to use them more often here? None. This is the downside of government: your job is defined by legislation so doing something different is technically illegal. What I do is apply regulations, policies and guidelines. Other people got to do all of the thinking. What likelihood is there of finding work that uses those strengths given my current qualifications? None. That alone helped tip the scales towards going back to school.

Whereas, on the other hand, everything I choose to do outside of work involves at least one of those five, if not more or even all. Writing, blogging, crafts, reading about everything under the sun--if I do it unpaid under my own steam, you can bet it matches that list. I've even noticed that my preferred parenting style approaches that list (hopefully in a way that meets Frances's needs instead of imposing my preferences on her); when I can be creative about what we do together, make something lovely, or learn something together it is much more satisfying than engaging in repetitive role-playing involving plastic figurines. We have two projects on the go right now: designing and sewing up our own stuffed monster, and writing out and illustrating a storybook about a family trip to a playpark on the moon. These are fun for both of us.

There is my personal endorsement of this one tool and how it can be used if you are feeling vaguely dissatisfied with how your life is currently set up and aren't sure why, or if you want to make a change but can't figure out which direction to move in. Not that it will solve that for you, but it might give you another way of looking at the issue.

Or maybe just give your self-esteem a boost by telling you, guaranteed, five good things about yourself.

Posted by Andrea at 10:09 AM | Comments (1)

Creature Comforts

When I was nine years old, my family moved into a brand-new house. It was 3200 square feet and sat on a wedge-shaped lot, so the backyard was huge and would eventually have a large deck in it (that I would help to build). There were two sets of stairs from the main floor to the second, one of which led to an extra living room that was only used at Christmas. My bedroom there was as large as the master bedroom in the apartment I'm renting now, at least. It was full of stuff. I thought nothing of it.

I can't recall any specific instance of the house and all of the things within in making any of the people who lived there happy. Which isn't to say that no one was ever happy, but it wasn't the stuff that did it.

Most adolescents go through a process of rejecting their parents' values, in small or large ways, and I was no exception. There's never been a moment of my life when I consciously wanted to replicate their lifestyle or career path. They can keep their money and everything they buy with it; if it doesn't make you happy, what's the point?

But it did make them feel comfortable and secure, which is a vastly different thing.

A number of assumptions underlie modern middle-class life, so far as I can tell, something like:

1. A paycheque is a reliable form of income, because:
2. Employers can be trusted, industries are stable and economies don't undergo massive short-term upheavals.
3. People are happier when they live in larger houses with more stuff in them.
4. People get what they deserve. Therefore, a person or family with a lot of stuff clearly deserved it all, and a person or family without a lot of stuff clearly deserved that, too.
5. If you let go of the middle-class ladder for even two-and-a-half seconds, you will find yourself living in the street, eating rats that you roasted over a fire made of dumpster trash. The moral being:
6. Poverty makes life not worth living.
7. If you don't do at least as well as your parents did, you have failed.

The rules from your family may vary, but I'll bet the end result was the same.

1. GET A JOB.
2. The more money you make, the better.
3. Never let go of it unless you have something better in hand.
4. Use the money you make to buy a big house and fill it with lots of nice stuff.
5. Plant a few kids in the appropriate bedrooms.
6. Eventually you will get to retire and do what makes you happy.

This isn't, I don't think, what anyone believes leads to happiness. It's what people believe leads to security--to comfort. Except, well:

1. Paycheques are not reliable forms of income, because:
2. Employers are not trustworthy, industries are not stable and economies undergo massive short-term upheavals.
3. After a baseline income above the poverty level, increases in income and stuff have never been demonstrated to lead to more happiness.
4. No one ever gets what they deserve.
5. Some risk-takers are rewarded with failure, but no very successful person ever got there without taking a number of substantial risks, unless they were born rich.
6. Poverty is hard, but it's not death.
7. With housing as expensive as it is now (in Toronto anyway) it is enormously costly to succeed by surpassing your parents. It requires two incomes earned in long workweeks with unpaid overtime as a matter of course, and still living stretched to the limit and drowned in debt. Unless you're lucky.

Money has never motivated me. Given the choice between earning overtime or earning time off, I have always chosen time off, even when I couldn't really afford it. I went from the big suburban detached house to the apartment, and have not for a single moment missed all that extra space and the stuff that went in it. I went into environmental studies for earnest, idealistic reasons, not suspecting that one could end up with a stable well-paying job from something so seemingly impractical. Go figure.

Losing the well-paying part is no big deal.

I've taken pay cuts before. Nothing quite so substantial, but still. There are more important things than money.

"Stable" is another matter.

Giving up stable lends itself nicely to panic attacks. Even though I know quite well that in the 1990s the Canadian government laid off a substantial portion of their workers and illegally froze the wages of the rest for six years, making stability through government employment a myth. Even though I've been unwillingly put on strike at one job and laid off from another; even though I saw family members laid off from jobs they had worked for years; even though I know women who were told not to come back after their maternity leaves or fired when they got pregnant. Stability isn't real, it's just a persistent and very convincing story.

I consider myself to be someone who is normally comfortable with a relatively high level of risk. I work with risk, or at least I do for the next few months; understanding and applying risk butters my bread. I like taking chances, I like change. It's unusual for me to run into a change that feels big.

(Thump)

This week I get to tell my manager and colleagues, after already telling the internet. One might consider this backwards. What are they going to do, fire me?

Posted by Andrea at 9:36 AM | Comments (9)

House of Dreams

Once upon a time, I had a comfort zone. It was a cramped tiny thing, tightly circumscribed by class, language, church, family and culture. I lived there; surrounded by other little white girls and their nuclear families in suburban detached homes, with no idea that some of them didn't go to church on Sundays.

It was a long time ago and I don't remember it very well anymore, as distant and unreal as any story beginning with "once upon a time." Once upon a time, I was a princess in a castle surrounded by a moat, only I didn't know it yet.

Nowadays I don't have a clue. Two years ago, I was a married mom living in the big detached suburban house, driving to a government job every day, who was sedentary, rarely wrote (though she wanted to), and felt constantly like everything was wrong somehow but she didn't know what. In a few months, I will be a divorced mom living in a rented townhouse-thingie on a subway line, taking classes at a nearby university, who works out nearly every day, rides her bike all over the place, has written almost a hundred thousand words towards a novel (but split that in two halves, so I'm not nearly done), living off savings, and wearing clothes a few sizes smaller than before. The daughter has remained the same, but not much else. Maybe nothing else.

And it's not the first time.

Once upon a time, I was a little fundamentalist girl who grew into a fundamentalist teenager. I believed in the rights of the unborn, the sanctity of the family, the resurrection of Christ, the coming Rapture, and that slang was a sin. I was, in short, a sanctimonious brat. Then one day, I found the meaning of the dream I'd been having regularly for five years. Hey, Andrea? You're a witch.

Ouch.

It took two whole years--that's 730 days plus or minus, depending on whether or not one of them was a leap year--to begin to entertain the thought that I might not be evil. I can still remember the shock of that moment, the sensation of walls falling away. The old comfort zone looked suddenly like a prison cell.

It's happened more than once. Actually, it's happened repeatedly, more often than I can recount. It was a very small box at the beginning and now if there is a box anymore it's pretty damned big. A lot of those moultings have been recorded here over the past several years (marriage and parenting and difference and, now, work), so you're either already aware of them or you could be with a bit of dedicated browsing. But here's one I have never shared before: The Story of Andrea's Critical Reading Skills.

Just before my last year of undergrad, a friend gave me a book for my birthday. They didn't know it, and neither did I, but it was a classic piece of brownlash literature*, arguing for the unimportance of acid rain, the temporality of the ozone layer depletion, the arrogance of global warming concerns and the mathematical silliness of worries over deforestation. The only valid environmental issue according to that author was extinction. Three years of undergraduate education in environmental studies had left me utterly unprepared for these arguments. I was convinced.

The three years of undergraduate education in environmental studies had, instead, taken the basic environmental arguments for granted and worked to transform students into effective environmental investigators and activists. Three years of undergraduate environmental education and it was the first time I had encountered the arguments of the skeptics. Three years of undergraduate environmental education: I did not know how to evaluate the skeptics' claims or evidence, or take apart their reasoning. We had been taught many things, but critical reading and reasoning skills were not among them.

I grew up very closed-minded but by then that legacy had been long gone. There was no defence or barrier I could muster to that one book.

I'm afraid that during my last year of undergraduate environmental education, I was a bit of a jerk. I wrote papers outlining the skeptics' arguments and challenged every claim my teachers made in class. Shockingly, my grades on those papers were not as high as they had been. I was one angry almost-graduate, convinced that nearly the entirety of the movement to which I'd already dedicated the rest of my life was bunk. (By then, I'd read a few more brownlash books, all making the same claims on the same evidence by talking to the same experts.)

I'd been very comfortable in that little green box, and when it was taken away from me, leaving me--I was convinced--exposed to the elements, I was furious. Why hadn't anyone told me? Were they hiding the truth from their students to program them into lives of servile obedience to the cause? How is it I could have learned this from a casual birthday present the term before my last year of university?

What I didn't know at the time was that I had simply hopped from one little green box to another little brown one, and that the boxes had more in common than not: Don't question the experts. Trust what you read. If it's in print, it must be true. Hate the other guys, they're morons who don't understand progress/science. I stayed in the little brown box for about two years until, gradually, a more complete picture of the evidence began to penetrate and I stepped out of that box into another green, but larger one. I've been roaming around in this one ever since and have as yet found no cause to leave it. It's changed size and shape now and again, but it's the same very, very big box.

The last shreds of my environmental skepticism evaporated on a business trip to a conference on adaptation to climate change, where I saw for myself the effects that climate change is already having in Canada's far north (too far away from the urban centres for our politicians or business leaders to care).

In between those two moments--reading the book, attending the conference--I had made important decisions that would affect the rest of my life. After years of thinking I'd like to go into academia or maybe work with non-profits or both, I decided to jettison that nonsense and get a good job that paid well in the corporate sector--which I did, and loathed. I met and decided to marry a guy who wanted a stable middle-class suburban life with all the fixings--and you all know how that worked out. I bought a big detached house in the suburbs with that guy and hated driving everywhere, hated the material excess of it, hated the emptiness of what I was doing. All because a friend gave me a book as a birthday present that I didn't really know how to read, and I assumed that the change of heart it wrought was permanent. But it was only as permanent as snow, which feels eternal in January and by May you can no longer remember it. That, my friends, is an expensive lesson.

No book gets in under the gates anymore. No matter its claims or the persuasiveness of its arguments, I check for footnotes and bibliographies. I check the studies they cite, to make sure they exist (you'd be surprised). I read the abstracts at least to make sure they actually support the arguments the book's author is making. I look for book reviews, see if anyone had substantive criticism of the arguments or evidence. I take a look at the opposing side. Do you have any idea how many times since then I've read a book or article that misquotes or misrepresents the work of another author or scientist? Many, many times.

The first moral of the story is: Don't Marry the Book. No matter how sweet the courtship is, don't marry it. A book can be a friend or lover; it can also be a trojan horse, and the only way to tell the difference is to take it apart before you let it in. If you don't have time to take it apart, let it sit outside the gate until you do.

The second moral of the story is: A small hinge can move a large story. I'm sure you all have your own examples of this principle.

The third moral of the story is: Comfort Zones are Not Homes. They are stories; they have less weight and substance than air, and you cannot depend on them for support of any kind. Don't sit on the furniture, hang pictures on the wall, or put food in the cabinets. Treat them as extended and delightful versions of playing house. It's fun, but it's not real; it's good for now, but by tomorrow you may need or want something else. The less attachment you have to that house of dreams, the easier the transition will be when it comes.

The only way a comfort zone gets to be permanent is if you refuse to learn or change ever again. That's worse than learning to let it go with grace. Just don't get too comfortable in your comfort zone; if you are always willing to lose it, and can learn to see through the walls, it won't be so hard the next time everything turns upside down.

~~~~~

(This was part of Julie's Hump Day Hmm this week, about comfort zones. There wasn't a spot to stick that in in the body of the post today--sorry, Julie.)

*Brownlash literature is the environmental equivalent of backlash literature in feminism, in case you are unfamiliar with the term.

Posted by Andrea at 9:16 AM | Comments (14)

How to Change Everything in a Year, more or less

Step One: Separate from your spouse. Get a new apartment, move. Set everything up. Sign your daughter up for junior kindergarten and get her a new daycare. The stress will make you lose a pile of weight, so buy some new clothes while you're at it.

Take your time, I'll wait....

Step Two: Stop scrapbooking, you don't have time. Stop doing crafts, you don't have time. Stop baking, you don't have time. Stop playing computer games, you don't have time. Stop (most of your) reading, you don't have time. Stop commenting on blogs, you don't have time. Stop spending more than thirty minutes with your daughter on weeknights, you don't have time. Stop responding to (most) emails, you don't have time. Stop taking photographs, you don't have time. Keep exercising because otherwise you'll explode, and no one wants to have to clean that mess off the kitchen floor. Keep writing because otherwise you don't know who you are.

Once you get through Step One, this takes no time at all.

Step Three: Realize that you've lost or dropped almost everything that used to give you joy in life. Be unable to move past the issues that led to the divorce. Hold your daughter whenever she has a nightmare that her Daddy came to get her, and then left. Realize that you no longer have the time to even do all of the necessary things. Become more sleep-deprived with every passing week despite having stopped doing almost everything. Wonder how, if or when it is ever going to get any better. Have a mental breakdown.

This, too, is a snap. You can drag it out to as much as a month, but it's also possible to wrap it up in an hour or so if you're dedicated.

Step Four: Attempt stop-gap measures. Buy a dishwasher, sweep less often, let the toys accumulate on the living room floor. Pay all of the bills autmoatically by credit card so that you don't need to worry about forgetting any. Realize this is not helping. Realize that housework is not the enemy.

That, actually, you don't mind the housework, now that the house is small and yours.

That getting rid of it isn't saving your time or your sanity.

Step Four takes a little longer than the last two. You need to wait long enough for that realization to really sink in. Could be a month or two.

Step Five: Finger the culprit: your job.

Be struck with the idea that you are sacrificing all of the important things in your life that give you actual happiness (time with your daughter, time to read, time to be creative, time to keep the apartment clean) to a job that does not engage any part of you, except that its theoretical end-point is sufficiently ethically feel-good. Except that you hardly ever get there, and spend most of your time banging your bloody scalp against a brick wall that's moved half an inch in ten years.

Hate your job.

This can be accomplished in as little as five minutes. I don't care how busy you are, you've got five minutes to find a real bone-deep antipathy towards your current working situation.

Then, call in sick.

Step Six: Question your hatred of your job. Question your belief that anything out there would really be any better for you, that you are capable of enjoying work, period. Forget that you spend most of your free time engaged in unpaid work of one kind or another and enjoying it. Question your desire not to spend fifty hours every week commuting to and performing a job that mostly bores you. Question whether you aren't pretty spoiled and privileged, actually, to be able to even consider such ephemeral questions as job-satisfaction and meaning-of-life. Second-guess yourself by obsessively filling out career questionnaires on the internet. Be shocked when they all tell you that writing and theoretical/abstract pursuits are tied at the top of your interests and abilities. Figure that level of consistency is probably significant. Consider that your current job and all of the related jobs which your current experience qualifies you for allow for neither writing nor theorizing/abstracting, and in fact engage the skills and interests which rank near the bottom of the list. Bang your head on the nearest desk. Make up an excuse for the coworkers who come to find out what the ruckus was all about. (Did I forget to mention it? Fill out the questionnaires at work, of course.)

Done properly, this step will take at least a few days.

Step Seven: Read a half-dozen books on happiness. Feel guilt at their unanimous insistence on the ability of anyone to feel happy in their current circumstances. Contemplate making another upheaval in your life to end up no happier than you are now. Imagine poor Frances trapped in a bare apartment with a bitter mother who gave up a stable, well-paying job because it wasn't fulfilling, faugh. Feel nauseous. Complete the strenths inventory in Authentic Happiness and realize that none of your top five strengths are given any play at work. Recall occasions when you have attempted to use them and found it frustrating and depressing because there were so many roadblocks. Contemplate disemboweling the author when you read his cheery, upbeat message that everyone can redesign their job to make better use of their strengths. Contemplate sending him a sternly-worded letter. Do neither.

This all depends on your reading speed. You can do this in a week, or it might take a few months. Go at your own pace.

Step Eight: Is there any reason you can't do both? Can't you write about theoretical/abstracty things? Don't you already do that plenty on the internet for free? Aren't there people who get paid to write about science and environmental issues and women's issues and psychology and all the other innumerable theoretical/abstract subjects that fill your miserly heart with such joy? Why can't you be one of them?

Sure, you're writing now; but it's not putting any meals on the table and it will be years, if ever, before you have enough time to seriously devote to it that income replacement would be a real option. There is only so much you can do with thirty minutes a day. Marketing, for instance, and querying, and studying markets, and developing new skills, are not going to happen on thirty minutes a day.

Whereas, on the other hand, if you were writing full-time for actual money, if it was freelance or not, you would be developing skills and learning about marketing and mapping the ins and outs of the business all the time as a matter of course.

I just gave you step eight. It'll take no time at all.

Step Nine: Investigate writing schools. Consider the evening option: dismiss it because of the difficulties with childcare, not to mention, you already miss your daughter. Consider the online option: dismiss it because it seems short on instruction and high on discussion. Consider the continuing-ed option: dismiss it because the instructors seem kind of iffy and you're not sure how far such a qualification could carry you. Investigate degree programs. Dither. Digress. Stall. Be anxious. Apply. Start biting your nails again. Procrastinate on the corporate Learning Plan prerogative. Be accepted. Dither some more. Get a stomach ache. Budget. Get a headache. Investigate how many credits you would need to graduate and how long that would take, and what the timing conflicts might be. Feel dizzy. Start telling people. Fight the urge to throw up. Attend the enrolment appoint. Make a deposit. Good god, you're really going to do this.

Question your sanity. Wonder if you really wouldn't be better off just trying to freelance for a while. Tell yourself you can do both, because school has never taken you forty hours a week, so you will have more time to write and will be studying writing at the same time.

Step Nine will take a few weeks, and they will be nauseous, anxious, unpleasant ones to boot. Do not schedule important appointments during this time period.

Step Ten: Understand that, for the first time in your life, as of September you are going to feel very old.

Posted by Andrea at 10:09 AM | Comments (16)

Want, again

You might think that the worst thing about the separation and divorce was becoming a single mother, or seeing my income drop by 60%, or moving from a big detached house into an apartment, or losing most of my hobbies to the ravages of a new schedule, or being alone all the time, or helping Frances deal with all of her losses. While all of these (especially the last) were emotionally difficult, they weren't the hardest--the most technically difficult. The most intractable technical problem was decision-making.

It turns out that when making decisions, it helps to know what you want. Who knew?

I hit a wall this past winter. You might have guessed. It happened like this: single mom with type 1 diabetes whose adorable daughter has an undiagnosable genetic syndrome and whose ex-husband censored is being ground under the weight of various minor responsibilities, each one of which has the mass of a gnat but which in combination feels like a Hummer, and has made a number of disastrous personal decisions, the results of which are beginning to become clear; but the worst, the absolute worst part, of the whole mess is that she doesn't know how to fix it because she can't figure out what she wants instead.

The rest of it could more or less be dealt with. The hardest part was feeling stuck, feeling that I couldn't move forward because I didn't know what I was moving toward. Imagine trying to get a car out of a muddy ditch when you don't know where the road is, or darning something when you can't tell if it's a sock or a sweater. It was like telling up from down in an Escher drawing. When someone tells you that your life depends on the distinction.

This is what happens when you spend your life believing that wanting is bad, that you earn your share of oxygen by supplying other people with what they want, and then compound it by marrying someone who knows very clearly what he wants. It was undeniably destructive but at the same time it provided a structure: I knew exactly what to do. Sometimes I didn't like it, but at least I didn't have to make up my own mind. I was relieved of the burden of knowing what I wanted, of being selfish.

And then I was single, and everything in my household for the first time in my life depended on me making decisions which meant that I had to have some kinds of goals. Unsurprisingly, I ended up choosing goals based on the wants and values of other people: a stable professional job; a respectable savings plan; an up-to-date scrapbook; complicated homemade meals; a BMI of 21; homemade christmas cards. Unsurprisingly, I did not end up happy. For a few terrible months, I really thought I might have destroyed my family and ripped my daughter's world in half only to make myself even more miserable.

Dating was where a lot of this played out, as exemplified by the following bit of internal dialogue:

I don't like him.

Yes, but he likes you.

I know. But I don't like him. I don't want to see him again.

Yes, but he wants to see you.

OK! I know! But he's kind of creepy and I don't think I can trust him.

But he wants to see you! Are you going to put your own wants above someone else's?

I don't even know him! It's only been two dates! I don't owe him my life because of two measly dates, I don't like him! He's controlling and aggressive and doesn't manage stress well and it scares me how much violence seems to turn him on. I don't think that's good for me. I think I deserve better.

Oh my god, I can't believe how selfish you're being. Who do you think you are?

So the next time someone accuses you of being self-abnegating, you can show them this. Because I think this might be a new level of self-abnegation.

I figured out last year that I didn't have to endure unhappiness because someone else's wants required me to do things that I hated, put up with things I hated. And then it took me another long, slow, torturous year to figure out that resolving bad situations isn't enough; you need to have some idea of what to replace them with which, if you're not careful, could involve removing one person from the throne and sticking someone else there instead. I was hoping to fall down the rabbithole and find Wonderland; instead, I sat around in the hallway at the bottom for a year trying to get the key off the glass table. Which turned out to be: I was actually going to have to be selfish, I was going to have to want things all by myself and take responsibility for them.

The thought of it still makes me dizzy. All of those long-nurtured voices that masked themselves as virtue and perspective still pipe up: you already have more than you deserve, you should be happy with that; your wants don't matter anymore, Frances's do; you are just one person out of six billion, you are not special; most of those six billion people have so much less than you do, you should be focused on leveling that pyramid, not scaling it; how could you be so selfish? I'll let the sources of those particular voices remain anonymous. The point is, they're still there and very noisy but at least I've figured out that they are not the Voice of Reason.

In the meantime I'm going to have to accept that wanting anything is hard for me and do it anyway. Here's what I have so far:

I want to write. I want to have more time with Frances. I want to spend more of our time together doing creative things like cooking or baking or crafts or gardening. I want to have a good relationship with her, now and in the future. I want her to have good friends who deserve all of the affection that her big heart lavishes on people. I want to have more time to do creative things myself. I want to read really good books that make me see the world in a different way. When I write books, I want mine to do the same for other people. I want a garden--nothing fancy, nothing labour-intensive, nothing too groomed, just a green tangle I can see out the window for a few months a year. I want a home that is colourful and peaceful and relatively clean and uncluttered. I want to learn as much as I can. I want to have good friends I can relax around. I want someone to love me who hears me when I speak and understands what I say. I want to spend my days doing something that makes me think and lets me keep learning new things. I want to be able to talk to my parents about something other than the weather. I really want to know why my coworkers get up and walk to the kitchenette to throw their paper in the garbage when there is a recycling bin under their desk. I want to always be able to afford the really good cheese at the grocery store. I want to figure out how to get a bigger christmas tree in the apartment next year. I want enough money that I don't need to worry about the future, though I fully know that this is a number that gets bigger the more you have. I want work that I enjoy enough that retirement is not a daily dream, that I'm ok with "needing to work" when I'm older because work won't be some dreaded thing. While I'm at it, I want an end to bigotry of all kinds, a workable solution to the global climate change crisis, a lifetime supply of new books, all the time I'd need to read and understand them, and a cure for type 1 diabetes, in no particular order.

I can't quite figure out how any of that would harm any one of the one billion people who live on less than a dollar a day. Yet those voices insist on it.

Unsurprisingly, my life the way it is currently set up is actively preventing many of those dreams from coming true. That has to change. Which is where the school thing comes in--but more of that in June.

At the moment, what I really want is a nap and a few hours to finish reading My Name is Red, though I'm not too sure what I think of it right now.

Posted by Andrea at 9:17 AM | Comments (8)

In Support of my Change Addiction

Miche and I traveled downtown together for the Motherlode Conference in 2006, or at least we traveled around together, I can't remember which because my memory tends to lose these details. I do remember wandering around an art supply store with her, brain boggling at the tremendous variety of supplies (and their cost) and the way they crowded each other into the aisles. Apparently artists may have an elevated aesthetic sense but this does not translate into the places in which they purchase their goops and daubers. I remember that it rained (I think). I also remember a comment Miche made which I'm going to very loosely paraphrase because I don't remember it all that well; she said that the bloggers she knows of that have 'done well' in terms of blogging are doers.

I'm not sure I believe this is a universal fact, but it is a fact that the bloggers I know and have built relationships with, the ones who populate the corner of the interweb in which I hang my virtual hat, are all doers. I can't think of a single blogger I know and interact with regularly whose primary way of experiencing the world is to log eight hours in at an uninspiring job, go home, watch five hours of television, and go to bed. And when you consider how many people do live their lives that way, it's incredible, really, that so few people seem to do this on the internet.

You might argue that we've simply replaced the television with the monitor, but I don't think that's so. Yes, bloggers all seem to carry around a glowing screen in the interior of their skull on which future posts are composed in the midst of the circumstances that give rise to them, but on the whole they seem to be people whose lives are more full than average, not less. At least, the ones I know.

Julie's Hump Day Hmm for the week is to consider a blog, blogger or post which inspired one to make a change in one's own life--but the fact is that this is impossible for me, as the inspiration doesn't come from one person, one blog, or one post, but the entire atmosphere (that I fully realize I may have cobbled together myself through being drawn to particular blogs and people and so constructing a community that involves the kinds of people and blogs that are likely to inspire me--but that's a subject for a different post).

I have about a hundred blogs on my bloglines feed, split between personal blogs, mommy blogs, social justice blogs, environmental blogs, lifestyle and psychology blogs, writing blogs, art and craft blogs, and a very very few political blogs. None of them are mean-spirited or depressing--even the ones written by people writing about their own depression manage somehow to be positive places to be, even when the posts are about seriously negative topics. There's no snark, no vicious humour, no mean-spiritedness. It's kind of like sitting in a room full of inspirational speakers, only they're not selling anything.

I'd love to take you on a tour of the entire 100, but that is certainly too much for one blog post. Instead I'll select a few examples (and maybe revisit the topic in the future if there's any interest), being mindful of the fact that any selection will seem as if I'm elevating this handful above the other 95 or so. That's not what I intend. Instead I'm aiming to show you how comprehensive the impact has been.

Laundry. Marla has taught me to never ever wash undies in anything but very-hot-water, a lesson I promise I will take with me to the grave.

Big Sisters. The Social Justice RoundTable inspired me to start volunteering and post about it, which inspired a few of you to start volunteering and post about it, and who knows where that will end? (Yes, still doing that, btw--I haven't forgotten or ignored it though gods know I've had plenty of legitimate reasons to.)

Writing. Getting to know Real Live (Published) Authors through their blogs as Real Live (Imperfect) Humans wasn't the only reason I started submitting more seriously, but it was one of them. Especially when some of them (*cough* Ann *cough*) are so encouraging and kind.

Happiness. This is going to embarass her hugely, but when I see all the tremendous shit LauraJ has been dumped in her life and how she still manages to be this upbeat, lovely, generous person who designs and sews just about everything and sends it off as gifts all over the planet while single-handedly caring for an adorable boy with some very serious disabilities and providing care for all kinds of other kids (for free) (and by the way, Laura, I think your recent idea of reclaiming your weekends for yourself is great, do it!)--I know I can do the same, if I choose to.

Parenting. You told me where to find underwear in small enough sizes when we first started potty training, what to worry about after Erik and I separated and (more crucially) what not to worry about, that it is possible for moms not to be at odds with their teenaged daughters, and that benign neglect is a positive parenting strategy. I can't begin to enumerate the ways in which reading the interior monologues of other mothers has made parenting not only easier, but more fun.

That was fun. I should do that again.

Posted by Andrea at 1:45 PM | Comments (4)

Do as I say, not as I do

I've been reading a lot of books about happiness lately. It's a kick I'm on, what can I say, and who doesn't want to be happier? There's lots of good information and when there isn't it's still usually an interesting read that provides food for thought.

But there is something that is really starting to bug me.

"I dropped out of a promising science career to become a buddhist monk, and I've never been happier," says one. "What I learned along the way is that it's not the circumstances of your life that make you happy or sad, it's the way you think about them."

"I dropped out of a promising career to become an author, and I love it," says another. "And what I've learned is, happiness is a choice you make for yourself!"

"I've spent the past thirty years following my intellectual passions and indulging my curiosities," says a third. "You know what I figured out? It's not what you do, it's how you think about it!"

Geez Louise, talk about hypocrisy. Where's the book that goes, "I was miserable in this dead-end job that made lousy use of my talents and watched the clock tick by all week so I could put food on the table for my kids who, by the way, I didn't get to see enough; but thanks to some remarkable insights I made after they'd gone to bed one night, I discovered I can be happy with exactly what I have already! Now I love my job and don't miss my kids and sing to my clients and customers all week long!"

Is it just me?

Yes, I know, life circumstances accounts for only 10% of overall happiness, and 50% is genetic, and the rest of it is your approach to life. Got it. But for a group of people who, by and large, seem to have found remarkable success in altering their 10% to tell the rest of us that we don't need to seems ... well ... insulting. In fact, in the case of the book that the third example was based on, there was a substantial portion of the book devoted to how to think about your current job in such a way that it makes you happy no matter how rote it is, the example given being a hospital orderly who sees himself or herself as integral to the healing process by making positive hospital environments for patients. Which is admirable and lovely so far as it goes, but why is it illegitimate for someone to just decide to get a different job? And how exactly is an academic who has been able to pursue his intellectual interests for the past thirty years in any kind of position to tell a hospital orderly that he ought to be able to find meaning in his work as it is?

Besides, if changing circumstances is really so unimportant and makes such a paltry impact, then why bother with challenging institutionalized discrimination of any kind? Why try to alter racism or sexism? Why fight disablism or heterosexism? You'll only get yourself in a tizzy; you'll be happier if you can just learn how to relax and not be bothered by all these destructive emotions.

The more I think about it, the more I think that happiness (if defined as "feeling good all or most of the time") can't be the goal. Or it can't be the goal if the only way to achieve it is to follow the advice of the happiness gurus and not worry about changing circumstances, only attitudes. Why can't it be both?

Posted by Andrea at 9:00 AM | Comments (5)

Carnival of Allies: Prologue

(Edited to add the link, which is working now.)

I don't have a lot of time to go into the detail I'd wanted to, so I'm hoping to come back and finish this one over the next few days. In the meantime, as ABW was planning on doing this this week, I wanted to get something up.

In the Scientific American Mind issue I mentioned in the Blog Against Disablism Day post, there was an interesting article on implicit (or unconscious) bias. (It looks like the article is supposed to be publically accessible, but the link was broken when I tried it this morning.) The basic idea is simple: implicit biases are all those prejudices that you learned without meaning to from a society full of biases of every kind, while also learning that biases and prejudices are wrong, so shoved them into your unconscious. The authors of one particular study looked at how implicit biases governed behaviour. They did this by administering implicit bias tests to hospital doctors and then looking at the care they gave to various patients. (Detail to be fleshed out later, when I have time and brain cells.)

Unsurprisingly (to me, anyway) those doctors who showed a large implicit bias against, say, black people also showed a significantly lower standard of care for black patients, and were less likely to give the appropriate treatment or medications to them. If the doctors were unaware of the purpose of the study.

This is where I think it gets really interesting:

If the doctors were made aware of the purpose of the study, those doctors with large implicit biases then provided more equal care to their patients--thus demonstrating that a conscious acknowledgement of previously unconscious prejudice can work to overcome it. Doctors with less implicit bias, presumably, assumed that their standard of care was already equitable and adequate and so did not work to overcome it, and ended up performing worse.

In one sense, it's bad news: implicit biases are meaningful, people act on them without intending to in ways that are harmful and wrong.

In another sense, it's good news: just by becoming aware of our implicit biases, we can change our behaviour for the better in significant ways.

In a third sense, then, each of us has a personal responsibility to become aware of our implicit biases instead of assuming that because we are good people, we must not have any; or if we do it can't possibly affect how we actually treat people.

You can find your own level of implicit bias in a range of areas by taking tests such as the ones at Harvard's Project Implicit.

Posted by Andrea at 10:04 AM | Comments (1)

Surprised? With a how-to:

You Are a Realist

You don't see the glass as half empty or half full. You see what's exactly in the glass. You never try to make a bad situation seem better than it is... But you also never sabotage any good things you have going on. You are brutally honest in your assessments of situations - and this always seems to help you cope.

And just so you know, Psychology Today says I'm an optimist. So there. I score 68/100 on hopefulness, 76 on coping skills and a mere 22 on cynicism (and I'm sure these test results are just as valid as a session with an actual psychologist).

You're shocked, I know, because I'm always going on and on and on about how the world is going to hell in handbasket if we don't get off our collective over-privileged western asses and do something. This remains true. But if I weren't an optimist, I couldn't be in the job I have, trying every day to change things--you have to believe change is possible or you just can't do it. I do. I really think we can pull this off. Otherwise, I would quit my job, go home, and eat chocolate until the apocalypse comes. But that's different from believing that we don't actually have some serious problems on our hands.

Still, part of that loopy logic-defeating optimism (sure, we need to reduce our consumption of planetary resources 75% over ten years--who's with me!) is thinking that 62/100 overall isn't bad, but if I worked at it a little bit, I could probably do better. So when I read in an article a short while ago that one way to increase one's optimistic outlook is by writing down three good things that happen every day in a journal, I thought, I can do that. Three things, can't take more than five minutes, and maybe it'll save me a heart attack one day.

I also like the idea of writing down three good things that happen every day without a specific emotional agenda except to become slightly more optimistic over time, unlike the daily gratitude journals which, honestly, kind of creep me out. Who wants to force themselves to feel grateful every day? I mean, come on, aren't you ever entitled just to have a really crappy day and not feel thankful for it? Whereas I think that even on a really crappy day I could probably find three small good things that happened, and write them down, even if I can't manage to feel good about them at the time. (1. I didn't die. 2. The world did not end today. 3. I have not been convicted of a felony. (Here's hoping I never have to use that list.))

There was only one problem with this scheme.

I never remembered to write them down. My journal was always in some other room, and by the time I was ready for bed I didn't want to go downstairs to get it just to write down three good things. Normally I like to keep everything in the one journal. Daily events, brainstorming, the occasional to-do list, daydreaming, rants, what have you, it all ends up in the same orange journal because otherwise I feel schizophrenic, as if I'm dividing myself into Selves. I don't like it. Still, I thought, for the sake of this one project, I could probably have one split-off journal. Something small that can easily fit on my nightstand so I see it every day. I looked around, I had nothing handy. I thought about buying a little notebook, but found it wasn't something I really wanted to spend money on.

Instead, I looked through my book-making books and made one (the link goes to the book I used for this project). A little single-pamphlet that took about twenty minutes. Eight sheets of blank sketch paper cut 9.25" x 4.5", a piece of cardstock cut 10" x 5". Fold them all sharply in half, nest them, and use a ruler to mark where two holes should go, about 1" from the edges. Use a good strong needle to make the holes. Three plies of embroidery floss run through the holes once and tied into a double knot on the outside makes it a book (you can also use sewing thread or even dental floss--whatever you have handy. The plus of using embroidery floss is that you can make four books this way, and then use a friendship-bracelet pattern with the embroidery floss to join them together, as illustrated in this book-making book. I figured this way if I ever got to the point of filling four books with good things--they're not big, it's conceivable--I could join them all up together and it wouldn't be hard or take long but it would look nice.)

Frances liked mine so much she asked me to make her one too, but with an orange cover and a frog stamp but it still had to have the pink swirlie and she had a very particular title in mind. She's doing something a little different with the contents, though (each page, so far, is being coloured one solid colour). It turned out to be such an easy project that I think we are going to do it again, when the first volume is filled. Frances is very excited about having a book that is all for her that her mom made. It also makes me sound very crafty and wholesome and good-Momish, even if it did take only twenty minutes and use scrapbooking remnants. And because you're making it yourself, it can be any size or colour you like, with anything you want on the cover. For the inner pages, you could use watercolour sheets, papers that are patterned on one side and blank on the other, lined paper, drawing paper, envelopes, whatever suits the use you're going to put it to.

It was so much fun that I've been making other simple and not-so-simple books since then, one of which I think will turn into a vision-board-in-book-form as a way to keep the goofy collage off the walls. (I like my walls. I want to have attractive things on the walls.) I might post a few of them when they're done. It's one of those things that sounds intimidating but, once you give it a shot, turns out to be very simple. And now I have the perfect mini-journal for a particular mini-project.

Posted by Andrea at 3:26 PM | Comments (6)

The Constitution of the Republic of Andrea

Jen linked to something called The Happiness Project a week or so ago; and while I will be brave and admit I'm not sure about the entirety of The Happiness Project (I'm thinking it's probably most advisable for those who have no serious mental health issues to begin with), I do like the blogger's Secrets of Adulthood, her own rules for navigating life (way down in the left-hand sidebar, beneath the Wednesday tips). (I like other things too, but this is a unitopical blog post.) It got me to thinking about what rules for life I've managed to put together, in the near-total absence of any conventional knowledge. And this is undoubtedly what I should have written for Julie's Hump Day Hmm last week.

But better late than never: Andrea's Voice of Experience

1. Treat others as they would like to be treated. If you don't know how they would like to be treated, treating others as you would like to be treated is a good starting place; but it's still better to know the difference.

2. Nice is about looking good; kind is about being good. Be kind.

3. Kids are resilient, so forgive yourself for the occasional mistake. But don't use their resilience as an excuse to allow a persistent negative pattern to continue, because if you do something over and over again it will have consequences. And you're the adult, it's your job to fix it.

4. Take a risk. Be willing to make a fool of yourself. At the very least, you'll learn something.

5. You can't be brave if you're never scared.

6. Harm none.

7. And since that's impossible, be willing to accept the consequences when you do harm.

8. The world already has one Angelina Jolie/Mahatma Gandhi/Alexander Graham Bell/Joan Didion, it doesn't need another one. It needs you.

9. Failure is temporary; apathy is permanent.

10. What feels like boredom or frustration is often resistance--not wanting to do the next thing that you know you need to do, not wanting to engage with your life as it is. Resistance is fear, always. This is the one kind of fear you should never listen to. Learn the voice that resistance has for you and beat it over the head with a big stick until it falls down in a messy, bloody heap. It is not your friend, it will not keep you safe.

11. You can't save the world on your own, but you can still contribute your own small piece. Have faith and hope that your own small piece will matter.

I'm sure there are more, but that's what I'm starting with.

What do you think? Tattoo? Too permanent? T-shirt? Too crowded? Coffee mug? No? Screensaver! Nah.... Stone tablet? Parchment? Petit-point?

Posted by Andrea at 3:27 PM | Comments (8)

Blog Against Disablism: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Today's post is part of the Goldfish's Blog Against Disablism project. There are already lots of interesting-looking posts up and I'm sure more and more will be added throughout the day.

~~~~~

Of all the group labels I'm aware of, none is so potentially problematic as "disabled." While other group labels focus on what the member groups are in either positive or negative terms, "disabled" inherently focuses on what group members are not. It's a definition of lack and I have to think that the weight of such a definition on an individual would be greater than the alternatives.

Scientific American Mind was kind enough to publish, in April, two articles that are going to all but write my Carnival posts themselves. Fortunately the one I'm using for today's Blog Against Disablism post is available free on the internet: How Stereotyping Yourself Contributes to Your Success (or Failure). The article discusses in general terms stereotype threat--the well-documented process whereby being confronted with a reminder of the inferior status of a group to which one belongs causes one to conform with that stereotype by performing below one's natural abilities.

"This pattern of findings has been replicated with many different groups on many different dimensions of stereotype content. For example, Sian L. Beilock of the University of Chicago and her colleagues reported in a 2007 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology that if female students are made aware of the stereotype that men have greater mathematical ability than women do, they tend to perform worse on complex mathematical tasks than they do if they are not alerted to this stereotype. Likewise, elderly people have been found to perform worse on memory tests if they take them after being made aware of stereotypes that associate aging with deteriorating cognitive ability.

"In the domain of athletic performance, studies of golf putting have shown that expert golfers tend to leave their putts farther from a target than they would otherwise do if they are exposed to a stereotype that members of their sex are worse at putting than members of the opposite sex."

If someone reminds you that you are not supposed to do well at something because you are black/female/poor/etc., you will in fact do worse than you would if someone had not reminded you. Being aware of the stereotype, even unconsciously, will cause you to conform with it.

The article didn't discuss the impact of stereotype threat on people with disabilities, but when the very name of the group reflects a collective perceived inability, how can it not affect people?

(Stereotype threat, by the way, is one of my favourite theories from the last five years. It's so perfectly brilliant! Because whatever stereotype someone throws in your face and then "proves" with a whole bunch of statistics relating "actual" differences in performance and ability can now be challenged with the idea that the differences in performance or ability are not innate but are constructions of a stereotype. Girls are "actually" worse at science? Boys "actually" are more violent or aggressive? How much of the difference would be explained as an effect of the stereotype itself?)

So the first thing to take from this, I think, is that all of the things society generally believes that people with disabilities can't do may actually cause people with disabilities not to be able to do them, or to do them less well. In other words (speaking as a non-disabled person): it's not them, it's us. The persistent societal beliefs held largely by non-disabled people that folks in wheelchairs, say, aren't very bright; that people with Down syndrome can't go to college or university; that blind people will make less competent parents; will actually help to make those things true.

Which is terrible.

The authors of the article were nice enough to include three possible solutions to the problem of stereotype threat:

"The first is to adopt a strategy of “social mobility,” which involves individual-level activities that serve to downplay the impact of the group on the self. .... The limitation of this solution is that it protects the individual by working around the problem but, in the process, leaves the problem itself unresolved. As two of us (Haslam and Reicher) note in a 2006 article in the Journal of Applied Psychology, such activities thus involve attempting to cope with the stress of threats to self through a strategy of personal avoidance. This approach may be cognitively sophisticated but politically naive.

"A second strategy is one of “social creativity,” which invokes different in-group stereotypes that deflect the impact of belonging to a disadvantaged group. Traditionally, researchers and laypeople alike have tended to think of stereotypes as fixed and invariant representations of social groups that are impervious to change. In fact, however, the large body of evidence reviewed in the mid-1990s by Penelope Oakes and her fellow social identity researchers at the Australian National University suggests that stereotypes—of both ourselves and others—are inherently flexible.

"...Leaders and other agents of change are thus able to promote changes to in-group stereotypes by altering the dimensions of comparison, the comparative frame of reference or the meaning of particular attributes. [Andrea: for instance, women could say, "Sure, we're worse at math, but we're better at parenting!"] There is a sense, however, in which these strategies of social creativity still work within a prevailing consensus rather than doing anything directly to change features of the social world that give rise to a group’s stigmatization and disadvantage.

"A third alternative, then, is to advocate group-based opposition to the status quo through a strategy of social competition that involves engaging in active resistance. [Andrea: otherwise known as: activism.] Here group members work together to challenge the legitimacy of the conditions (and associated stereotypes) that define them as inferior—trying to change the world that oppresses them rather than their reactions to the existing world. They work to counter the stereotypes that are tools of their repression with stereotypes that are tools of emancipation. This strategy was precisely what activists such as Steve Biko and Emmeline Pankhurst achieved through black consciousness and feminism, respectively. They challenged the legitimacy of those comparisons and stereotypes that defined their groups as inferior and replaced them with expressions of group pride."

An example here would be the recent redefinition of deafness as a "culture" instead of a "disability."

You have to know how happy this makes me. Can you hear me crowing? I'll bet you can.

Activism--feminism, anti-racism, anti-classism, and most relevantly anti-disablism--by challenging stereotypes actually makes them less true. Isn't that brilliant? Doesn't that give you hope?

The article concludes, and I can't add anything to it: "Thus, the literature on stereotype threat delivers two fundamental lessons. The first is to beware of equating performance and ability, especially when dealing with differences between groups, and to understand the power that the expectations of others has over what we do. The second is to realize that we are not doomed to be victims of oppressive stereotypes but can learn to use stereotypes as tools of our own liberation. In short, who we think we are determines both how we perform and what we are able to become."

Posted by Andrea at 9:22 AM | Comments (6)