Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

21 Dec 2010, 12:28 p.m.

In Which I Take A Sharp Left Turn In The Last Paragraph, Just Like The BSG Finale

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2010 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Once I read, perhaps a webcomic or a short story or a joke, where one person showed off some collection, perhaps of antique mustard bottles, and another person asked whether there wasn't a less bulky and costly way he could display his crippling fear of death. Lazyweb request #1 of 2: anyone remember this?

Maybe because my dad died this year and I spent a bunch of time with my mom, or just because of the perspective that comes with age and experience, I'm seeing my family- and mortality-related neuroses more clearly. The armchair psychology soothes me, because of course if I can come up with a simplistic "x causes y" chain of dominoes, then I know my own true name and I can defeat myself! Wait, um, that isn't what I mean or want --

My family moved around a lot as a kid, so I got several of the "hey, surprise news, we're moving soon" speeches, and maybe that's why I flinch so hard at surprises.

We moved, and I didn't get to keep friends, so I kept things, read comfort books over and over with a fear of moving on to books I hadn't read before, stayed in my room, memorized the Star Trek universe, living in the mental space I could control since I couldn't control the physical spaces I lived.

Food. I had to eat as much South Indian food as my mother gave me nearly every day until I left home for college. I felt like saying no counted for nothing. I rather wonder that I did not develop a bona fide eating disorder; as it is, I just had an aversion to Indian food for about a decade. And you know how you're not supposed to shop for food when you're hungry, because you're more susceptible to marketers' tricks? Well, yesterday Leonard and I stopped by a health food store after lunch, and I was surrounded by all this food when I was already full, and I got a little nauseated and panicky. I hope this dies down when I've been away from India for a while.

My birth family told me I could and should achieve great things, write books, get a Ph.D., without taking risks. Not all together like that, of course, that would sound ridiculous. And I was just precocious enough to be ridiculous to everyone normal, but never truly iconoclastic and self-propelled and genius-level enough; or maybe I would have been, if they'd given me space or freedom or uninterrupted solitude, or if I'd felt I had enough agency to take it myself. And oh what a textbook case I had of extrinsic motivation destroying intrinsic.

Big giant honkin' fear of failure. Skill acquisition never made systematic sense to me; it was either under-my-nose No Big Deal or incomprehensible deep magic. My first semester of high school, I got a C in a class, and I was more ashamed of that than of anything else except my adolescent hormonal urges, and maybe even that's a fair fight. I got to university and took a computer science class, and debugging exhausted and humiliated me; I read it as constant failure topped by a meager teaspoon of success, instead of enjoying the challenge and reading each quest as a hero's journey. When I read entrepreneurs saying that of course you'll fail the first time you try something hard, or a comedian or chef saying that it's freeing to have a fresh opportunity to fail and improve in every set and every dish, their perspective feels disorienting and freeing.

So now I see the anxious grasping for control in my own perfectionism and completism. I can at least laugh at my own anxiety now when Leonard suggests watching a few episodes of Psych out of order.

That is all preface. Once upon a time I did triumph over my own petty completism, with the help of the Sci-Fi Channel marketing department, and watched the middle and end of Battlestar Galactica without seeing the beginning. Last night Leonard and I watched most of the introductory miniseries. Roslin and Starbuck are so awesome! Because we accidentally held vintage BSG in reserve, it is as though now we get a wonderful prequel with magically younger actors! Lazyweb request #2 of 2: Remember "Why Tom Zarek Was Right"? Where's the followup letter, from after the series finale, dissenting from the controversial decision to you-know-what?

Comments

Zack
http://www.owlfolio.org/
21 Dec 2010, 16:04 p.m.

This is just to say that debugging exhausts and humiliates me, too, and always has. I like the notion of thinking of each bug as a hero's quest; maybe that'll put my brain into a place where spending a week to find exactly where one must make a tiny change seems like an appropriate allocation of effort.

Zack
http://www.owlfolio.org/
21 Dec 2010, 16:33 p.m.

Also I'm going to put a comment here that's really for your old post that you linked to with "under-my-nose No Big Deal."

When I was a little kid -- four to eight, probably -- there were a bunch of things that my parents did all the time, made look easy, and absolutely would not let me do ever. For instance, my dad regularly sliced apples against his hand, but I wasn't allowed anywhere near the kitchen knives without one of them hovering over me and correcting my hand position, and a cutting board was mandatory.

Fast forward twenty years, one day I'm chopping up a vegetable without really thinking about it, and it dawns on me that I'm only a little bit younger now than my dad was then, and I have been chopping vegetables for twenty years. (What other skills have I practiced for that long? Walking?) It must have been the same for him. Of course he could slice apples against his hand without hurting himself. And of course he wasn't going to let me try it.

So that purged an old bit of crystallized resentment, but it also left me musing on how to teach this sort of thing. You point out, correctly, that making something look too easy is a great way to show contempt for beginners. I've also had the related problem where if I just do something that I can do like falling off a log, the person I'm helping won't learn anything. But at the same time, some degree of making it look easy is vital to instilling confidence, and if I let my hypothetical four-year-old child chop the vegetables (with an appropriate amount of supervision), that's going to delay dinner.

YA definition of adulthood: recognizing that life is one tightrope act after another.

Thomas Thurman
http://thomasthurman.org
21 Dec 2010, 17:46 p.m.

I wonder how many distinct approaches to the problem of the existence of failure there are. I've been giving it some serious thought in my own life, and it's a large issue for me as well, but I seem to have dealt with it in an unconstructive way different from yours. I suspect the problem is faced by all grown-ups who were once gifted children.

Zack: In Hemel Hempstead there is a series of roundabouts which together form one huge meta-roundabout. When I used to drive, I knew perfectly well how to drive around a roundabout, but it was always a slight crisis, and I would always settle back onto the next piece of ordinary road with relief. Going around that roundabout, however, meant that leaving a roundabout-crisis only meant you were entering a new one. It felt like a metaphor for life.

Mel
http://blog.melchua.com
22 Dec 2010, 10:05 a.m.

"My birth family told me I could and should achieve great things, write books, get a Ph.D., without taking risks. Not all together like that, of course, that would sound ridiculous. And I was just precocious enough to be ridiculous to everyone normal, but never truly iconoclastic and self-propelled and genius-level enough; or maybe I would have been, if they'd given me space or freedom or uninterrupted solitude, or if I'd felt I had enough agency to take it myself."

This.

I mean, you never really know, right? Could you have done more under different circumstances, or is that just an excuse for "not trying hard enough" when you were younger? How much is nature, how much is nurture?

Although... the experiences you have and your ability to share them like this help - a lot - for folks like me, who see this as a mirror of sorts for understanding how my own life has been shaped, to be reassured that I'm not the only one. And I suspect that the journey you've taken - not just where you've ended up - is part of what lets you be such an excellent bridge across so many different worlds, and what gives you the insight and the empathy to understand and spot things like different sorts of privilege, and... generally make you more awake and aware of the world.

Painfully so, sometimes. But I think you would be one of the ones who walked away from Omelas. You prefer knowledge that hurts to ignorance that allows bliss, and once you have that knowledge, you do what you think is right by it, regardless of whether it's hard or not.