Untangling Tales

I’ve been (re) reading the bit in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy about the logic of Elfland, and how the wonder that exists in that story-world is to remind us of the wonder we forget of our own world.

And I’m filled with this surge of remembering. Of my capacity for wonder and delight.

Then just as quickly it is checked, by the cost of that wonder and delight.

To immerse without reserve means there is no net when I fall through the broken parts of this world.

I lost a whole litter today.  Mneme’s, that I just mentioned on Monday that I was eagerly looking forward to. My first litter since just after Christmas.

At 7:30 this morning I found nine naked kitsicles.  Three on the straw outside the nest were misshapen, and one was bit open and laying on the wire, but the other five looked perfectly formed.  On a last wisp of hope I immersed those in a bowl of warm water, up to their noses. My wonder expanded with my hope when four of those five began to kick weakly, and make gasping motions with their tiny mouths, revealing incisors as delicate as toothpick tips.

But the motion gradually slowed.  They were so cold the water cooled almost at once, and I couldn’t leave them to refresh it or their little noses would sink under the water.

I did what I could but eventually dried them and returned them to their nest, warming in front of the fire. But I knew I’d lost another litter.  And I grieved it.

And I hated grieving it, because it wasn’t necessary.  There were other things I’d expected to get done today.  I also wanted to not-care because if it can happen now after what I’ve learned, it can happen again any time.  And if it can happen any time, I am continually vulnerable.

And since I had just let two new babies into my heart, I did not want to be reminded of my vulnerability.  I didn’t want to think of all the ways I could lose these delicate little lives.

~ ~ ~

But what reading Chesterton tonight reminded me of, was that I am exchanging– surrendering– deep delight for the cheap payment of neutrality.  That is, in exchange for connection, and awe, and wordless wonder, I can now anticipate the worst and practice being numb both before and whether or not it happens.

I don’t limit my pain to events that are actually painful.

But the other cost of the delight– of indulging it– is being willing to look (or at least feel) like a fool.

To be surprised, burnt or wounded by something any pessimist or “realist” could have told me would happen.

I want the delight.  But I’ve forgotten the road. And I still care too much what others think.

But  am praying about what to do about that.  And what not to do.

Have I ever mentioned here (on Untangling Tales) that I wrestle with depression?  Usually seasonal, and usually manageable, but there are times and varieties that just eat my mind and (as a result) basically freak me out.

Well, this post is a chewing on that variety.

Last summer I went back to Weight Watchers for a while, to see if their new system was a good match for me. The first group I visited was a  convenient time for me, but I was “twilight zone” weirded-out by the emphasis of the majority on consuming.

That is, they never talked about recipes they were discovering and trying out with their own twist (what I was used to from my old group) so much as they talked about the right websites and recipe designers.

Now, this is a subtle distinction, so it took me a while to decide what felt so off.  These were women who were not (as a group) creative people.  They didn’t experiment on their own (at least from their talk). They were good at sussing out the “perfect” recipes and following them exactly for perfect results.

Objectively I see nothing wrong with this, but it is (to use an Alaskan analogy) like warm dark.  I know it exists, and is even normal to some people, but it is so far from my life-history I can’t be all that relaxed in that environment.

Shifting groups actually helped me stick it out longer in WW.  My later group was (as a whole, at least in what they shared) much more creative.

~ ~ ~

I have found a fairly tight correlation between creativity and managing depression. That could be why a non-creative group felt dangerous.  Depression feels like zombie-mode to me, so being surrounded by folks who didn’t need it… Well yeah, was just creepy.

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Here’s a reprint from about two-and-a-half years ago.  Because the idea of ambassador is one I want to keep in front of me. For many reasons.

I mentioned  that life will be getting even busier soon since school will be starting, then added the clarification that we are homeschooling.

“Oh,” says Person-A, “Will Jay be teaching them math?”

“He could,” I said, surprised at the question and not wanting to make Jay look bad by saying he’s not currently planning on doing any of the teaching.

“I was just thinking he ought to be able to,” Person-A finished.

Then (this was my moment of lucidity) I realized Person-A had just insinuated it took an engineer to teach 1st-grade math.

“Are you implying,” I asked, genuinely hoping to embarrass him, “That I can’t teach 6-year-old math?”

Yes, that’s what he was implying.  He didn’t even try to defend himself.

I was surprised, but shrugged it off.  It wasn’t important to me what he thought.

It wasn’t until later that night, thinking again of the leggy Darwin fish on the car in his driveway, and remembering the sign during voting season for the local fellow I wasn’t voting for, that I began to feel something about our interaction wasn’t right.

And then this morning I realized that I had gone into the conversation utterly unprepared.

I had gone to admire a delicious new baby and prattle family small-talk and keep up positive neighborhood relations.

It was not in my mind that I was entering as an ambassador of Christ, and Homeschooling, and Conservative Thought, and Purposeful Parenting.

Lord-willing, that will never happen again.

I acted as though I was a friend among familiars, being sloppy in my explanations and imprecise in my reasons.  In short, I did more to reinforce any (diminished) view they may have of those things than to correct it.

And maybe it wasn’t that bad, but the problem is that I didn’t enter as an ambassador, aware of what I represented.  If I’d had the right mentality going in, I know I would have done better (If I’d only know this was a job interview…).

I might have recognized the “playing” of me and my ideas before the next day, and maybe refused to play.  I want to think I’d still not be offended (it never serves a diplomat’s goals or purpose to be offended), but I could have been more “professional” and less of an airhead.

Again, not that I’m sure I was the opposite extreme, it’s just that I muffed a fine opportunity to muck up their stereotypes.

And I find that disappointing.

All the same, I haven’t yet learned how to respond politely to subtle insults, and it occurs to me that had I fully known what was going on I might have been a poorer representative of Christ than I otherwise was.

I’m a defender. It’s what I do– often without thinking about it.

I see someone on the defensive doing poorly, I jump in on their side.  Especially if it’s an argument I know and think I could do better than them.

I think I lost a friend this way last year.  He hasn’t spoken to me the same way since I took the other side of his literal-6-days creation debate.  It is in my nature to try and homogenize, to find the perfect faerie* argument to make everything “technically” mesh.

For the record: I think the “specific Hebrew word for a 24-hour day” argument is weak.  The argument that brings me to a literal creationist stance (which, for the record, I hold) is my belief from scripture that death did not exist before the Fall.  Therefore, billions of deaths over millions of years– in order to get to a human creature, sentient and capable both of communion with God and division from him– is not possible.

I have a high degree of empathy– the ability to get into other people’s heads or emotions and imagine how certain things affect them.  As a result I can take far too much responsibility for their comfort.  For their feelings.

And I recently figured out that to be healthy as me I have to quit thinking so much of others.

Whoa! Is a Christian allowed to say that?

You see for about three years now, about as long as I’ve been homeschooling, I’ve been feeling responsible to keep my choices (for example, to homeschool) from making other parents feel guilty for making a different choice.

Before that it was about being a stay-at-home mom, but it seems more people do that with preschoolers so I didn’t feel the separation as keenly.

The point is, I imagined how I’d feel if I were the other parent, and I downplayed the significance of our different choices because, well, if she wanted to be home, I didn’t want her to feel bad, and even if she didn’t, I wanted very much to avoid any possible conflict or fight over which choice was better or (an even worse word) “correct.”

This sheltering or defending of others has continued as Jay and I made our lives more complicated and atypical: gluten-free, debt-free, tiny house, homegrown (I like to call it “ethical”) meat.

I’ve avoided talking about our choices, especially the whys, because I didn’t want to draw such stark lines as I knew they’d create.

So I basically said what anybody chooses doesn’t matter, because we’re all different, with different needs and different stages.  And while that’s true, and I really don’t want to create a hierarchy or polarize folks, it killed me emotionally.

Because I had just said– continually said, over years– that what I invested in, the hard stuff I chose because it was important to me and I felt it was worth it and made a difference– Didn’t. matter.

And I don’t want to do that any more.  This is where I need to be my defender and trust everyone else to be grown-up enough to own and love their own decisions.

I’m certainly not going to pick any fights, but I’m going to quit being embarrassed of how hard I work. I do it for real reasons, and those reasons carry me through. Make me stick with things even when they’re hard.

What I do is valuable. Not something to kick under the bed like the shoes my husband won’t get rid of.  I’m proud of what I do. It is important and worth defending.

*Faerie are creepy to me on a couple levels.  The main one is their commitment to the truth– as it is useful to them.  Their methodology is to manipulate the “mortal” they speak with by speaking nothing but the *exact* truth.  Of course they will direct, imply and manipulate to their purpose’s end, but they will never be culpable to the charge that they ever spoke falsehood.

When I talk of me speaking faerie I mean it in terms of working words or reality as a puzzle that I’m trying (by means of the exactness or slipperiness of language) to meld differing views enough to bring cooperation if not true peace.

Atavism is the idea or concept of a throwback.  A recurrence of a trait that (genetically, say)  had not shown up in a few generations.

I tripped over the term earlier this year.

I’d stopped into a yarn shop to see what blends they sold of angora yarn, and to buy a pattern.  My girls were with me (we’d just come from a baby shower), and between us we started talking with a woman who was probably in her 50s.

It came out that we raise rabbits, that I spin their wool and knit and love old stories– the old tales where spinning and knitting could be critical elements.

“Ah,” said she, “so you’re atavistic.”

I’d never heard the word, and asked what it meant.

“It means you love the old ways,” she said.  “Traditional things.”

I really enjoyed being given a useful new word (I had her spell it for me).  It is used more frequently in an evolutionary context, but her explanation is still solid. (The word is related to the word for ancestor.)

Anyway, all that to say, that I’ve been looking for a focus on Untangling Tales, and this might be what I end up with.

I do not automatically agree with Older-Is-Better (expect a post on that, eventually), but I am also against reinventing the wheel.  Such a waste of time.

With such a full life, I often think about time and how we have to make the most of it.  One of the ways I look at frequently is How did other people manage?

“There is nothing new under the sun,” and that concept gives me hope: I don’t need to know everything, or even figure out everything. If our generation has fewer physical resources because of the “depletion of the earth,” we can at least benefit from the many generations that have come before us.

Stories, songs, skills, delights: What a gift that we are not limited to ourselves– the past or the present.

I get nervous when I discover new things.

Not particularly because those things rock my world (so much) as I immediately start to wonder how long ago I was supposed to figure this out.

This popped into my novel a couple days ago:

A: I just figured out I’m ‘gifted.’
B: Just now?
A [self-conscious, embarrassed]: Yeah.
B: Maybe you should seek a second opinion.

A new friend mentioned how no one believed her when she said she was afraid she might fail. “Oh no, not you,” was all she heard.

It made me think of a quote I read recently: “I want to die” is often the way of saying “I want the pain to stop”… try, if you can, to respond as though you heard the second statement rather than get caught up in the horror of the first statement.

Not only in writing circles we can trip over the concept of *subtext*. The idea (reality, actually) that what’s being said is not always what’s really being said.

While listening to her story and hearing how utterly unhelpful the friends’ response was, I was embarrassed to realize I would have responded the same way.  It led to my new discovery:

We are (culturally?) conditioned to negate negativity.

When child says I can’t we jump in to say he’s wrong.  Only we do it by saying You can! A child says I’m afraid and we say she’s wrong by insisting, There’s nothing to be afraid of.

An adult friend asks, What if this proves too much for me? and instead of saying, I’ll love you anyway, or, How can I help you feel less overwhelmed? we jump in to remind her of her past competency.

I loved it last week when (in response to I-don’t-remember-what) Jay jokingly misquoted, “Past performance is no indicator of future success.”

“Uh-uh,” I corrected. “Past performance is no guarantee of future success.” (He agreed that was the accurate line.)

The past is an indicator, but it can also become a type of impossible standard.

Just because I’ve been relatively competent and self-sufficient much of my life does not mean I’ll never fall apart and call up three different people for help in the same week.

I did!

And I’m so thankful that there are those in my world who hear me when I’m scared or weak. And I’m even thankful for those folks who, even if they don’t particularly seem to believe me, will still come and wash dishes or fold clothes so I can keep my nose above water.

~

But hearing this friend’s frustration was a good reminder of what I’ve bemoaned lately: What’s so horrible about failure?  Instead of jumping to head every *potential* failure off, I wish we could adopt more of a wait-and-watch approach when we’re not dealing with life-and-death issues.

Yes, this might not turn out so well, or *maybe* it just isn’t what you would choose to do with the same time; but with no heart/soul/mind or body in line to be irreparably damaged, maybe you could just say you’ll love me anyway? No matter what?

That’s what we need to hear most.

Especially when we fail.

Apparently they aren’t just about saying *no*.

I pretty much have that down (despite it making me feel like a jerk sometimes), so I’ve not paid close attention to the topic when it comes up.

The study of boundaries (or rather, the person teaching about them) also suggests that I, like everyone, am continually teaching people how to treat me.

Last week I went off on an unorganized verbal riff with a total stranger (that is, we’d just introduced ourselves to each other as we worked in the same garage).  Toward the end I felt embarrassed at her patience and made a joke about how “I’m just thinking with my mouth open, feel free to walk away any time.”

But for real, that’s the worst thing she could have done.  That’s the sort of thing that completely burns me, and I only said it because I was trying to absolve my felt-foolishness.

Later that evening, in a different (and more organized) exchange, she did just what I had “taught” her and decided it was time for her to leave (albeit, more graciously than just walking away). I had “taught” her that I didn’t care if she listened (or participated) or not, and that was untrue.

But this also means I need to consider how I want to be treated, and subsequently how to convey that.

For me it means being not-flippant, and treating as serious the things that are serious to me.  I often criticize (or redirect) Natasha for using “baby talk” when something is disproportionately important to her, or she’s not sure how I will respond.  But I think I do the same thing: trying to hold lightly to something when I’m not sure my listener will equally share the weight of it.  I make a joke out of something important to me, then feel wounded to watch it tumble.

This is something I want to work on.

Another angle on boundaries that isn’t just saying no, it’s also not saying anything I’m not comfortable saying, or just don’t want to say.  The idea that I am allowed to not-share certain thoughts with anybody. (This in contrast within both Christian and the modern culture’s emphasis on being “real” or “genuine” at any/all costs.)

A commenter on this short and thought-provoking post called authenticity and transparency “the most important thing about social media.”  Yikes.

But it’s my tendency to agree, and not just about social media. I’ve always acted as though it was my purpose (or at least my job) to be transparent as possible.

A healthy sense of boundaries teaches that nothing about me is public property, or available for mistreatment.

An interesting aspect of The Perilous Gard is how the main character, Kate, refuses to push another character for the inner workings of his (obviously troubled) mind. She feels there ought to be one person in his world who lets him choose how much he’s willing to share. But it’s not like she enjoys it.

“Though she honored his privacy, she resented it very much, always to be shut out…”

This story was the first time I’d ever thought of feelings or inner battles as private property.

And I wonder a bit if any of that came from my time working with foster kids. “Use your words” was the cure-all/preventative for most behavior issues, so openness with everything was strongly reinforced.

But these two new ideas have made me curious to pull out my old book (that I’ve started ~ five times and never finished) to see what else I’ve missed.

“Wow,” my mom said when I told her. “I though you had to be way older. That’s really cool.”

Last week someone was describing first-impressions and one of the words he used for me was eccentric.

I mentioned this after church, and one of the women seemed to grow offended or anxious for my sake.

“Did he really know you?” she asked. How could he say that? was all over her tone.

“That wasn’t the point,” I tried to explain, not sure how to say that no matter how he meant it (and I was convinced he meant it in a neutral way), I felt honored by the word.

You see, though I didn’t have the label for it yet (that came about two days later), I was sure eccentric meant strong. It takes a distinct measure of strength to continue to be notably different from the world around you.

I’ve expressed how thankful I am that I was homeschooled, because it meant that I wasn’t pummeled into some standardized mold by my peers.  I don’t think I would have been this strong then.   And I rather like who I’ve grown into.

When I meet (usually in a story) an individual that is both weird and attractive, I just assume they’re good at something. The Bunny-Ears-Lawyer can get away with anything because they are. that. good. so no one forces them to change.

But I have a few people in my world that are just weird. Not the eccentric + attractive combination that is necessary to assume skill.  So I was sort of putting myself down, putting myself in that (“merely weird”) category, when, two days after I found the label, another recent acquaintance spontaneously addressed this.

I’ve gotten the distinct impression, on reviewing this last week, that God has been telling me over and over again, You have value.  A message I needed to hear.

“I remember seeing you at the last potluck,” the new woman said.  It was the first time we’d spoken much. “I saw you talking with all this energy and information– you had so much information– and there were people around you, and they were listening to you. And I thought, I want to sit near *her*.”

Many many times I’ve been afraid of burning people, vaguely aware that my intensity is higher than, well, what people expect.

Whatever that means.

And I forget that God has placed people in my world who actually enjoy the way I am.  Including my eccentricity.

And that I’m allowed to enjoy me too.

I have so much fun on TVtropes.com

It’s a total fiction-geek corner.

I love how the introduction emphasizes the effort is to celebrate fiction through recognizing patterns, not to bash anything for being “unoriginal.”

After all, Everything is Remix.

The reason I love the tropes site so much is that it is a place and means of acquiring vast amounts of trivial (yet potentially useful) information that is not immediately actionable.

That is, I can indulge my interest in minutia without the compunction of adding to my to-do list.

I’ve found that’s my favoritest way to relax.

On one level I think it is a very good thing.

How many tragic (powerful, often, but tragic) stories unfold primarily from the foolishness of hubris?  The idea that everything needed is already within.  Including wisdom.

How much grief could be avoided by following good advice?

One of my favorite lines is the one that goes, Sure “experience is the best teacher,” but if you can learn second-hand the tuition is cheaper.

I’ve practically made it my life’s work to learn everything second-hand. At least at first.

That said there are people with the opposite problem.  Those who don’t trust themselves at all.

While at first this might seem the solution to the problem of hubris, it can’t be, because of the simple reality that no one can be as invested in you as you.

G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy posits that humility used to mean doubting one’s self, which at least has the potential to motivate working harder (i.e. to prove or validate one’s self).  More recently, he says, humility has come to be doubting one’s purpose, resulting in not working at all (i.e., freezing up).

He calls it the difference between a spur and a nail in the shoe.

I have wrestled with the latter question a lot.  And felt ineffective; not because I’ve particularly been thwarted, but because I’ve not fully invested and worked.  I hold back, still looking around for the right pool to jump in before I hold my nose.

~ ~ ~

When I have the (sometimes) conflicting spheres of ability, interest and responsibility; all ranged out before me, all under a ticking clock, I end up with something like anxiety.

From my conception of God, I know I am not responsible to make up my own reality, and in my view of his sovereignty, I expect he has equipped and prepared me to do something unique.

C.S. Lewis provides one of my favorite quotes on this:

God makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. Be sure the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.

And it seems that I must regularly remind myself of this.

Because what is important to me hasn’t changed.

What is changing is the distractions and responsibilities that deflect me from what I still believe is important.

Have I said what that is?

That thing that’s been around since before children, I can apply with them and expect to still be important when they’re raising their own families?

Story.

It matters because I don’t know of any other (let alone better) way to train the imagination.

And whether you ultimately make decisions from your mind, emotions, or convictions, all of those capacities are informed and trained by imagination.

I have no doubt that to neglect this foundation is dangerous.