Brainwork

My ability to survive and thrive in my day-to-day life depends on two brains. One is the approximately three pounds of lumpy grey and white matter between my ears. The other, about 2.5 pounds heavier and also grey and white, is my laptop. They aren’t a truly redundant system — I haven’t yet figured out how to sync them, and let’s not even get into the mutual failover issue. But I’m equally dependent on each, for different reasons, and I fiddle with either one only with great caution.

Technically, it’s easier to muck around with the computer. If I don’t like the results, I delete the file or application and try again. If I mess up, I restore from my latest backup. If I really mess up, I always have the option of wiping the hard drive and reinstalling everything from scratch, or if necessary trotting the whole shebang over to the Genius Bar at the Apple store. And if all else fails, I can move the contents onto a new machine.

With the so-called wetware, it’s not quite so simple. I can upgrade some of the software, so to speak, but there’s no such thing as migrating to a new cerebral cortex, so it’s taken me a while to get everything running smoothly. If you’ll pardon the nerdy analogy, I’m still resolving various conflicts and incompatibilities — but by and large, things are finally operating as they should, and given how much time and effort (not to mention cash) I’ve expended to get there, I’m reluctant to experiment.

I rely so much on my two brains that tinkering with either one of them makes me anxious. This week I’ve been tweaking both at once, which I consider brave and/or foolhardy, even though I pretty much know what I’m doing.

This afternoon, I’m wrapping up the complex and somewhat nervewracking ritual of setting up a new laptop. Each stage has its own attendant anxieties, from transferring data from the old laptop to the new one (What if I lose something important, like the article I’m writing that’s due next week, and can’t get it back?) to doing a total erase and system reinstall so the old laptop is ready for its new owner (What if I accidentally pass along the Quicken file with almost 20 years of my financial records?).

I’ve done this plenty of times; I know what I’m doing, and besides, the Migration Assistant in OSX makes it damn near idiotproof. And yet I still cringed last night when I put the system disks in the old laptop and told it to restore itself to factory-fresh settings, and again when I set up a seven-pass erase on the old external drive. Even with two other copies of my data, one on the new laptop and one on its new backup drive, I still had to push past that last tiny bit of oh no, what if I make a mistake that can’t be undone?

Meanwhile, I’m also testing a couple of medications meant to reset my circadian clock when it’s been badly thrown off. Two or three times a year, I get turned upside down chronologically somehow, and I want a way to get myself back on local time in a day or two rather than struggling to function for a week as I inch my wake/sleep patterns forward or backwards by an hour or two every night. This is definitely not something I’ll be trying on a regular basis, mind you, but knowing it’s possible is a comfort.

I’m trying both medications now, when my clock is properly set, because I want to be sure they don’t make me twitch, puke, lose touch with reality, or sprout an extra limb, so that if and when I need them, I at least know they won’t make matters worse. I’m doing this with a doctor’s approval, but even so, when I swallowed half a white tablet this morning, I felt a rush of deja vu from last night. That niggling apprehension, that last tiny bit of oh no, what if I make a mistake that can’t be undone?

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The challenge of forgiveness

Let me set up a hypothetical situation for you.

Someone does something really crappy to you. It doesn’t involve torture, bloodshed, or imminent danger to life or limb — but it’s not a minor annoyance, either. Think cheating, stealing, lying to or about you, that kind of thing. To make matters worse, it’s done by someone you thought you had every reason to trust. And when you say, “Hey, what the hell,” this person you trusted plays the “you made me do it” card.

What do you do? Unless you’re a saint, you get mad, and you probably stay that way for a good long while. But then what?

To some extent, this is a universal experience. It’s probably not hypothetical to you. It’s not hypothetical to me.

To add insult to injury, someone who took advantage of my trust has noticed that I made the best of the betrayal, and now points to that as proof that it wasn’t actually that bad and, in fact, might even be considered as having done me a favor.

What do I do? I’m not a saint. I got mad. I’ve stayed that way for a good long while. But now what?

Because the thing is, I’m starting to realize that my anger is no longer serving me. Oh, it did at first. It gave me the strength to stand up for myself, to put an end to the bad behavior, and to say, “Do not do that again, or else.” But now my anger is becoming counterproductive.

It doesn’t make me feel better. It doesn’t undo the past. It doesn’t even elicit an apology; if anything, the other person has used it as an excuse to justify a lack of regret. Worse yet, rage keeps me perpetually frozen in the painful and infuriating moment that I discovered someone I trusted was entirely untrustworthy. As long as I continue feeling it, I continue defining myself as a victim — and more than that, I continue berating myself for not having known, somehow, that I needed to protect myself. That’s corrosive, even more damaging to me in the long run than the original betrayal.

And so I find myself wrestling with the terrifying concept of forgiveness. Yes, terrifying. I know continuing to be good and mad (understandable though it might be) is, as the saying goes, “drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” But my fear is that without it, I have no way to protect myself against a repeat performance.

That’s why I wish I could erase the phrase “forgive and forget” from the language. I think it does us all a huge disservice; it implies that forgiveness equals defenselessness. Forgiving bad behavior — or to phrase it in a way I’m more comfortable with, letting go of anger about it — doesn’t mean accepting it. As a wise friend recently said to me, “You can forgive a scared dog for biting you, but that doesn’t mean you have to let it bite you again.”

If I let go of my anger, am I excusing being treated poorly, or worse yet, agreeing that it was appropriate? Does forgiveness mean I have to pretend it never happened? Does it obligate me to give the other person the chance to hurt me again in exactly the same way?

No. No. And no.

Once you move an untrustworthy person to the periphery of your life, where he can’t do you any further damage, you no longer need the weapon of anger to protect you. Letting go of it is about switching perspective from “things to run away from” to “things to run toward.”

I don’t know precisely how to do that. But I know it’s necessary. And I know it’s possible.

What are your thoughts on forgiveness?

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Still not perfect.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. – Voltaire

~~~

Well, hello there. I haven’t made a blog post in far too long, and I have no excuse.

Actually, that’s not true. I do have an excuse. I was procrastinating. And for the strangest of reasons: I was putting off writing a blog post because I really, really wanted to do it.

I’ve spent some time trying to figure out what that’s about — and to my surprise, it turns out to be connected with, yes, fear. I wasn’t too darn busy to get to it. I wasn’t enjoying the pleasure of delayed but inevitable gratification, the way I think happily in the morning about the delicious meal I plan to make that night. I wasn’t using making a blog post as a reward for completing a less enjoyable task. I wasn’t even grasping for ideas; I have half a dozen ideas stacked up and circling like airplanes over O’Hare in bad weather! I was just worried that I’d sit down and write something heartfelt, put it online, and realize nobody was interested.

In other words, I had an attack of perfectionism.

I think a little bit of perfectionism lurks in the heart of all of us. After all, who doesn’t want — even a tiny bit — to be instantly and effortlessly good at everything, and to universal acclaim? But sometimes that desire goes malignant and grows wild. When that happens, it can turn into the compulsive striving and monomaniacal focus of the stereotypical control freak. But it can also do just the opposite and flip into a vicious cycle of “why try?”

Here’s how it works:

I worry about being judged and found inadequate.
so
I think the only alternative to being inadequate is being perfect.
but
I know I can’t be perfect, even at the things I’m very good at indeed.
because
No one is perfect. Even Nobel laureates, Olympic medalists, and great diplomats have failures.
yet
I don’t find that comforting
because
I feel Nobel laureates et al have earned the right to flop sometimes, but I haven’t.
so
I procrastinate, because doing nothing seems safer than exposing myself to criticism for doing something imperfect.

Avoiding doing things because I can’t do them flawlessly is like a baby thinking, “If I can’t skip the awkward toddling bit and go straight to a graceful run, why should I bother trying to stand up at all?”

There’s only one medicine for the “why try?” disease: deliberately choosing to do something in a half-assed way, or at least what I think is half-assed, and see what happens. To my surprise, what I think is “nowhere near good enough” looks just fine to other people. The draft I pounded out in an hour rather than revising every sentence three times? It didn’t come back for revisions. The photos I shot on the fly, snapping five times as many as I ordinarily would have? I nailed a handful of shots I probably would have missed otherwise. The awkward conversation I didn’t allow myself to rehearse in my head for three days straight? I didn’t have to be as eloquent as I thought I did.

And that’s why I’m going to post this right now and not allow myself to go back and tweak it later.

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The joy of fear

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. … You must do the thing you think you cannot do. – Eleanor Roosevelt

***

This quote is a touchstone for me; my main intention in starting this blog was to chronicle my attempts to follow Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice and thereby become a stronger, braver, more confident version of myself. I’ve mentioned this quote to dozens of people over the years, and almost every time, the person I’m talking to brings up a time that s/he “felt the fear and did it anyway.” This week, though, two very different people who have never met each other responded to the quote in a very different, and (to me, at least) unusual way: both said that they were so stubborn and determined that they couldn’t remember ever thinking anything was beyond them as long as they tried hard enough.

I have to admit that I found this completely incomprehensible. Never felt intimidated or overwhelmed? Never endured insecurity or self-doubt? Never suspected they’d bitten off more than they could chew? Never worried about what other people would think or how they might react? Never feared the repercussions of going against the crowd?  Never hesitated, even briefly, to say, “I wonder if this is going to work out”?

Never? Not even once?

That seems more than impossible to me; it seems superhuman.

But the flip side — being ruled by doubt — seems equally impossible. I confess that I’ve certainly  hung back, kept quiet, delayed, denied, avoided, procrastinated, made excuses, taken the path of least resistance, or simply gone along with the crowd from time to time. The axiom about how the nail that sticks up gets hammered down rings all too true for me some days. Let’s face it: it’s a lot easier, plain and simple, not to do the things you think you can’t do.

But it’s also not as satisfying.

There’s joy in looking fear in the face. In standing up for yourself. In defending someone else. In risking rejection. In entering competition. In challenging conventional wisdom. In claiming authority. In setting boundaries. In examining your preconceptions. In defying your prejudices. In redefining your priorities. In confronting your phobias. In speaking your mind, as activist Maggie Kuhn said, “even if your voice shakes.”

Fear — not terror, but a healthy concern for consequences — is part of the human condition. It’s normal to think you can’t do something. It’s also normal to go ahead and give it a shot anyhow.

This week, find something you didn’t think you could do, and then do it. And come back here and tell me about it.

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In which I play in traffic

Several years ago, a friend passed her old mountain bike on to me. I was very excited at first. I imagined zipping nimbly around like the people in Amsterdam who commute merrily hither and thither on their beater bikes. I bought padded bike shorts (because I thoroughly approve of any sport for which my own natural padding is inadequate). I even starting thinking about getting panniers, or at least a basket, in which I pictured myself bringing home a baguette and a bouquet of flowers or something equally charming.

Then I realized 2 things:

1. Although my neighborhood is fairly flat, San Francisco has some very big hills. And I am somewhat lazy.
2. Although San Francisco has a lot of bicyclists and bike lanes, the cars are bigger and more numerous. And I am terrified of getting doored, clipped, or just plain mown down.

As a result, I didn’t ride nearly as much as I thought I would. Yes, I downloaded the SF Bike Map, which not only shows all the official bike routes, but color-codes every street in the city to indicate how steep it is (this is also very useful for walking). I used it to help me figure out where to pedal in my own ‘hood and how to get to the bike paths in Golden Gate Park with minimal risk, but I didn’t dare venture farther.

Until today!

I figured that if I was going to confront my fear of riding on city streets, I should do it on Sunday, when traffic is light, and in the nice, flat, comparatively bike-friendly Mission District. So I rode my bike a few blocks to a bus stop, where I loaded it onto the handy-dandy bike rack Muni provides on the front of its buses. The bus took me up and over the ridge that runs through the center of town. I got off at 18th Street and Valencia. And then I rolled up my jeans, strapped on my helmet, and rode merrily along bike lanes and side streets until I got to Precita Park, where a bunch of street food vendors were dishing it up for a small crowd and a film crew from the Food Network.

I rewarded myself for my courage with a lavender creme brulee and a grilled Gruyere sandwich with onion/fennel/bacon jam before heading home again. Gotta keep up my strength.

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