intellectual properties

turn and face the strange

as a follow up to my last post of 2007 about letting go, for my first post of 2008 i want to talk about hope. and letting go of fear.

i thought i’d mentioned this here before but i can’t find it, but my valedictory speech at high school graduation was on fear, written on that topic mostly because i was terrified of giving the speech, and while in my younger years i made a lot of rash decisions (thankfully, most of them turned out pretty well), one of the things i’ve become more and more aware of in the last few years is that the older i get the more sort of obsessive/compulsive i am when it comes to Big Changes, in that i either make them quickly and dramatically with little or no forethought or i spend weeks (if not months or years) obsessing over the details, envisioning as many scenarios as possible before i let myself make any kind of decision, and often that leads to not being able to make a decision at all. it’s another symptom of my anxiety, this total inability to make decisions in any kind of logical way. sometimes even the smallest decisions seem impossible, like what kind of bread to buy at the store. if they don’t have the kind i usually buy i will stand there and read all of the labels first. this drives jay insane when grocery shopping. my mom said i was similar as a child in trying to figure out how to spend my allowance, agonizing over the smallest expenditures, and when i look back on that speech i made in 1994 the more i realize i have always been very afraid, of a lot of things, and that it has kept me from making a lot of decisions and changes i probably would have benefited from, possibly including the stressful one i alluded to in my last post.

here in my grown up life, while it may seem to some readers that i’m happy-go-lucky and spontaneous, sort of like ariel i’m a bit of a slave to stability and anything that seems spontaneous probably wasn’t; there was probably a lot of mental calculation that went into it. i’m incredibly risk-averse, whether it’s a new job or a road trip or a consumer purchase. i sweat the details on almost everything.

it’s sort of confusing to me, this clinginess i seem to have programmed inside me that is slowly becoming more prominent as the years go by. in my daydreams, i am SO MUCH more easygoing and spontaneous, footloose and fancy free. i fantasize about making all kinds of huge decisions - leaving the country, changing jobs, moving from SF, joining the circus - and i hint about making vague plans for all kinds of things here, but in reality i’ve been at the same job going on 8 years and in less than a month jay and i will have been together for 10, and whenever something comes up that looks like it might rock the boat, even if it’s something i want, i freak out and generally pull out in order to maintain status quo. the physical manifestations of this don’t make it any easier, as recently whenever i’m faced with a really difficult choice i start having anxiety and panic attacks, which are really awful, and so i go into avoidance mode and sort of shut down. not healthy, i know.

i’m not sure how much of this conflict of interests is me and my fears about change and instability (and possibly failure as a result of change), or, as blogged about a few months ago, the paralysis that occurs from too many choices in current affluent american culture. this is something i really need to figure out, but it’s so complicated.

this interesting piece in the NYT discusses some of the same ideas, focusing on the role hope plays in human decision-making and emotion, and how often clinging to hope causes people to avoid making changes they need to make, such as waiting for someone to come home who is probably never going to come back (an endless character theme in books and movies), or believing there’s a cure for whatever ails you when really you should be making plans for what happens if there isn’t, or in the case of the current mortgage crisis in the US, hoping to get bailed out and so not taking any action to get yourself out of the hole.

this is interesting to me, as recently in a project involving public health here in the bay area, “the politics of hope” were discussed, and how in many urban areas, what some people think is the cause for the seeming disregard for human life and public cleanliness (high homocide rates, trash in the streets, etc.) is that the people in those communities have lost all hope of anything better, so they no longer care about who they are or what they have. “hopeless” is a state of being that no one ever wants to feel, yet many in poor communities, urban or rural, live without ever believing that they’ll have a better way of life, and this dramatically affects the life decisions they make. more importantly, depression can affect entire communities, not just individuals, and in this book i’m reading the discussion about the affect of economic depression on social values and thus what choices communities make about their ecological environment is really very key to solving global environmental issues.

back OT: these ways of thinking about the affects of hope - uplifting because it gives people something to work toward or paralyzing either because of believing that something is coming that probably isn’t or because there are too many choices to make in order for change to happen - represent the ends of a spectrum, and depending on your current situation i think most people fall somewhere in the middle. i am certainly on the end of that spectrum in which i have so many choices i’m overwhelmed, which, ironically, also ends up in the same result as having no choices: depression. i have so much hope for my future, but i have so much anxiety about making the wrong choices that i end up not making any. another article on the subject notes that people in cultures with little or no opportunity are often happier with what they have, because they don’t have to think about choices.

this year, i think i have some tough choices to make about my life, because despite all my fears, i think change is good and change is important for growth, and aside from all the standard resolutions, by the end of 2008 i hope to have made some good progress on doing some of the things i’ve been too afraid to do, and take some chances i’ve been too afraid to take for no other reason than fear. i need to follow the advice of the tag line i’ve had on my email in the upper left hand corner of this blog for many months: “If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.”

there was a saying for january 1, 2007 on my little zen calendar that really spoke to me, but because i thought i wasn’t ready yet to make any big changes in 2007 but planned to do so in 2008, i instead saved it and put the little note on my planner page for today, january 1, 2008. it says: