Not terribly infrequently, someone in my life will take note of some or another new physical adventure I’m trying and say something like, “Wow, you’re brave!”
Truth is, I’m really not particularly brave, when it comes to physical feats of derring-do. I’m just wired for adventure. Temperamentally, I’m pretty fearless (which is both good and bad, all things considered) in that particular way.
If you do things that look scary to other people because you’re not afraid to do them, that’s not the same thing as being brave. Intrepid, I’ll give you, but bravery is a different kind of thing.
Bravery is being afraid to do something and doing it anyway.
So while I may be bold about physical challenges, I’m a complete coward about emotional ones.
Well, maybe not a complete coward, but not what you’d call “brave” by any normal definition of the word.
Or, well, I haven’t been.
So I’ve decided that I’m going to try it.
It’s weird how apparently-unrelated life experiences can suddenly coalesce into the beginnings of new adventures: graduation, ballet, PlayThink, goodness only knows what else. It’s hard to identify the streams of influence that lead to now.
But, anyway, those and a lot of things have made me think that it’s really time to try being brave in a way that I haven’t before.
I want to learn how to be brave emotionally — I may never be fearless, where my heart is concerned, in the way I am where my body is concerned, but I can learn to be brave. We can all learn how to be brave.
A caveat: I write a fair bit about myself, about some struggles that a lot of people would consider deeply personal, here.
That might look brave, too, but it isn’t, because it isn’t hard for me.
The truth is that here, in the blogosphere, in my very own blog, I hold the reins. I’ve got my finger on the button. I can shut the whole freaking thing down if things get hairy.
There are other bloggers to whom I feel a kind of tentative connection (in a “Wow, I really admire your blog/your comments/your thoughts, and you seem like a thoughtful person who actually cares about stuff” kind of way) — but I can always suck all my tentacles back into my shell and jet off into the abyss* if I feel threatened.
*I’m sure there’s some deep, abiding significance to the fact that I always use ocean-dwelling invertebrates in these analogies.
In short, I’m completely in control of what I share here, of how much other people sort of bleed over into my being.
Out there, in the big scary world of actually making connections and building friendships, things are completely different.
I don’t trust people — and while it’s true that my wariness about my fellow humans evolved for some very real reasons, it’s a tool which has, in its current form, outlived its usefulness.
I don’t make new friends in part because, for me, friendship is a deep connection, and the process of making that connection involves leaving doors open that, frankly, it scares the crap out of me to leave open. It means leaving my heart out there on the counter where anyone can just pick it up and stick it in the Vitamix**.
**I don’t actually own a Vitamix.
It means coping with the fact that maybe sometimes I will think someone is really interesting and hope they will be my friend, and they won’t.
It will mean that some of those interesting people will want to be my friends, but will also turn out to be human beings with complicated, messy lives (because we pretty much all have complicated, messy lives), and that I will love them anyway, and hurt when they hurt, and struggle when they struggle, and maybe I will sometimes even be overwhelmed by their struggles, just like they, G-d forbid, might sometimes be overwhelmed by mine.
It means negotiating all of the glorious, abstract mess that is the human heart.
The same goes for just being with people in the moment. I keep thinking back to some of the moments at PlayThink this year, those moments that overpowered my preconceptions about interacting with strangers and became, in and of themselves, transformative. In the past, I haven’t been very open to those moments. I want to change that.
I know that being open to those moments in a more conscious way involves risk. That’s fine (or, at least, I’m trying to convince myself that it is: work with me, here).
Living involves risk.
By way of a favorite analogy: every time you get get out of bed, you’re taking a risk. You could trip over your duvet and break your neck. However, if you just stay in bed, you’ll almost certainly die much sooner than you otherwise would — the medical complications of just lying in bed will kill you. Worse, you’ll miss so much of the amazing spectacle of life while you’re ensconced in your bed, staring at the same four walls.
Also, eventually, you’ll have to pee.
So it’s worth getting out of bed, even though you could trip over your duvet and die.
The weird part is that you have to have a reason to want to get out of bed. Telling yourself you should get out of bed to avoid the risk of dying from inactivity doesn’t really work. You have to want to experience the amazing spectacle of life (or at least, you have to not want to pee in your bed).
Until very recently, I have bemoaned the minuscule scale of my social circle, but apparently that alone hasn’t been enough to overcome inertia.
What has overcome that inertia, instead, is experience: the experience of being unexpectedly swept out of my frame and discovering that, hey, this connecting-with-people thing is pretty great, actually!
So I’m going to try to do more of it. I’m going to try to do less of the thing where I decide that interacting with a group of strangers sounds, frankly, terrifying (an emotion that my brain recasts as “stupid,” it sounds stupid, this activity is ridiculous, etc.).
I am going to get out there and try new things, emotionally speaking.
Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. Who knows?
Regardless, I think I’ll be better off for having tried.
And maybe I’ll finally be able to say, “Yeah, you know what? Actually, I am pretty brave.”
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On Reading The Comments*
May 26
Posted by asher
Once upon a time, back in the day, etc., I was an avid reader of and participant in The Comments. I’m not sure whether I was braver, dumber, or just a lot more bored (probably some of each?), but I sort of had this notion that Someone Has To Speak Reasonably (yeah, yeah, typical Angry Young Man stuff).
Let’s not even get started about the privileged assumptions behind that kind of thing — I know, I know. Not that I ever really strolled around the internet swinging my electronic gold watch chain and telling people that they were half-witted imbeciles, old boy, and that their backgrounds deprived them of the ability to respond rationally, but part of me almost certainly kind of felt like that on some level.
I tried to write rationally and logically and politely and sanely, but I also believed that a lot of people were Wrong On The Internet and that I should Lead By Example (how embarrassing).
I think some benighted part of me seriously (but unconsciously, or at any rate no more than hemi-semi-demi-consciously) believed that if I just kept calm and demonstrated what civil discourse “should” look like, I could somehow save either the internet or civilization or something.
Barf.
Anyway.
At some point, I realized that A) I was actually, in my own way, kind of being an ass (to whit: a lot of the people who say stupid crap in the comments are just having bad days; the ones that are actually jerks, meanwhile, are just going to go on being jerks, no matter what) and B) you can’t take the wind from the maelstrom, or whatever. Comments gonna … um … com?
I figured out that even to read the comments was basically a form of swimming upstream, that you can’t reason with irrational people or even with rational people who are having irrational moments (who, of course, are the ones who I was, for a long time, most likely to attempt to engage with my reason and coolness and politesse, &c.).
In short, The Comments became a giant energy sink, and I said to myself, “Wait, I don’t even have to read these! I can just pretend they’re not there! And if I really, really feel the need to comment on a particular newsworthy item, that’s part of why I have a blog.”
Since then, I’m happy to report, I’ve been largely unflustered by The Comments (and the world has not, as far as I know, ended — except perhaps in an Alternate Timeline). The Comments and I now have a great relationship: I leave them alone, and they leave me alone.
Every now and then, though, I venture back into the fray (though, outside of WordPress, I pretty much never say anything).
Sometimes it happens on purpose — I guess when I’m really, really bored and all the dishes are clean and I have done the day’s thousand tendus or what have you and I’m also feeling a bit masochistic.
Usually, though, it happens by accident: I’m idly scrolling through the aggregations of links related to the article I’ve just finished, looking for another way to
avoid doing work andoccupy myself, and then suddenly, Boom! I’m in The Comments, and I don’t even realize it ’til it’s too late.The problem is that I’m an auto-reader: put text in front of my face, and I will read it (or, if it’s in a language and/or alphabet and/or syllabary and/or pictographic system I don’t know, I’ll attempt to read it). I suppose we all have our weaknesses.
So by the time that I really grasp the fact that I’m in The Comments!!!!111oneone, it’s too late, because I’m already reading them.
Usually, I pull myself out before any damage occurs.
Once in a while, I start reading, am filled with horror, revulsion, and/or frustration, and yet I find myself fascinated, and must apply all of my fearsome might to tear myself away before I become lost.
Once in a great while, something different happens: I read the comments, get sucked in, and swiftly receive a reminder that the human race is, in fact, actually kind of doing all right — that there are good people, that we can be reasonable, and that the world probably isn’t going to end today.
Probably.
It’s weird how bracing that feels: to see two people disagree, and to expect Fighting On Teh Intarwebz, only to be startled by a breakout of humane, civil discourse that leads not to an escalating firestorm of trollery, but to a really admirable agreement to disagree or — better still — the serendipitous discovery of unexpected common ground.
Once in a great while, I’ll even discover that someone out there disagrees with my own cherished beliefs in a way that makes me realize that they’re just that — beliefs — and that they’re full of holes and flaws like everybody else’s.
So, anyway. That happened today: I was reading The Comments on, of all things, an article on Queerty, and a little conversation happened between two people who disagreed, and then talked about it like civilized beings, and I was impressed and led to think, “Hmm. Have I really been looking at this situation as objectively as I can?**”
So, there we have it. Out of the depths, a moment of light and clarity. A happy surprise from the universe, found in an unlikely place.
This doesn’t, of course, mean that I intend to start regularly reading The Comments. Oh, helllllll, no.
I may be inspired, I may even be a little bit crazy — but I’m not an idiot.
…But maybe just a peek, now and then.
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Posted in life
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Tags: happy surprises, life, serendipity, the comments