amatyultare

Our 31 Days of Goal-Setting continues today with a question that I very deliberately separated out from yesterday’s finance question: How are you doing in terms of your career and purpose?

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Continuing with our 31 Days of Goal-Setting, today we’re asking ourselves, How are you doing when it comes to your friendships, community, and other relationships?

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We’re on to part two of our 31 Days of Goal-Setting! Part Two is all about Considering Goal Categories. (Note: I think I may have run across the explicit idea of goal categories in You, Only Better, and the categories I’m using are based on, though not identical to, the categories from that book.)

Considering goals in terms of different areas of one’s life is a simple but powerful part of goal-setting. For one thing, the process includes evaluating one’s life and which areas might be improved. For another, it generally leads to more balanced goal-setting overall.

For example, how many people have you seen who list eight or ten exercise or physical-based New Year’s Resolutions and absolutely nothing else? Some of these people are very focused on fitness achievement, and that’s fine. Others aren’t, but they are working under the assumption that that’s just how NYR’s work. (Trust me, I used to be one of them.

That said, health is a legitimate aspect of one’s life. So hey, let’s start with the obvious. Today’s question is: How are you doing when it comes to your health?

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We’re already on day five of the 31 Days of Goal-Setting challenge! Sick about thinking of last year’s goals yet? We’ve got one last round to go. Today, let’s think about: What unspoken/unwritten goals do you have for yourself? And why do you have them?

What do I mean by “unspoken” or “unwritten” goals? They’re they ones that you don’t record, or even necessarily plan around, but that “of course” you want to make progress on.

These types of goals can be really tricky. They may reflect things that are deeply important to you but that you aren’t focused on. Conversely, they can be things that you don’t care much about but that you are still semi-consciously expending time and energy trying to achieve. (If you are curious about this concept, I strongly recommend Mastering the Art of Quitting.)

The why here is even more important than in days 1 and 3 - why are you pursuing these goals, or at least keeping them around as goals that you should pursue?

You could probably spend an entire month simply rooting out and evaluating your own subconscious goals. For the sake of time, we’re compressing it into a day. I had three big ones that popped into my head almost instantly.

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Day three of 31 Days of Goal-Setting! Today’s question is: What other goals did you set throughout 2015 and why?

Days 1 and 2 focused entirely on New Year’s Resolutions. But January 1 is hardly the only time of the year in which you might set a goal for yourself; it’s just a particularly common time.

As always, the “why” is as least as important as the what of your goals. Identifying the purposes behind your goals helps you think about what is important to you, and whether your stated ambitions are actually in line with what you consider significant.

I had a LOT of supplemental goals that I set for myself throughout 2015 - at least 15, in fact. Again, I’m just going to talk about three.

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The question for the first day of my little homegrown 31 Days of Goal Setting is: What New Year’s Resolutions did you set for last year and why?

The “and why” is a REALLY CRITICAL part of this exercise. A significant chunk of this month is dedicated to figuring out what is important to you. For one thing, when you set a goal to achieve something that you care about, you are more likely to be motivated to achieve it. For another, why bother making goals about things you don’t care about?

Be as exact and descriptive as possible here. Did you write down your New Year’s Resolutions for last year? (I did, but I am sort of a weirdo when it comes to goals. See also: this entire series of exercises.) Any diary/Facebook/other social media entries about your NYRs? Try to dig them up.

I had twelve New Year’s Resolutions for 2015. I’m going to talk about three of them.

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On of my favorite sporadic series of posts I ever did on Tumblr was "fandom essays I'd like to read but feel unqualified to write". It worked really well when I had a fandom idea that I wanted to express, but didn't feel confident that I could write a full essay (with proof and arguments and so forth) that would be worth reading.

(That said, I still sometimes wrote up SOME supporting points for my imagined essays. They are included in cuts below.)

My first post, in January 2016, was titled "I am going to start a series titled Fandom Essays I'd Like To Read But Feel Unqualified to Write".

One of them would definitely be Provided, Of Course, That All Is Well: A Comparison of the Symbolism and Narrative Functions of Steve Rogers and Carrot Ironfoundersson.

(Unfortunately, I know very little of Marvel canon beyond the MCU so anything I wrote would be heavily fanon-influenced.)

The second one, just a week later, was Another One For the Pile.

“We’re Bad Guys, It’s What We Do’: The Meaning and Marketing of Transgressiveness in Suicide Squad”

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A couple of weeks later, I was back within another one:

Eroticizing the Overwhelming: Slavery, Submission, and Rape in Captive Prince

A few notes under the cut (content warning for rape, sexual assault, CSA, and other messed-up stuff):

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Next is the one I'm maybe the most proud of:

Now and Forever, No One Would Save Him: Raising a Chosen One In Ender’s Game and Harry Potter

(I mean, yes, they’re both Jesus narratives. But it’s the similarities in how the two characters are groomed, contrasted with the differences in what the groomers hope each hero will ultimately do, which I find so interesting.)

After I finished the entire Captive Prince trilogy, I had another essay I wanted to write:

The Sovereignty of Empathy, the Logic of Trauma: Love and Trust in the Captive Prince Trilogy

(cynical subtitle: How C.S. Pacat Wrote The Platonic Ideal Of A Codependent Relationship And Made Us Love Every Word Of It)

I'm realizing that these almost all came from 2016. Another personal favorite:

At the End of the Universe, A Band Is Playing: Tracing The Narrative and Stylistic Influences of Welcome To Night Vale

(The point I wanted to make, which I didn't make very clear in the original Tumblr post, is that the common description of Night Vale as "a mix of Stephen King and the Cthulhu Mythos" is actually completely incorrect. I would trace the influences of WTNV back, rather, to the dark humor of Douglas Adams, i.e. The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, and the horror-adjacent science fiction works of Ray Bradbury, e.g. Somewhere A Band Is Playing. Doesn't "somewhere, a band is playing" even sound like a WTNV line?)

Then I got a little salty about the show Sherlock and Moffat's obsession with Great Man stories:

"Not Everything Is Deducible”: Aggrandizement, Deconstruction, and Male Mary Sues in Sherlock and Elementary

Skip forward almost a year, to mid-2017, and I got a little excited about Fast & Furious 8, aka The Fate of the Furious:

“Daddy’s Staying Home”: The Evolving Appeal of The Fast and Furious Franchise

(Subtitle: F&F is turning into a fanfiction of itself and I am HERE FOR IT) (spoilery tags behind the cut)

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Next came an essay that I'd actually fully outlined before deciding I didn't want to write it:

The Triumph of Elektra: The Troubling Subtext of Innocence Reclaimed in Labyrinth

(this is technically not an essay i feel unqualified to write, but rather one that i’m hesitant to write. i generally dislike “nostalgic childhood property turned grimdark!” fan theories as much as the next person. on the other hand, the events and themes in Labyrinth are kind of creepy when you start to think about it, especially given the whole “Jareth is the magic-world parallel to her mother’s boyfriend” thing.)

The next essay, from late 2017, I actually titled "an essay I might be able to write after seeing The Last Jedi a few more times""

“You’re Nothing, But Not To Me”: Romance Heroes and Anti-Heroes from Pride and Prejudice to Star Wars.

(I am SO sorry y’all, I know that Kylo Ren and Reylo Discourse™ is kind of a mess. But I saw The Last Jedi an hour ago and I just…I really need to talk about how thoroughly they Reverse Darcy’d Ben.)

And the final entry, in late 2018, was regarding the Black Jewels trilogy by Anne Bishop.

fandom essays I’d like to read but feel unqualified to write: “holy shit these books, y’all” edition
Father, Brother, Lover, and (Chosen) Child: Visions of Female Power and Gender Relations from Female Speculative Fiction Authors

Along with everything else I did this weekend, I managed to read the entire Black Jewels trilogy by Anne Bishop. And while the plot and setting peripherals were just as over-the-top* id-ficcy as I’d heard, a lot of the thematic elements felt oddly familiar. Like, “super-powerful female child will be our savior but must be guided and helped by a variety of male figures, including a weird jealous scramble around who gets to be her romantic/sexual partner” - I have read that Anne McCaffrey novel AT LEAST three times. The way that consensual, non-violent sexuality is present but muted (extremely non-explicit and peripheral) while violence (both sexual and non-sexual) is foregrounded and described in relatively explicit detail, reminds me of several entries from Mercedes Lackey’s body of work. And the tone - likely progressive for its time, but leaning heavily on “one/a few Worthy Women contrasted with Those Bitches” and gender essentialism - feels so tied to both a cultural moment and the prominent female spec fic writers who were popular at that time.

*and the peripherals are, don’t get me wrong, banana-pants bonkers. Things I said out loud while reading Daughter of the Blood: (cut because of various content warnings)

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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.

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:


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.)

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.)