#190 - Learning To Ask Questions

I've used my intelligence as a shield for a long time.

It's not that I'm not smart–I am smart, but I've often used it to get away with not doing things because I'm able to intellectualize my laziness into plausible sounding excuses.

Which has actually just led to me...not doing things.

I didn't read a lot of the assigned books, I faked my way through class discussions and bluffed entire essays. I got away with it, I got B's and A's, but I robbed myself of the experiences.

And yeah when I was younger we can chalk a lot of that up to "growing up too fast" and "existing in survival mode" and "not being able to read at home because of the level of anxiety that was thrumming through my body" but then I went and grew up and never developed new habits so, at this point it's on Coach Tracey.

I got better at making excuses. I got so good at lying to myself I failed to realize I was even doing it anymore. And then I got annoyed/depressed/sad because my life felt out of my control and I felt like I didn't have any skills to pull myself together which, something I was able to blame my past for, which kept me from living in the present.

But a lot of my life subconciously warped itself into situations where I wouldn't be challenged, where I could remain safe and cling to the outdated beliefs about myself I had built into pillars of my personality.

I was so worried that if they crumbled, I would as well.

Asking questions isn't easy for me.

Not only am I admitting that I don't already know something (terrifying when your self-worth is (falsely) predicated on believing your worth to those around you is arbitrary and based on what you provide to them rather than believing in community and relationships existing in deeper ways than falsified perfection can ever hope to create) I'm having to admit how much I don't know. And then I'll probably have follow ups.

Ugh. Yuck. Gross. I'd way rather pretend I know what someone means and deal with figuring it out later on my own.

But that's faaaalse and that's a liiiiiie and if I don't let people in then no one gets to actually come to the party and then I'm lying about how great the party was because I know enough to know that letting people in on the depths of my loneliness is more likely to breed more of it than satiate my need for attention. Pity isn't a nice feeling for anyone, no one likes to be pitied, but no one likes to feel it either. We don't know how to deal with big griefs, let alone smaller observations of problems that cannot be solved with one suggestion.

Self-protection rarely makes sense. Which makes me feel stupid.

I'm capable, but I think I stopped believing that in myself at some point. I got very worried that I make everyone around me worse which is a hell of an ego trip to go through. (I do think I created permissive spaces for the "worst version" of myself and therefore others gave themselves that permission around me too.) (The emotional equivalent of my thin friends only eating fast food when they hung out with me because my body gave them the space to indulge without feeling judged or whatever.)

A lot of it's ego though, it's all ego, and what's really strange about chronic shame and ego is the whiplash between thinking I'm the Most Important Person and the Least Important Person with no stop in the middle of just "Person". I write thousands of words about myself, I send them to people's inboxes to invite them to read it, but I'm too scared to post on social media about it using hashtags??? Make it make sense! Is the self-indulgence of the first act of writing the essay not enough to carry through to the promotional stage??? No! Turns out, not at all actually. My ego is just large enough to make it but too small to shout about it from the rooftops? Boooooo.

It creates a level of "responsibility" that no one asked for. No one signed up for this thinking it was The Most Important News and yet I panic every time I don't sit down and write about current events and provide solutions for how to fix them. As if that's one persons responsibility, and as IF that person was me.

You really do have to laugh.

And not even in a mean way just in a "babe what's going ON in that head of yours sometimes" way.

Part of writing this is an acknowledgement, part of it is an earnest attempt to stop sabotaging myself and read the fucking books because then I get the experience of reading the fucking books, and learning to trust people enough to tell them the real shit instead of pretending everything is fine until I've twisted myself into a reeeeeally twisty pretzel and want to throw myself away than face what untangling myself would mean.

I used to lie a lot, and I worked really hard to get over that. Part of that habit though was this reflex to pretend that everything is okay all the time (which is funny to say because like, I wasn't very...good at keeping it together but I tried and I wasted so much energy trying that I had little left over to actually process).

If you're raised with an angry man in your house, there will always be an angry man in your house.

– Cut by Catherine Lacey

I really appreciate the sentiment of this quote, but I'm working really hard to reject the "always" and turn it into "until you kick them out". I don't live with alcoholics anymore, and I need to stop acting like it.

I get to enter a new phase whenever I see fit. I get to try harder than I've ever tried before and trust myself a lot more this time around too. It's not easy, nothing ever is.

It's hard to feel like I've had this revelation before, like I'm restarting over and over again. I keep waking up and wondering if I've ever existed in a body that I wasn't lording over in unproductive ways, contorting into whatever shape I thought would please everyone (despite not being very good at it).

Sometimes writing is helpful because you see it and you're like "oh that's not actually true" but it takes time to process how we think we show up vs. how we actually show up vs. how we would authentically show up if we knew what the fuck that looked like.

Maybe it looks like this. Starting again and again and again.

Life is about practice and repetition, not perfection. Keep learning the lesson, new parts of the book will sink in when you read it again this time because you'll value different things and come to it with new experiences. It's scary to change but it's even scarier to consider the alternative.

Static feels safe but static is boring.

Life isn't safe and life isn't boring.

It's not always easy to enjoy the ride, feeling like a fraud takes a while to recover from and sometimes you realize that you were a giant asshole in situations and it doesn't really matter that it wasn't on purpose because the consequences were still what they were. And sometimes you realize that other people were being cruel, or that it was just a miscommunication, but really I'm just learning to resist the impulse to make myself impunitive in situations just because I'm trying my best.

Other people are often trying their best too.

And it's not on purpose, it was never intentional, but because I speak so assuredly even when I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about (because a key to faking it is exuberant confidence in the absolute bullshit coming out your mouth) that it shut others down. I didn't mean to. I didn't want to or intend to.

But I did.

So the results are in, and I have to try a new approach. I don't have to have the fastest answer in order for my thoughts to matter, and being more intentional is like...90% of my fucking problem. I blurt! I impulsively say the joke even if it wrecks the moment because I thought of a funny joke and I like making people laugh!

Like, take a fucking breath and stop making yourself the center of attention all the time, me.

Stop lecturing. Stop showing off your knowledge. Start asking questions. Real questions. Questions that are just to get to know someone else and what their deal is because I'm sooooo bored with whatever the fuck my deal is.

Gotta get a new deal.

Gotta put down the shield and pick up a different tool and break myself out of this weird overly-hardened cocoon I've trapped myself into with the best of intentions.

Anyway.

I'm working on it.