But what if you never get better? & other small reckonings

You ever have an epiphany, forget you had it, and rerealize it?

I recently rerealized that some people who think they like me actually like who they think I would be if I magically stopped having social anxiety and became more confident. People don't like "Bad Vibes" so having a mental illness that makes you permanently a bit neurotic makes you less appealing, less attractive.


I tend to assume people who post, share, or say things like this are all upper middle class white Yoga Girls who assume everyone else has similarly stable life circumstances to them and would jump at the chance to cut off anyone upset about their marginalization.

I get super confused when Black people do it! Like, do they also believe in Black-on-Black crime? Or do they give life advice oriented around bootstraps?


(The funny thing is, I've found that secure people don't have as much of a problem with my anxiety because they are so internally stable that they aren’t afraid of others’ negative emotions. They also don’t seem to believe in The Secret or The Law of Attraction or other You-Control-Your-Destiny borderline-neoliberal nonsense. It's mostly other insecure people who are like "quit complaining and perform confidence already. I don't want to be infected with your doubt.")

On a positive personal note, I don’t get infected with other’s doubt. I usually either just calm them or commiserate.


 
 

Seeking the conditional approval of such people easily leads to self-rejection or pretending to be someone you’re not in order to keep up the image of #girlbosshood, #blesseditude, #grind, #livelaughlove or whatever other hashtag can be wielded to blame people for their circumstances. Honestly, all motivational speakers should be required to share their economic background, salary, and wealth so we can judge the merits of their advice on those with less.

Thankfully, I am not and have not been suicidal, and I know that less severe mental illness is a privilege, in a way. I only need to look at my relatives to see how much more severe my situation could be and how much more limited my options could be.


My favorite situation ever is when folks with objectively more comfortable lives grow frustrated with you for having a mental illness directly tied to your social class.

My anxiety makes sense for my upbringing—it’s an adaptation my brain developed to survive while protecting itself. Although my current situation is different and that adaptation make no longer serve me, there are a lot of situational factors that remind my brain of my upbringing, triggering a return of the anxiety. It mades sense to be anxious then, and it feels like it makes sense now.

I’m working on changing my material reality in order to prove my worse fears unwarranted. Until then, I’d like to be allowed to be anxious. Hiding it is just extra psychic labor.


Despite being board-certified as a big-brain genius recently (more on that later), I don’t plan to share my IQ (since IQ is little more than a tool of white supremacy anyway), nor do I plan to practice any new forms of rankism or hierarchy.

EXCEPT! when it’s dumbo jumbo! like this!

This thought system is objectively stupid and I am objectively more intelligent than anyone who believes it and it objectively hurts any and all arguments in which it’s used.

Why are you vibrating? Just be a good person in a normal human way! Better yet, go read some Maslow, please!


There is a nonzero chance that I may remain anxious forever, though. I will definitely get better at managing it, but it'll probably never fully go away. What then?

I am fine with being in a constant state of becoming, but not if the end state is necessary to impress others. Maybe some will give up on me. Most likely I will learn to wear the mask of confidence around those who need it and reveal my full & messy self to the rare folks who don't mind reality.


 

These kinds of positive-vibes-only vibrational-magic mental health memes seem to be vague enough that anyone could twist their meaning to make themselves “high vibration” and the people they dislike to be “low vibration”.

They also seem to have lot of embedded judgements—how can you tell someone is being inauthentic, for example? Only they can truly know that.

I think I generally have an issue with giving other people mental health labels, though; especially if you aren’t a trained professional.


I often wish there were more role model for how to live openly with anxiety.

Someone with humor, someone with knowledge, someone who accepts their flaws and quirks as well as their strengths, someone who knows enough of the science that they won’t engage with all this blame-your-own-efforts nonsense.... Some living embodiment of the Serenity prayer who accepts what they can’t change and changes what they can’t accept.

For a while, the only example I could think of for a celebrity with social anxiety was Ryan Reynolds.

But more recently, I have been vicariously comforted by a defense of SZA, whose occasional hiatuses make more sense if she has social anxiety.

Given that, I guess I could look for celebrities who have vanished from the limelight for a while, and it's likely that a few of them also have SAD. A quick search reveals Andre 3000 also struggles with it. I really his friends and family don’t tell him to just take a deep breath and stop worrying. Although I can totally see Erykah Badu telling him something like “Your frequency is too low for me right now. Suck it up or pack it up.”

 

Now this I agree with!

 

My first long-term therapist--also my best and favorite therapist--liked to challenge me to think less about shoulds, musts, obligations, and "the right way to be a human being" and to think instead about what I want and need for myself and others.

I want to be authentic as I grow, I want to be honest about who I am, I want to accept myself more fully, and meet people willing to accept my full self. That may mean accepting that I may occasionally need to ask folks "Are you mad at me?" at the big age of 85.

I may lose friends over that, I may seem annoying or cringe or needy or so on, but so be it. I would rather be uncertain than overconfident or confidently wrong—we have enough of that in the world right now.

In the big picture of foibles and flaws, mine aren't so bad.

dreams of a gay myspace killer

[2000 words | 7 minutes ]


I spend a lot of time wondering what it would look like if Facebook were rooted in the science of relationships and positive psychology instead of capitalism and the science of addiction.

What if it were not built out of a Harvard white man’s rolodex of weak ties?

What if it were not evolved from a jilted college boy’s hot-or-not revenge scheme?:

 Logging on to his blog, he created an entry titled “Harvard Face Mash: The Process.” His plan was as simple as it was vindictive: create a site called Facemash.com, hack into Harvard’s directory, download photographs of his classmates and post them online next to photos of farm animals to rate who was more desirable.

He began like any other hurt schoolboy. “Jessica A— is a bitch,” he wrote. “I need to think of something to take my mind off her. I need to think of something to occupy my mind. Easy enough, now I just need an idea.


If “a "face book" is a student directory featuring photos and basic information,” one way to queer it would be to include less basic information, to make it more of a LittleBlackBook.

I feel like what I wan to know about my social network and what Facebook can tell me are only occasionally overlapping things. I want to know:

  1. How do I best contact you?

    1. Email, here, text, phone call?

  2. When should I reach out? When should I not? Should I reach out at all?

    1. Are you responsive if so? Do you log in often?

      1. I don’t need you to be available right now, but it would be nice to know if you’re ignoring me, busy, or as sporadic at communication as I am.

      2. Can technology help us combat the fundamental attribution error? Or does it create new modes of misunderstanding?

  3. How well do we know each other? What can I know of you given that? What should I know of you for our relationship to thrive?

    1. You shouldn’t have to share any of your contact information with me, but will you? What level of trust will it indicate?

    2. I think it’s a reasonable boundary to only allow close friends to know one’s phone number, or for only trusted friends to know when you’re on vacation, never the prospective burglars on the outer rings of your social group.

    3. Humans don’t practice privacy as a public/private binary, but social media has yet to grasp that fact. The closest they come is to distinguish unidirectional relationships from mutual ones, and “friends” from “friends of friends.”

  4. What are your three signs? Or your love languages? Or your MBTI? Maybe even your StrengthsFinder? Or enneagram? Which personality rubrics do you prefer, if any?

    1. But this, again, is something for which I care more or less depending on nature of our relationship. For most people, I will not be reviewing your conflict style to think out how to apologize to you or reviewing your communication style before checking in after a worryingly cryptic post of yours.

    2. But I want to take character notes! Why is there no place in social media to note what you have learned of others that you wish not to forget, like their dietary restrictions, anniversary dates, left-handedness, or love of gecko-themed memorabilia?

  5. What roles are you looking to fill in your support network? Do you only have space in your life for activity buddies? For career colleagues? Or do you have the space in your life for more close friends?

    1. If our hobbies line up then, then are we near each other? What which of your favorite concerts are playing when? What exercises are you joining where? How can we solidify this relationship through action?

    2. Were you, like me, subject to a peripatetic childhood? Are you therefore willing to build deeper adult bonds than most may need?

    3. Or do you have childhood friends who will always come first? Will I always be relegated to an outer peripheral ring in your social network?

    4. Do you have a “back home” to return to? Do you want reminders of back home?

      1. Why does Facebook assume we most want to connect with those we have already known? Does it exist in a world where the past holds no trauma? Why does it carelessly recommend those I don’t ever want to speak to again?

      2. Do we not all contain multiple selves? Is the idea of flattening every tie into a “friend,” no matter how strong the relationship, not also repellant to you? Pretending all relationships are flat doesn’t make it true, any more than pretending that all Americans are middle class establishes it as a more equal nation. 

      3. Why is the algorithm a black box of unknowns? An inscrutable god that creators pray to? Why can’t we tweak the weights in algorithmic considerations? I want to see my closest friends latest post regardless of how recent they posts!

      4. The answers to many of these questions can only be suggested by social media, I know, inferred by the viewer. We can’t have too much of the wrong kind of vulnerability. But still, how do we connect those who want deep ties with each other? Lord knows they need more than an algorithm that detect suicidal language. I suppose that other apps have tried, and yet...

  6. Do you actually even like me as a person?

    1. I wish social networks observed who engaged with the greatest percentage of your posts and whose posts you engage with most often to knit ties of reciprocity. I think this every time I am shown the people the platform deems important rather than the people most important to me.

    2. In a perfect world, the algorithm would also detect hatewatchers, antifans, stalkers, bullies, and other dangerous interactions to limit their engagement.

  7. Can I safely ask you any of this? Can you safely tell me any of this?

    1. It might be dangerous for a platform to observe your log-in times and response habits, and to mark you responsive/unresponsive or some yellow light status between the two. It might be dangerous for an app to know when someone is likely isolated and vulnerable, or especially bleeding-heart and idealistic.

    2. Why do we live in a world where the most convenient technologies are subverted and used against us? Why must capitalism destroy utopia from the inside before it is even built?

People rightly laughed when Facebook moved into the matchmaking space, but that’s because it never did even a passable job of matching making platonic connections. It’s strange that APIs only let you sign in more easily while collecting your friend data and personal data, how APIs allow Facebook to remain an inviolate hub for personal information instead of a mutual give-and-take of plugins, addons, extensions.

Its word analysis is wielded to pinpoint the perfect ads to show us all, but could be used to identify which friends you should deepen your relationships with. Rather than directing us to look at the popular, biggest, most engaging/enraging things; algorithms could identify which things match your values, mood, wishes, needs.

In short, they should put more work into making curation easy, responsive, and decentralized.

(My hot take is that all popularity is a form of centralization, however.)

Rather than the whiplash of seeing newborn announcements, police assault videos, global crises in headline, and metaironic memes with a mayfly lifespan all colliding into each other, maybe Grammarly-style tone detectors could suggest post categorizations that people could either accept or insert their own. Those categories could be used to filter the timeline: I may want only to see pet photos today, but tomorrow I may review which of my queer friends in crisis are holding Gofundmes. If I’m well enough the day after, I will review everyone’s achievements and life updates.


Actually, profiles should be more like dashboards. 

Maybe it’s the data fiend in me, but I would like social media profiles to be like recipe cards indicating how one wants to be known. I want to add reminders and notes on the back of the card: this person’s birthday is soon and they like vinyl records. They’re vegetarian and we’re going out to eat soon. Roller skating is one of their hobbies and there’s an online sale that may interest them. I want to be able to see how and why we know each other at a glance. I want an interactive directory, a living gratitude list (with the assumption I am glad we met).

In contrast, updates create the expectation that we be constantly logged on to keep up with others, lest flickers of important news be drowned out by an unfiltered flood of amalgamated thoughts. 

I avoid social media because I don’t want to drown in ephemera with variable significance. 

I use social media because I want to understand those I’ve begun to know. 

want to give them homes in my extended mind and find commonalities that allow us all to grow. 

Is it too much to want to know who to turn to?

I know my biases as a neurotic gay leftist are clear in my desires for a social network. When I how I want a social media user face to look and function, I think of something like a pod map:

I also think of the “building a support system” worksheets my therapist had me fill out. They looked a bit like the pod map above but also asked questions like this:

When I realized they had come from a workbook on recovery, I was offended at first—my ability to build and maintain relationships is similar to someone recovering from drug abuse?

But when I thought deeper and connected it to the “loneliness epidemic” here in the US and other nations, I concluded that people in recovery may have to do explicitly what all of us do implicitly. They need to be intentional about building and rebuilding relationships to minimize relapse, and we can all learn from their openness on how to foster relationships that foster our wellbeing.

At this point, I feel no shame about sharing an experience in common with people in recovery. It means I’m not alone. As a wise therapist once sung, Honey, you’re not special cause you’re sad.

Because my eMarxist behind resents social media for showing me the most popular posts over the most relevant ones, TikTok was able to reel me in quickly. It does better at balancing the two and knows that centralized, total-platform popularity is different from popularity-within-a-niche. Young-pretty-people-dancing is assumed to be the bulk of TikTok, but the app has no hesitancy over showing me people with facial disfigurement so long as they are disability activists with insights to share.

That said, I do not use TikTok to meet others, network, and/or deepen ties. I refuse to post on the app. I can’t say if it portends a future of hypercustomization in social media technology, and whether said customization will succeed in connecting people in such a way that their social support networks are adequately filled. I don’t know if microtrends help fight loneliness, or if we are mistaken capitalism for identity once again.

Maybe we are moving away from social media driven by the Pareto principle and that would be good! I want us all to create according to our ability and to receive support according to our needs.

I want more friends willing to go to concerts at least as much as I want to network my way into a new job.

And more than I want to peer across pixels into the staged life of an fairycore influencer, I want those queer friends in crisis to get their fundraising goals met.

I am trying my best to not be a lizzo hater, but...

I doubt myself a lot; I probably always will.

I think a lot about the time a (female) interviewer told me straight out that she chose a (male) candidate over me because he had more confidence. Interviewers have told me I lack confidence multiple times.

I think a lot about the (Black female) recruiter who boasted of lowballing her client because her client didn't think to ask for more. "I just offered a candidate $85,000 for a job that had a budget of $130,000. I offered her that because that’s what she asked for and I personally don’t have the bandwidth to give lessons on salary negotiation." She said, and tagged it #beconfident.

Not all skinfolk are kinfolk, I know. But if it's feminist to use the “insecure” or “ignorant” as lessons in this way, then I want none of it.

I'm alive only because of the softness of others.

The people who claim the world is a cold cruel place and no one’s going to hold your hand or coddle you are 100% the people making the world cold and cruel in the first place lmao

I also apologize a lot; it's ingrained in me by now.

I think a lot about the time a white woman coworker told me to apologize less and to say "thank you" more, "You should try that." I distinctly remember how certain she was as she told me—not suggesting, but commanding with an air of annoyance.

I think a lot about the time Lizzo, one of the music world’s loudest drumbeaters for self-esteem, angrily condemned music writers to unemployment because a (fellow Black female) music reviewer gave Lizzo a very critical review.

If that is what confidence looks like, I'd rather remain apologetic. I will apologize for apologizing, again and again.

i remain wary of unkinfolk, and devote my mind to the women, the black women, the black men, and the others who upheld my watery, airy self in interviews, as supervisors, as colleagues, and role models. i want to thank every one—gratitude inflates me & i no longer need to apologize once i am allowed to.


still, my brain returns to that ex-coworker and all the other shapes she may take. i wonder if she, in another body, told tell bell hooks to capitalize her name so that she doesn't look like she's downplaying herself.

i wonder if she told bell hooks to write her name in all caps: “other wise the world won’t take you seriously. otherwise, the world/i will can’t support you. Other wise I (the world) will eat you alive.”

What’s So Good About Anime Anyway? [Part 1!]

I want to talk about the accidental properties of anime that were lacking in American cartoons as the time that anime exploded, the things Nickelodeon and Hanna-Barbera could have leaned into even before anime inspired them to do so.

I want to think explicitly about the things I try to apply in my own work even only under the surface.

I want to focus on craft and considerations that go deeper than “big eyes and blue hair.” I want to dig deeper than style.

I want to talk about what’s so good about anime.

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Bending English with J-Pop: FictionJunction YUUKA

But yeah, to be more explicitly pro-Asian in a way that fits National Poetry Month, I want to talk about what non-Native and bilingual speakers of English taught me about how to use the language. Some people call it “broken English” or even worse “Engrish,” but I’d like to think of it as bending English, a language which was a flexible mongrel. I mean, as a fan of AAVE/Ebonics and skin-official siblings of the coiner of “based” and “bling,” I should know a thing or two about the extra-boxilar possibilities of English.

The non-Native and bilingual speakers in this case are all J-Pop and J-Rock artists, hence the blog title.

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