haphazard musings on "rock bottom" & underdog narratives

A post from early 2016, in the lead-up to the awful 2016 US presidential election. I'm no prophet, but this short essay does feel a little prophetic.

(Subtitled: Electing A Fascist Because It Will Show People How Bad Fascists Are Is Not Quite The Foolproof Plan You Seem To Think It Is)

I have been seeing, with increasing frequency, a wish that Trump will win the election so that “we hit rock bottom and things can get better”. Sometimes this is being suggested jokingly; other times…not.

What I find interesting is how this idea of hitting “rock bottom” (and, more importantly, a presumed immediate upswing) is ultimately tied to a sense of American Exceptionalism and U.S. culture’s love of an underdog story.

Note, I say underdog STORY because us U.S.ians don’t tend to like actual underdogs. We only like once-upon-a-time underdogs who have been affirmed as victors (if only moral victors) by history. We love, love, LOVE to imagine someone suffering nobly - and briefly - for their cause before achieving success. And that arc, from low point to inevitable victory, is part of the mythos of our country from beginning to end.

I can’t help but think that modern media, particularly Hollywood’s three-act structure, is also partly to blame. The major turning point of a Hollywood movie is from “character is at their lowest point” at the end of Act Two to “character triumphs over obstacles and wins the day” by Act Three. This can be done well, certainly! But when we see one kind of story again and again, we start to think that it’s how our own lives will go.

Alternate arcs that are less sexy but at least as realistic as the downfall->triumph storyline:

• Messy, inconsistent, two-steps-forward-one-step-back style progress where we see incremental improvement over time


• A huge crash followed by a long period of things being really, really shitty

Does this ultimately fall under that ever-present error in thinking, the Just World fallacy? Yeah, probably. As a fairly privileged U.S.ian, I distinctly remember the moment in my childhood when I first discovered the existential terror of realizing that sometimes, things don’t work out well. Sometimes people suffer, and die in cruel and terrible circumstances, and there’s no last-minute rescue or happy ending. And that could happen to me, or someone I know! It’s an uncomfortable thought, but a necessary one, especially when we start wishing for the whole system to crash because ANYTHING would be an improvement.

I wish I knew a good way to say this to those folks who express a desire for U.S. politics to crash and burn. They’re imagining “hitting the lowest point” as working like a rubber ball hitting a concrete floor. But there’s at least an equal possibility that it will look more like a stone falling into a swamp. Sure, we’ll have stopped sinking - but we’ll be in a bad place, with no immediate prospects of getting someplace better.

(Note: Is it possible for a system to be so bad that it should be destroyed and remade? Of course! However, the people using crash-and-burn rhetoric today generally strike me as not having thought carefully about a) what qualifies as “so bad it’s better to burn it down and start from scratch” or b) whether the kind of “breaking” they propose/envision will facilitate the type of rebuilding they hope will result.)

"evil doesn't pay"

This is a post from early 2017. While not explicitly political, I'm pretty sure I was thinking about the political climate when I wrote it.

Tonight I was thinking about two lessons I’ve learned about evil- or wrong-doing. Specifically, I learned them from Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft (it’s a great book, read it if you haven’t already.

Lesson #1: Wrong-doing doesn’t automatically hurt the person doing it.

We have this weird cultural myth that “evil sows the seeds of its own destruction” which, in the very long term has some truth in it I guess? If you keep hurting people, they will do their best to escape or stop you. But the idea that doing wrong in and of itself makes you sad, makes your life worse, etc. is just false.

(Bancroft touches on this when contrasting abuse and addiction. Addicts go into downward spirals; it’s one of the defining attributes of addiction, in fact. Abusers, on the other hand, can go for decades abusing their partners without damaging their careers, friendships, physical health, or psychological wellbeing.*)

Lesson #2: People generally do bad things because it gets them things they want.

Okay, this sounds really obvious? But one of the most mind-blowing sections of Why Does He Do That? is when Bancroft carefully explains that abusers abuse because they get a lot of benefits out of being abusive.

(In particular, abusers get the privilege of never, ever having to compromise about the issues they care about. Say one partner wants to live frugally while the other wants to go on expensive trips every year. Or one believes in corporeal punishment for their children and the other doesn’t. In an abusive relationship, the abuser will ALWAYS get their way.)

The Point Is…

It’s uncomfortable to consider that doing bad things does, in a limited sense, work. Evil is not, in the short term, actually doomed to fail.

In practical terms, I think this leads to a counter-productive, even dangerous cultural construct on how to handle being wronged. We want to find closure through consensus with the wrong-doer. We need the person who wronged us to agree that they did wrong and apologize. We want to see concrete proof that “evil doesn’t pay”.

But how likely is that, really? The wrong-doer got concrete benefits from what they did. While they hurt us, they likely didn’t do themselves any harm. They have no incentive to agree with us, and every reason to defend their behavior. The idea that we must pursue consensus&rapprochement leaves us trapped when the person who hurt us is not interested in playing their part.

Instead:

On a PERSONAL level, we need to find a way to say “What you did was wrong” and then…walk away. Our ethical judgement cannot be dependent on the agreement of those who have wronged us.

On a SOCIETAL level, we need to understand that “appealing to their better nature” is not a winning strategy. Reinforcing social and ethical norms is important, yes. But that must come in tandem with concrete penalties that impose negative consequences and eliminate the benefits of wrongdoing.

*here we’re talking about “natural” emotional/psychological/social consequences, leaving aside than the possibility of being punished by the judicial system.

depression on more than one axis: notes towards a conceptual framework

I wrote this in mid-2017 and I'm still quite happy with it.

I’ve been thinking through versions of this essay for a while. After a couple of recent conversations on the topic, I figured the time had come to actually write the thing, just in case others might find it helpful.

Disclaimer: I am not a health professional or expert of any kind, and particularly not an expert in mental health. This is a personal theory based mostly on my personal experiences. If you are suffering from depression or any mental illness, I REALLY recommend talking to a trustworthy medical or mental health professional.

Here is what I have realized over the past few years. Clinical depression happens on two distinct axes. One is, broadly speaking, biological; the other is cognitive. Separating the two in my mind has helped to address the symptoms of each more effectively. I hope it may do the same for you, gentle reader.

The Biological Axis
Zach Handlen wrote a really good essay on mental illness back in 2014. The essay is technically about bipolar disorder, not unipolar depression, but many of his points are specifically about his experiences with depression and rang true to me. A particular favorite is his attempt to explain the sheer banality of depression:

I’ve never been sure I should write a post about depression.There’s something so fundamentally uninteresting about the condition that any attempt I make to describe it falls short. I can throw words out all morning, and still not capture the idiot simplicity of the experience.

Depression is one of the most unglamorous forms of suffering imaginable. I once drafted an entire essay around the search for a good metaphor for depression. Almost every comparison I made seemed insufficiently descriptive of its awfulness, while simultaneously being far too dramatic. Depression is an all-encompassing, yet completely boring and shitty, experience. It’s not grief or misery. It’s not a dark cloud or a black dog following one about. It’s not exciting or wistful or photogenic. It’s senseless.

The metaphor I’ve settled on is this: depression is a mental version of nausea. It’s not pain, exactly, but it’s a clearly physical wrongness which is deeply unpleasant and unsettling. The worse it gets, the more it absorbs your energy and attention. Some people have constant low-level illness, i.e. dysthymia, which sucks in its own constant, grinding way. Others suffer from major depressive disorder and will have intermittent periods when they suffer severely. I’ve read accounts of people who experience such deep depression that they literally cannot get out bed. Their energy is entirely devoted to handing/processing this intense wrongness they are experiencing. Still others experience depression as one half of bipolar mood swings.

So yeah. Imagine having the worst nausea you’ve ever experienced. Does it seem the slightest bit romantic or glamorous? Nope! Does it seem incredibly shitty? Sure does! Now imagine having to live your daily life, go to work or school, pay your bills, care for your pets, keep your living space clean, maintain your relationships with friends and family, while constantly feeling that nausea. For months, sometimes years (or in the case of dysthymia, basically forever). Congrats, you have now started to understand depression.

This kind of mental-nausea-esque, biological-based depression isn’t caused by negative thinking. It’s never going to be fixed by mindfulness or gratitude exercises (though these tools might help a sufferer live with the symptoms of depression, in the same way that chronic-pain sufferers sometimes find meditation techniques helpful). “Biological” depression is treated through medication and behavior modification that impacts one’s physical state (e.g. exercise, getting more sleep, changing one’s diet).

So what’s the deal with “talk therapy”, psychology, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, and the like? Are they worthless? Absolutely not! They’re just designed to treat a different axis of depression.

The Cognitive Axis
Ten Lies Depression Tells You, published in 2013 by Anne Thériault, is one of the most succinct descriptions of how I’ve felt and thought during depression that I’ve ever read. I tear up every time I read it from sheer recognition. I mean, not to get too personal, but #4 is almost verbatim something I started telling myself around the age of eight (!!!).

And here’s the thing: contrary what I’ve been arguing for the last several paragraphs, this essay does reflect a lot of the drama that often is attributed to depression. “I’m the worst person ever! If something goes wrong, no matter what it is, I must be to blame for it somehow!”

Contrast to, say, Allie Brosh’s wonderful comic Depression Part Two. Allie’s base, biological description of her experience still resonates. But the way she thinks and feels about her depression is strikingly different. She basically sees it as a long interval of being really confused by what’s going on. She’s suffering, and she knows it, but she has no explanation for why.

What's up with this discrepancy?

The pieces fell into place for me when I starting reading David Richo’s excellent book How to Be an Adult. (This is not an #adulting book in the sense of instructions to get your oil changed and vacuum underneath your couch. Rather, it’s a book about how to achieve psychological maturity.) Richo points out that the negative beliefs and stories we tell ourselves are often a control mechanism. They comprise a strategy we use to try to manage, contain, and channel negative emotions.

At the time I started the book, I had been struggling immensely with the idea that I should Stop Having Low Self-Esteem. I was extremely resistant because, well. How do you stop feeling the way you feel? “I feel bad, and when I tell myself to stop, I feel bad about feeling bad.” Getting out of that loop felt impossible, a paradoxical directive.

Richo made me realize that I was feeling…depression, full stop. The negative stories - “I’m not good enough”, “No one likes me”, “It’s all my fault” - were secondary mental structures that I had created as an attempt to make sense of this overwhelming experience of depression. They were channels I’d built to contain and route the floodwaters of emotion. (Mostly gouged out, I suspect, from the most vulnerable veins of the human psyche - fear of inadequacy, terror of not belonging - hence why so many people’s cognitive depression presents along similar lines.)

(See The Dirty Normal’s How to Feel Your Feelings and Another Thing About Feelings for more on this and the concept of “meta-emotions”. Heck, throw Emotion Coaching on that list as well.)

Of course, simply recognizing the dichotomy between feeling and belief isn’t enough to eliminate these negative stories. But it has helped me to use tools like cognitive behavior therapy MUCH more effectively to address those negative beliefs.

Cognitive depression, in other words, isn’t simply a symptom or manifestation of biological depression. It is a belief system and set of mental structures. These structures are created in reaction to biological depression (or, I suspect, mental suffering in general), but thereafter exist independently from it.

Addressing Each Axis
Does this model really matter? To the extent that they can be, both the biological and cognitive aspects of depression should be addressed in treatment. That’s why “medication + therapy” is such a common prescription.

On the other hand, understanding depression as moving along multiple axes has helped me get very clear about what each form of treatment will do. For example, medical interventions or even the straight-up cessation of a depressive episode won’t automatically change what I’m thinking. Those conscious stories exist separately from the biological state of depression. They are triggered by, but not caused and certainly not synonymous with, “depression” in its base state. Even at my best, I sometimes revert to unhealthy “stories” to cope with everyday stresses. Which makes sense, given how engrained these stories are after years and years of using them!

On the flip side, changing my thinking will not stop depression. I can learn to stop telling myself negative stories. I can build up new, healthier mental models. But that work will not check or mitigate one iota of my brain’s physical illness. When that biological depression comes back, the absolute best I can hope for is to recognize it and allow it to run its course with little or no maladaptive storytelling.

This all sounds grim, but honestly it’s really helpful. When I start telling myself that “I feel awful, I’m not good at anything”, the cognitive/biological framework has helped me pull back. I can see now that “I’m not good at anything” is an interpretation of my feelings, not the feeling itself. That makes it possible for me to challenge the interpretation without negating or denying my feeling. And contrawise, when I’m feeling depressed, I am much better at stopping my scramble to find some kind of reason (i.e. way to blame myself) for it. I am able to acknowledge that I’m feeling bad because depression means feeling bad sometimes, and I can ride it out with as much equanimity as possible.

It’s not perfect. But it’s a start.

(Does this model resonate with other people with depression? I’m honestly really curious and would love to hear your thoughts.)

on cats and non-reciprocal empathy

This is a post from late 2017, in response to an original post:

Whenever anybody gets on how they think cats are horrible because they don’t shower you with easy-to-read physical affection I’m left wondering how much respect or understanding they can possibly have for fellow human beings who don’t all fit their exacting social standards.

I have thoughts on this.

I adopted a cat a few months ago, and it’s been way more emotionally intense than I expected. I wouldn’t say I adopted *thoughtlessly* - I had been thinking about it for quite a while, did a bunch of research about their needs, waited until I was sure I’d have money to take care of it properly, etc. But In terms of the emotional side of it, I was basically thinking “cute furry thing that will curl up in my lap and I’ll pet it” and not much further.

Instead, it’s been - look, I cringe as much as the next person when folks start talking about their “fur babies”, and having a cat is definitely NOT like having a kid. It’s exponentially easier. But…emotionally, it’s a little bit along the same lines as caring for a young child?

Here’s what I mean: a cat is a sentient being that you are obliged to care for, but which does not feel any reciprocal obligation to care about or humor you. You have to keep caring for the cat even if it’s “mean” by human standards. Your cat scratches you or pees on the floor or doesn’t like to be pet? Okay, but you still are responsible for giving it everything it needs to be healthy and happy.

Said straight out, it sounds crass to complain about. Of course you should take care of your pet (or kid) even when it isn’t acting loving towards you! But psychologically…it’s not always easy? We want to be appreciated for what we do. We want reciprocality. It takes a certain amount of emotional work and commitment to not let your behavior be affected by how the other side (be it person or pet) is acting towards you.

(Or maybe it’s only difficult for me, idk.)

So I guess, assuming we’re talking about that silly NYT piece, the author has backed into something of a point. People who own cats and truly treat them well are doing so, at least sometimes, in spite of their cat’s love or lack thereof. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing. In fact, in moderation (not so much it overwhelms your own needs) I think it’s good to learn to give because someone else needs it without needing reciprocal validation of your goodness.

on piers anthony's "race against time"

I wrote this in early 2018 in response to a tumblr friend asking if other folks remembered the Xanth series. I took the opportunity to rant about another Piers Anthony book.

Unfortunately, yes.

Also, apologies but I’m gonna hijack this post to rant a little about Piers Anthony’s Race Against Time, because I hardly ever get the opportunity.

I encountered Race Against Time in a library book sale when I was in my late teens. It was 10 cents, so I picked it up. And HOO BOY. (tons of spoilers behind the cut)

In Race Against Time, our protagonist is a white teenage boy living in what he thinks is 1950s in the USA. However, he quickly discovers that he’s in a sort of zoo/Truman Show set created by a race of short grey-skinned humanoids. He escapes and, assuming they’ve been kidnapped by aliens, attempts to get back to Earth with the one other “real person” from his simulation, a white teenage girl.

While escaping, they pick up some companions: two Chinese teens (one male and one female) who were living in a simulation of 10th (?) century China and two African teens (again, one male and one female) who were living in a simulation of, uh, a small village/tribe situation on the savannahs of, erm, somewhere in Africa.

(”But Ama, why are you being so weirdly specific about their ethnicities?” HOOOOOO BOY.)

After attempting a daring escape, and teasing some possible romances between various characters of different ethnicities (I don’t remember exactly who, but think: the Chinese girl and the African guy, the white girl and the Chinese guy, etc.) the set of teens discovers:

• They were on Earth the whole time, it’s just the future
• The grey humanoids are actually future!humans
• People are grey now because of pollution –> race wars (I think?) –> weaponized plagues –> much of the population was killed –> race mixing –> no more distinct human races and everyone is grey (???)
• The grey-skinned racially ambiguous humans no longer have any creativity or drive, because race mixing is the worst, and humanity is regressing (?!?!?!?!?) (this is not my interpretation, it is explicitly stated in the text)
• In conclusion, these grey-skinned, mixed-race and therefore inferior humans have created “pure” breeding pairs (of, of course, the only three races: U.S. White, African, and Chinese) and raised them in facsimiles of the ~pinnacles~ of their respective societies to fall in love with their designated Race Mate and have lots of Racially Pure Babies (?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!)

And these teenagers get this all dumped on them and go, huh. Well. Guess we better go back to our artificial 1950s USA/10th century China/African savannah and get on with saving humanity by having "pure race” babies. Too bad about those romances we teased, but they must give way to Saving Humanity by Having Pure Breed Babies.

And that’s the end of the book.

It was written in 1973. At the time, it was apparently called “controversial” and “layered”.

The sad thing is, Piers Anthony has almost certainly written stuff that’s even worse than a YA-novel-length defense of racial eugenics and condemnation of mixed-race relationships. But Race Against Time (savor the retroactive awfulness of that title) was definitely what made me swear off his work.

Universal Fan Con

I wrote this as a response to this amazing article about the collapse of Universal Fan Con.

THOSE WHO DO NOT LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT.

Folks who have convention experience: when in the article did you start developing hives? For me, it was at the description of the Kickstarter tiers, with $10 one-day and $35 weekend passes. (Those are HILARIOUSLY underpriced tickets for a big convention. Hell, it’s less than a small convention charges! Renting event space ain’t cheap.) Oh, and both tiers included one free photo with a celeb of your choice. Naturally.

By the time I got to “[this first year con] needs 18,000 attendees to be financially successful” I was at “shrieking and clawing at my face” levels, tbh.

Con drama usually amuses me, but I almost can’t laugh at this one because the dream was so beautiful and the reality so, so awful, you know? A convention that centers marginalized communities - we could absolutely use more of those. And yet….here we are.

I’m gonna repeat my only advice for would-be con runners, which I first said when DashCon exploded: DO NOT BASE YOUR STRATEGY AND FINANCIAL “PLANNING” ON HOW MUCH MONEY YOU THINK YOU’LL RAISE THROUGH AT-DOOR (or otherwise last-minute) REGISTRATIONS. First, because if you overestimate how many people will attend, you’re left holding the bag in a big way. Second, because even if you’re on-target, you’ve spent all of your money on the current convention and don’t have any funds to plan for the next year.

(Of course, as always, that advice only works if the con-runners are honest and just made some mistakes/wishful thinking. Which - the fact that every single person on the ConCom who has made a statement claims to have had NO IDEA about the financial issues, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, and particularly the fact that one of the ConCom members appears to be a literal fucking Twitter bot - look, I’m just saying, I’m skeptical.)