Fear of Letter Writing

short essays for a perplexing world

[fearofletterwriting]

The Society of My Mind

After Malcolm introduced the cast of himself and Brienne talked about the people in her head who make her do things, it was probably only a matter of time until I also tried to partition my personality into characters. It was fun naming my tendencies and drives; I feel like I can encourage and wheedle a society of my mind more effectively than my usual muddled self-conception 1. I won’t present the characters in dialogue because very little of what happens in my head takes the form of a conversation. However, I’d like to introduce the variously-gendered gang:

Striver loves to work hard, be challenged and feel accomplished.

What is it responsible for? Striver values productivity and busyness. It motivates me to take on projects and cram my schedule to the bursting. A major reason I have an engineering degree is because Striver hoped getting one would be satisfyingly hard.

How can I make it happy? Striver likes giving lectures, making impressive technical things, and successfully navigating overbooked days. (And trivial things, too, like carrying armloads of groceries.)

What are its failure modes? Striver is not realistic about how much I can do. This leads to small frictions (last-minute cancelling of plans) and large ones (feeling like I “never do anything” and am therefore worthless). Striver thinks hard work is virtuous and won’t reflect on whether work actually advances its goals as long as it feels sufficiently productive.

Mercator creates visual and memetic patterns and organizes them neatly.

What are they responsible for? Mercator likes coming up with elaborate plans and theories; much of my systematizing impulse originates with them. They are exacting about aesthetics and so get to be in charge of fine-tuning and taste.

How can I make them happy? Intricate tasks with lots of immediate feedback— debugging code, precise figure drawing, arranging rooms— make Mercator happy. They like both the brainstorming and honing parts of analyzing people, politics, prose, etc.

What are their failure modes? Mercator pursues the elegant or otherwise aesthetically appealing over the practical. They are easily frustrated in the necessary stages between dreaming of a beautiful plan and tweaking its execution.

Grace is a hostess. She wants to smooth everyone's experience of the world.

What is she responsible for? Any social competence I have is but by the grace of Grace. She is in charge of relating to people– how to pay attention to what others might be feeling or wanting and how to go about providing it.

How can I make her happy? Grace wants to create good experiences for people. Hosting parties and other events is great for her. She thrives on empathy and enjoys giving advice and support to friends.

What are her failure modes? Grace is about smoothness; she tries to be what she thinks people want and will encourage lying or other disingenuousness in support of that aim.

Beatrice thinks everyone is important and wants to be careful not to hurt anyone.

What is she responsible for? Beatrice is the guardian of my core beliefs. Direct appeals to her are your best bet if you want to win an argument with me or change my behaviour 2. She doesn't drive very often; though Beatrice cares plenty about people, most socializing is delegated to Grace.

How can I make her happy? Beatrice likes listening to people and receiving new opinions. She enjoys trust, connection and doing her duty. She gets very angry when people are dismissive of others and feels good if she can argue against that.

What are her failure modes? Beatrice used to mostly steer me with guilt, which hurt. She has mellowed with time and now mostly fails by giving disproportionate weight to certain styles of moral argument.

Felix is a self-satisfied, in-the-moment sensualist. He’s basically a smug, happy cat.

What is he responsible for? Felix lets me get out of my head and enjoy the world. If I’m worrying, I can let Felix steer and he’ll make me a snack or remind me of the shiny things within immediate reach.

How can I make him happy? Felix revels in unhurried sensory experiences: wandering barefoot outdoors, smelling cardamom or smoked paprika, staying under the covers on a cold morning, or feeling wind through hair.

What are his failure modes? Felix will enjoy what is happening in the moment at the expense of paying necessary attention to the future, causing him to ditch plans, disregard commitments and be otherwise inconsiderate.

Markov is verbal momentum. They chain actions in the direction of conclusions.

What are they responsible for? Markov doesn’t manage everyone, per se, but they maintain a sense of direction. Striver or Mercator might decide I want to do a project, but Markov carries out their vision.

How can I make them happy? Markov relaxes when given smooth, progressive flow of information, anything from checking off lists to freestyling parody lyrics. They appreciate feedback and flow states.

What are their failure modes? Markov resists changes to their current motion, sometimes avoiding useful course-corrections or failing with abandon when there is no smooth redirection available.

What characters are your upper-level mental agents? Most of the people I’ve talked to identify at least one pleasure-seeking partition with a short time horizon and one partition oriented towards social connections, but how name those characters is very telling. I’d enjoy hearing about your society of mind!

Having a less coherent vision of myself seems to be useful for my thinking. If you feel overly dissociative then this exercise may not be helpful for you. ↩︎

Example: I wasn't vaccinated as a child and vaguely felt I ought to get adult vaccinations, but didn’t do so until @nanoishuge pointed out that I wasn’t doing my part to protect the people whose allergies or immune systems prevent them from getting vaccinated. ↩︎

[fearofletterwriting]

5 Principal Components of Sexuality

Among the best DIY house decorations I’ve seen was a string hung across my friend’s back door. Each roommate’s name was written on a coloured triangle of paper that could be hung from the string by a miniature clothespin. Above the string were the words, “Where are you on the Kinsey Scale today?”

It was all very twee. I liked that the names could be moved to a particular place on the string every day, precisely located on a scale. But, really, you can’t be that precise if you’re only measuring in one dimension. I think we can achieve much more emotional precision if we add more dimensions. My suggestions:

Heterosexual-Homosexual (the Kinsey Scale)

This is perhaps the most obvious dimension. When we think of sexuality it’s often with words like straight, queer, bisexual, gay. One thing I like about the Kinsey Scale is its granularity between a 0 (exclusively heterosexual), a 3 (bisexual) and a 6 (exclusively homosexual). I can think of people who I’d assign a 1; they identify as mostly straight and occasionally pursue homosexual interests. Similarly, I know people at the 4 level who find they have a preference for homosexual relationships, but a well-established interest in heterosexual ones 1

For the remaining dimensions, I found that assigning myself a 0-6 à la Kinsey Scale required informative thinking and I encourage you to do the same. However, feel free to mark an X if you really feel orthogonal to one of the categories 2.

Asexual-Sexual

How much sexual contact do you want in your relationships with the people you find attractive? For example, the Slate Star Codex post Polyamory is Boring has the quote:

I’m sort of borderline asexual. I like cuddling people, kissing people, falling in love with people, petting people’s hair, writing sonnets about people, and a few things less blogaboutable, but having sex isn’t an especially interesting experience for me.

This sounds like someone at the level of a 1 (incidentally sexual). I have some friends in the 2-3 range who go, "eh, being sexual isn’t a big concern for me, but it’s something I enjoy at times". I have found (to my mild embarrassment) that I can go from feeling bleak frustration to sunny optimism about a relationship via a single night of excellent sex; I assign myself a 5.

Polyamorous-Monogamous

How exclusive do you prefer your sexual or romantic relationships to be? Do you want multiple partners? What about your partners seeing other people? People in the 5-6 range probably experience the flavour of jealousy described by Thing of Things where they:

… feel that having their partner fall in love with or have sex with someone else lessens their relationship somehow or takes away the specialness. Even the thought of their partner going on a date can make them extremely upset to the point of hating their metamour. This is true even if all of their emotional needs are met, their partner is being honest, and their partner is not going to leave them.

On the other end of the scale, one of my friends realized that he would rather have no relationship at all than a monogamous relationship. I can only reasonably assign him a 0 (exclusively polyamorous).

Conservative-Opportunistic

This scale was proposed in the John Scalzi blog post that got me thinking about the dimensions of sexuality, with the example:

A guy who is largely straight but highly sexual and somewhat opportunistic might not turn down a same-sex encounter because, hey, sex; another man who is gay but closer to asexual and conservative might turn down the same opportunity.

Someone confessed romantic interest to one of my friends and she physically ran away from the conversation despite liking this friend back. That style of practically working against opportunities probably indicates a 0. I tend not to pursue romantic interest unless I’m sure it will work out, so I’m looking like a 2-3.

Initiating-Responsive

I felt like the four scales above were missing some of the important variance in sexuality. I thought of a series of pictures in a Kate Bornstein book, each of which shows a pair of people with the caption, “if you were in this picture, who would you be?”

The question points at some others: Do you prefer to hold someone or to be held? Are you happier asking someone out or being asked? Does your desire feel more spontaneous, where you occasionally just think “hey, I’d like to have sex!”, or responsive, dependent on context and sensation? 3 Do you prefer dominant or submissive consensual power dynamics?4

I find this scale a bit difficult to describe, but I think initiating vs. responsive distinction is very similar to lead vs. follow in partnered dancing. The lead decides on a sequence of steps, suggesting a turn here and inviting a side-step there. The follow interprets the lead’s tightened arms or twisted hips and responds, translating the steps into a fluid dance. If you were out dancing, who would you be?

These are the principal components I’ve been able to extract for my sexuality; I’m curious to know if they align with important dimensions of other people’s sexualities. I’ve found it really informative to ask friends to assign numbers to themselves. So: where are you on the principal components of sexuality today?

Where one lies on the Kinsey scale on a given day is not necessarily an uncomplicated, intrinsic fact about them (see: elsewhere on this blog). ↩︎

Attempts to bring up the Kinsey Scale with a partner lead to him irritably declaring “I date people, not genders, dammit!” Respond with an X if thinking about a scale makes you irritable. ↩︎

If you’re more of a 0-2 on the asexual-sexual scale, feel free to substitute “have sex” with “be romantic or intimate”. ↩︎

I thought about calling this scale dominant-submissive but wanted to avoid it being seen as overly kink-related. ↩︎

[fearofletterwriting]

A Letter to 14-Year-Old Me

@storiesandnarratives and @sinesalvatorem wrote lovely letters to their 10-year-old selves. I liked this idea, but my 10-year-old self was pretty content. My 14-year-old self, though, I could muster a few choice words for.

Hi 14-year-old me,

​I'm going to try to build credibility by starting off with something you won't want to hear: sadness still haunts you. I know that one of your small secret hopes is that this too shall pass, that this worthless sad feeling is just a phase induced by teenage angst. Sorry.

It does get better, though, which I think won’t be a cliché phrase for another year. My future is uncertain, but it feels full of waiting possibilities rather than waiting failures. There comes a time when the years of life stretching in front of you no longer seem an inconceivable burden that cowardice will force you to bear. You stop collecting all the jagged hurts of the world and turning them inward to stab at your self-worth.

Right now, you feel like life has given you everything you could have asked for and all you do is take and take and break and break, squandering the gifts you've been given. Your mental alchemy transmutes gratitude to guilt and then the guilt feeds itself on the knowledge that it ought to be gratitude. Here’s what I think you need to hear:

You can't deserve your life.

You can never earn your birth.

Life is just something you have. There is no end point at which someone will judge you worthy. There exists no way for you to be accomplished enough or helpful enough or exceptional enough or just enough that someone will finally nod and say, “Yes, you’ve done it, you’re now officially a good person. Carry on being alive.” You know this, of course, but you don’t believe it.

Remember in the play where you were Arietty, you messed up your cue and someone tried to comfort you backstage, saying, “Everyone makes mistakes,” and you shouted, “I don’t!” and felt shaken and childish? Even at age eleven, you refused to give yourself permission to be a person in progress.

Think of that tender feeling you have when one of your little cousins tries to do something new. When they try to rescue all the monarch larvae in the field by bringing them to milkweed or attempt their first backwards somersault on the trampoline? When they fail, you don’t get angry at them. You feel proud that they’re growing. Can you try to feel some of that tenderness towards yourself? You’re growing, too. So am I. We’re going to be in progress as long as we’re alive.

In your diary (thanks for writing it, by the way, you were right that it would be fun to look back on) you spend paragraphs listing what you hate about yourself. You let yourself believe that you are a bad person who never does anything, while simultaneously telling yourself that anything less than perfection is failure.  It’s overwhelming.

Letting go of your painful need to be perfect will happen gradually. You will let go. You will let go because the people you love, like your Nana and brother, are ordinary, not perfect. They will convince you that they will love you even if you never do anything exceptional. They celebrate your mundane accomplishments, sure, learning a new language or publishing a poem or winning a science contest, but their desire for you to live is never conditional on how impressive you are. Life is just something you have.

You’re homeschooling yourself right now, at your Academy of Vegan Learning. This was a good decision. It makes you anxious when your friends recite the fullness of their days in school, but don’t worry: you’re not falling behind. I’m so glad you took some time to read and e-mail your friends and do hardly anything. You don’t have to be productive to be progressing.

I don’t think this reassurance will be enough for you. You are dangerously good at convincing yourself that you never do anything. One thing I suspect may be a fundamental personality bug is that you always feel like you’re wasting time when you work alone. I suggest finding a project to work on with other people. Maybe go to Hacklab with your dad or spend more time making community theatre puppets.

You feel lonely sometimes, even sprawled out on that couch on the island with your eight closest friends. You feel isolated from their conversations about school and dating, because you really do just want to talk about genetics. You know what, though? Emotions and people are systems just as fascinatingly complex as protein signalling networks. It’s not necessarily less intellectual to analyze them instead. In fact, you feel really good when you have a new insight that helps explain people. Start chasing those insights now and maybe you’ll feel better about the conversations you so often dismiss as gossipy.

Finally, you really do need to talk to some people about your sadness. Turning inward isn’t strength. It isn’t unforgivable weakness, either. It’s just not optimal. You are so afraid that your parents will feel like failures if you tell them about your self-injury, or that they will panic and force you into therapy or snatch away your plans. In fact, your mother thinks all smart teenage girls get incredibly sad for a few years. I promise she won’t freak out. After you talk to your parents, you may want to consider therapy. I suggest you look for something mindfulness-based: that flavour of therapy asks you to practice being and thinking a certain way, which is more interesting than overanalyzing your regrets.

Anyway, I like pointing at pictures of you and saying how cool you are. I usually follow that up immediately with, “Too bad I was so sad back then”. Your life may not be something you deserve, but I’m glad you hold onto it. There’s a hell of a good future next door; let’s go.

With all the tenderness I can transmit in words,

Your 23-year-old self

[fearofletterwriting]

Don't Tell Me to Do What I Love

Scattered thoughts at the outset of a career

It’s a rather loaded idea, a career. I certainly don’t want to be dedicated to my job above all else, the midnight workaholic who forgets the faces of her friends. Exhaustion is not a status symbol. Yet employment is important. I expect to spend around a third of my waking hours in the next decade working at a job of some kind, likely looking at a screen perched over a desk. As I’ve been pondering my (ugh) career options, I’ve found it helpful to keep a few things in mind:

1. Your job doesn’t have to be your work

I want to work on things that are important to me. I don’t have to do that work at a job.

I grew up surrounded by artists; that my work doesn’t need to be done at my job is axiomatic to me. Ask an artist what they’re working on and hear about the hours he spent stitching the wings for the dragonfly puppet or how she’s finally moved on to inking the graphic novel or how they just can’t get the grandfather actor’s theme music to work in C minor. Ask the same artist how they’re paying the bills and hear about tending bar or laying concrete floors or partners with steady incomes.

You can’t define your work simply by your waged labour. If we did this, we’d think of T.S. Eliot as a bank clerk and Kafka as an insurance officer. That false promise, do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life, obscures that nature of work. One of my favourite essays, In the Name of Love by Miya Tokumitsu, describes the flaws of tethering our self-actualization to our jobs:

If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves — in fact, to loving ourselves — what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.

We have to acknowledge that some jobs are both necessary and emotionally unfulfilling. Even in the aftermath of your personal favourite utopian revolution, someone is probably going to have to clean the bathroom. Similarly, there is worthwhile work that deserves your time—that you may indeed love to do—but that is profoundly unlikely to pay your bills.

Your job doesn’t have to be your work. It’s just a starting point; your career decisions will involve choosing jobs and choosing work. The internet already contains good advice about deciding what to work on. I’ll leave with this thought: is there anything you find yourself drawn to, that you approach with a half-grinning-half-wincing resignation? Some project or activity that is kind of self-indulgent and you should maybe avoid it but also maybe you just can’t? 1 Think about making it part of your work.

2. You can quit to explore the decision space

One of the best decisions I ever made was to quit school when I was 13. I wasn’t way more productive in my parents’ kitchen than I would have been a classroom. I did, however, learn a lot about the scope of my decision space.

Even as a preteen, I had this urgent sense that I had to constantly be moving along The Path: an inexorable progression from good grades in high school to a university diploma with trailing internships to a worthwhile job and a future of accumulated promotions. To be off The Path was failure, panic, the worst thing in the world.

Yet after quitting school I was off the path, doing not much other than watching anime and reading physics textbooks, and it didn’t seem to set me back. When I decided to return to school, I had a much healthier attitude. I knew I wasn’t a student just because it was my only option.

Do you have to keep trying to pass the MCAT because you wanted to be a doctor when you were sixteen? Do you have to get a graduate degree because school hasn’t trained you for anything other than more school? Do you have to stay in your office because you can’t stand another awkward year learning to get along with a new set of managers? No, you don’t. You have options, too.

If you feel an urgent constraining dread about your career, because there may not be anything beyond the decisions you’ve already made: quit. Get an exhausting job washing dishes and live in a crappy apartment for a year. Seriously. You can go back on The Path later if you want to.

If you quit, you’ll have to come up with a reason to go back, and you might do better for having one. If nothing else, quitting expands the decision space. It may even be one of the best decisions you ever make.

3. The non-work aspects of your job are important

What have you liked about the jobs you’ve had so far? Was it the work you did? Across six co-op terms, the work I did probably accounted for less than half of my job satisfaction. I can sit irritably at a desk and feel equally unproductive on DNA models or database management or image processing.

What did I like? Regular feedback. Multiple projects to juggle. Long to-do lists. Co-workers who laugh at my jokes. Cal Newport argues that the characteristics of great jobs are work-independent things like autonomy and relatedness. I agree: the actual work you are doing at your job may matter less for your satisfaction than the pace of your work day or the office hierarchy.

Think about what non-work aspects of a job are important to you. This blog post by Philip Guo compares academia and software industry along ten useful dimensions; read it and decide if things like external recognition and time flexibility matter to you. Ask yourself weird questions, like: would you rather be off-key as a voice in a chorus or off-beat as the beatboxer on its side? I would rather my off-key note be covered by the rest of the voices and I see the same tendency in my preference for jobs where I’m a part of a tight-knit team. My friend Malcolm, who is a team of one at his company, would rather be the solo beatboxer who can adapt what he’s doing when he slips off beat.

You already know your job doesn’t have to be your work. When choosing a job, know the kind of non-work characteristics it should have to keep you satisfied.

Looking among those (ugh) career options of mine, my thoughts are scattered, yet: I know my quest for good work is separate from my job search. I know I won’t be trapped along a path by previous decisions: I can always quit and explore the decision space. I know I can find a job with satisfying characteristics without knowing the work I want to do. I think… I think I’m even looking forward to my career.

I personally feel this way about sailing tall ships and figuring out gnarly systems biology, while I feel I ought to be working on making people suffer less. I’m trying to hack my motivation, don’t worry. ↩︎

[fearofletterwriting]

Faking Gratitude for Regrets

My brain is often unkind to me. Too often, I do something a little mean or inconsiderate and my brain just escalates on guilt.

I know it's unreasonable to turn a single instance of rudeness into a mental referendum on whether I'm a worthwhile person. My brain jumps to the occasion, though, providing a litany of every time I did some similar bad thing. Give us a few minutes and my brain and I are already sifting through the evidence from childhood. It's pretty convincing.

I've tried to tell my brain that this is unwelcome and a bad habit, but that went about as well as you'd expect.

My brain would take my suggestion that its thought patterns were mean and stupid and marshal that as further evidence that I was mean and stupid.

Arguing against my brain lead to more guilt, not less. I resigned myself to watching a highlight reel of my regrets every time I messed up. Often I wouldn’t acknowledge times when I had messed up because I was so afraid of triggering my brain’s unkindness and feeling worthless.

A few months ago, I had a backwards insight: if arguing with my brain didn't work, what if I tried just agreeing with it? I decided to pretend that my brain was actually being kind and helpful, instead of trying to hurt me. When it started to escalate guilt, I would act thankful.

This seemed like an obvious lie. It was awkward to respond to my brain's steady supply of painful memories with gratitude.

My gratitude made so little sense that eventually something had to give. Resolving the cognitive dissonance forced me to believe that my brain really was just trying to help! It was showing me all these painful things because... Because it wanted me to learn! And so... So it was showing me a pattern rather than focusing on just one event!

This explanation started to feel more and more true and my gratitude started to feel less and less fake, until... It wasn’t anymore.

My brain’s mental flood no longer seems unkind. More than that, it has now become, to my great surprise, something I’m genuinely thankful my brain knows how to do. As I practice radical acceptance and staring into my regrets, my brain’s ability to launch litanies is a powerful tool to help me learn from my mistakes. When I notice myself feeling down about something mean or inconsiderate I’ve done, I can call upon my brain to contextualize my emotions with a rich cascade of similar situations.

This is probably the most singularly useful faking-it-until-making-it I’ve ever engaged in. If your brain has similar unkind tendencies, perhaps you can try pretending to be grateful for them?

[fearofletterwriting]

Specific Positivity

Do you find it hard to take compliments? I do. A more socially adept friend once explained that it is rude to argue with someone when they compliment you. I’ve taught myself to muster an unenthusiastic “thanks” and change the subject instead; many compliments still make me feel awkward as hell.

My own instinctive bristling at compliments makes me wary of dishing them out. One of my favourite books on communication, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish 1, gives some very evocative hypotheticals illustrating awkward compliments 2:

This is a problem. If I compliment someone else, it’s because I think they’re great! They’ve done some thing or been some way that made me feel good and I want them to feel good in turn. I don’t want them to be doubtful or threatened or to zero in on the parts of my praise that ring untrue.

Thankfully, the book offers a solution: shift your compliments from evaluation to description. This is what I call specific positivity. Here’s an example of it from Faber & Mazlish:

In this example, the evaluation- “you write good poetry”- though intended as a compliment, just makes the would-be poet unsure. The descriptive praise, by contrast, leaves evaluation of the poet to themselves. Its aims simply to share a concrete, positive experience of reading the poem.

With specific positivity, you try to give someone evidence that they should be praised, rather than praise itself. They don’t bristle or argue, because all you’ve given them is a description of your own experience. The recipient of your compliment can then use your descriptive evidence to compliment themselves. This is the goal, anyway- get them to feel good by recognizing the good they’ve done or been. Another book I’ve enjoyed recently had similar recommendations for showing appreciation:

Be specific and precise. Instead of saying, for instance, ‘I love being with you’, be specific about what it is you love. For example, 'I love the way you ring me at midday to see how I am. It makes me feel cared for.’ - How to Stay Sane, Phillipa Perry

Even though the first phrasing doesn’t evaluate the listener, it’s remarkably easier to feel appreciated by the second, specific phrasing. I think much of what people find lacking in platitudes is detail. Without specifics, attempts at complimenting or comforting come out as sprays of positivity to be deflected.

So, how to make it easier for others to take your compliments? Take a moment first to find the action that inspired you to compliment someone. Now, describe your positive experience of that action. Offer evidence that the person has done something good, rather than asserting this to be so. Give specific positivity and make compliments less awkward for all of us

yes, it’s a parenting book that I first read when I was eight, but it has a lot of transferable knowledge, okay ↩︎

Table adapted from content of Faber & Mazlish pages 178-179. ↩︎

[fearofletterwriting]

Extranjera

I grew up going to commune-like public alternative schools, where children were allowed to chair school meetings and maintain a conviction that they were dinosaurs, and I used to wonder why my classmates were so much more homogeneous than the children I met in the park. We were mostly white kids whose families had been living in Canada for several generations.

I feel like being a foreigner in Chile is giving me a better understanding of the (obviously complex) reasons that my alternative schools were so lacking in diversity. You see, I haven’t worn my favourite coat since arriving in Chile. My favourite coat is bright red, with floral blue fabric quilted onto the front and an oversized hood. I bought it at a Buddhist temple rummage sale around the corner from my parents’ house; wearing it makes me feel a little like a manga-style Little Red Riding Hood. I confess that it probably qualifies as “quirky”.

In Toronto, I love romping around in this coat, getting glances from the denizens of my neighbourhood. In fact, I generally enjoy dressing and acting in a slightly unusual way. I like it when people read me as “alternative” or take note of me on the street. However, I think much of my enjoyment comes from the power I have in these interactions. Living in Santiago has taught me that it was almost always my choice to be inconspicuous.

As a foreigner, I no longer have that choice. It’s fitting that the Spanish word for foreigner (extranjera) nearly contains the word for strange (extraño). Most of my clothing choices are unusual here. My hair and skin colour make people notice me in the street. I stand out because I look confused all the time (usually because I am) and, whenever I open my mouth to speak, my terrible accent makes it obvious that I’m not from here. It’s a privilege to be able to choose to stand out and I’ve had that privilege without really appreciating it for most of my life.

I sometimes want to be private, to wander the streets of Santiago without turning heads, but I can’t change my confusion or my accent. I can change my wardrobe and, thus, I’ve folded up my favourite coat and put it away in my closet. It’s just not that much fun to wear weird clothes when people are already staring. I’d also guess that it’s not that much fun, in general, to make “alternative” choices- e.g. sending your children to alternative schools- when you’re already forced onto the fringe because of your accent or your heritage or your skin colour. I know there are probably many other factors that contributed to my homogeneous primary education, but I wanted to share this bit of new empathy.

Reposting from two years ago in Chile, this time with an illustration.

[fearofletterwriting]

Moments That Changed My Mind

I’ve been compiling a list of the moments in my life when I experienced what I’d call a personal paradigm shift.

One of the earliest entries on the list happened in grade school. A classmate made a slapstick show of being unable to pick up his eraser: it somehow jumped from his hand to the floor, then across the table, then across the room. As he fumbled after it, the three of us sharing his table were overcome with laughter. After we’d collected ourselves (and the rogue eraser) one of the other kids turned to me and said, “Wow, I didn’t know you laughed”.

I remember being astonished- I laughed all the time! How could someone be so wrong about me? Then I realized that these kids only saw me at school, where I was a classic early-stage nerd: shy, studious and rule-abiding. Thus: rarely laughing. In that moment, I first grasped at the idea that other people have their own versions of the world inside their heads, grown from their experiences. They wouldn’t know who I was unless I showed them.

Several years later, I realized that other kids had their own versions of imagined worlds as well. My friend and I were drawing together and she asked if her pencil crayon the right colour for her character’s skin. The character was from a world I’d invented (an elf trying to take down the oppressive ruling class of goose-riding witches, if I recall correctly) but my friend always played him in our make believe games and his voice was definitely more hers than mine.

Still, it hadn’t occurred to me that this fantasy elf would have a skin colour like my friend’s rather than like mine. In fact, until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that we imagined the world differently. I saw that the cast members of all my beloved fantasy worlds, the Hermiones and the Keladrys, might look different filtered through other people’s minds.

As a teen, late night wandering of the internet brought me to some pro-life forums. They were full of activists with opinions in much the same flavour as my own, peppered with statistics, appeals to human rights and a sense of frustration with a mainstream unwilling to face the world’s real problems.

At the time, I believed that many of the world’s problems were all a big misunderstanding. I thought that a wave of mutual understanding swept across the planet would somehow transmute everyone’s political opinions to be like mine1. I had to reconsider this belief upon seeing people who had thought just as— if not more— deeply about an issue and arrived on the opposite side of the debate. Even with the same exact evidence in front of us, the world inside their heads might be founded on such different axiomatic assumptions that we’d still disagree.

There are many more moments in my list, but they all seem like the same realization on different scales: the world as I see it is less universal than I thought.

I’m curious about the scale of realizations yet to come, though I’m not exactly sure how to go hunting for them. Scanning my memory for new list entries, I usually try to hone in on a feeling of mental pressure, of bewilderment giving way to a realization that nothing in my model of the world that explains what is in front of me. This seems to happen most often when I listen closely to other people and hear the way their minds are different from my own. If you’d like to share how your paradigm shifts differ from mine, I’m all ears.

This is a apparently a common enough liberal fallacy that it has a Stuff White People Like entry. ↩︎

[fearofletterwriting]

It took me some time to find my voice during my exchange to Chile in 2013. I decided during my first week in Santiago that I'd try to speak as little English as possible, forcing me to improve my Spanish. The consequence of my choice was that I often spoke hardly at all.

In English, I'm chatty to a fault. I have a prepunderance for cheesy wordplay and often interrupt people. In Spanish, by the time I connect my thoughts to the words that express them, the conversation has often leapt past me and onto a new topic. I was grateful for the patience of my Chilean friends, for their generous efforts to tease meaning from my garbled sentences.

I often explored Santiago in a drifting, introspective way. If I didn't apply an extra mental push to bring form to the words spoken around me, I could exist in white noise. Then a scrap of English- Robin Thicke on the radio, subtitled reruns of Friends on TV- would slice through, remind me of how easy and inescapable understanding can be.

I think English is a uniquely inescapable language. In the seminar sessions of my physiology course, we had to present scientific papers to the class. All of the papers were in English. For a moment, I thought my classmates might secretly speak my language, but no. They just accepted that part of their science education required that they parse sentences about "the effects of maternal melatonin on gene expression in the fetal primate suprachiasmatic nucleus" in a foreign language. I tried to imagine a professor at Waterloo assigning readings in French to a second-year biology class; I doubt it would go well.

As the weeks of my exchange washed by, I felt less nostalgic for the ease of English. My voice in Spanish grew more confident. New phrases rose out of the city's white noise. I jumped into conversations with my friends in time to earn a laugh. I can't say that I feel fluent in Spanish, though. I still feel like a different person when expressed with its limitations, someone more quiet and less clever. Yet, what a privilege to have learned about this other person I can be.

I wrote this for my school’s blog after they requested something about exchanges, but they never posted it, so I’m putting it here instead!

[fearofletterwriting]

Why I Can't Say Whether I Prefer Ladies or Gentlemen

Yesterday, my roommate asked me a really interesting question: "Imagine you could invent your ideal romantic partner, with an awesome personality, really attractive, all that. What gender would you have them be?"

I had to think about his question for a while. I'm still thinking about it, to be honest. Though I don't find male and female bodies attractive for the same reasons, I don't think I have a strong preference for one over the other. I think, in the end, social factors would be more important in choosing this hypothetical partner's gender than anything internal. Why do I say that? Let me tell you a few stories, from both sides of the gender divide:

"I think I could be bi," my friend announces as we wait for the streetcar home from middle school. She counts out her crushes on her fingers. "One boy, no girls, it's not that big a difference". I think her nonchalance is so brave, but everyone likes her, of course she can say that. If I said something like that they would all know I was weird and creepy and (gay) and stop talking to me. Years later, I will tell someone at camp that I'm bisexual and his eyes will widen. "I don't think we have any of those at my school," he will say and I will know they're just afraid to tell him.

I'm fifteen, bristling as my aunt delivers some matter-of-fact advice. "It sounds like you could go both ways," she says, "so you should probably just date boys. It will make your life a lot easier." I am indignant. Later, after several years in which all of my partners have been male, I will wonder if she was right, if I am taking the path of least resistance. It's a minor discomfort, this thought, but it will nudge at me as I hold my boyfriend's hand.

I'm playing with my cousins by our grandparents' pool and hear my relatives giggling. They've learned about the boy I kissed earlier that summer and are preparing to bombard me with questions. (Where does he go to school? How did you meet? Are you guys dating now? When do we get to meet him?) I feel irritated that they're taking those few kisses so seriously and I can't help but notice how few of those questions they've asked about my girlfriend, who I've been dating for almost a year.

I don't know how to talk to my boyfriend about sex. In this relationship, unlike my previous homo one, there is a script that our sex is supposed to follow. I worry that if I try to go off-book it will disappoint him. I, largely unconsciously, expect him to always want sex and fear that he'll lose interest if I'm not always up for it. Sometimes I wheedle him into doing things he doesn't particularly want because I think these things will make it clear that I'm a provider of Good Adventurous Sex and I assume that's what he's looking for. Later, another boy will reassure me, saying "I'll still like you no matter how often you say no. You know that, right?" and I will cry, surprised by how badly I want to hear those words.

On the bus heading back to university, I tell my friend about the amazing bike trip I just went on with my boyfriend. He begins to look concerned when I describe how I planned the trip myself, surprising my boyfriend with the route when we got on the trail. "I get a bad feeling about this," he says. "I guess it's fine as long as you're happy, but your boyfriend seems like he's not active enough for you. Why did you have to do all the work?" I know he would find it romantic if I were a boy and had planned a trip for my girlfriend.

These are some of the lower notes in my love stories.

In hetero relationships, I both love and hate the ease with which I can slip into my culture's love stories. I love the constant affirmation my partner and I receive, the images of relationships like ours paraded in movies and posters, the old men who tell us we're "too darn cute" in the street. I hate how I'm supposed to passively let the relationship happen to me or else hear my partner getting accused of being "whipped".

In homo relationships, I love being able to write my own love story. I love that my energy can be focused on my partner and I as people, that I don't have to waste it trying to clear away the bad ideas I've absorbed about men and women. I hate scrutinizing my public actions, asking if it's a good idea to hold my partner's hand or whether mention of their name will make people afraid or unwilling to talk about us.

You can see why it's hard for me to say which gender I'd choose; there are a lot of broken things on both sides of the divide. My physical preferences are not apparent to me now, hidden as they are beneath layers of social weirdness. Maybe I truly don't have preferences for ladies or gentlemen and, if the weirdness were set aside, my relationships would only be about the personalities involved. I don't know. For now, I just have to keep pushing against the bad stories I've learned about gender and relationships and hoping to find some love along the way.

[fearofletterwriting]

What would a person like me do in a situation like this?

I rarely know, on a deep level, why I make the decisions I do. Some reasons spring to mind as to why I chose to keep coding rather than arrive on time to a meeting this afternoon, or why I chose to buy myself a large, holographic Spiderman pin from a street vendor last weekend, but overall I find my own decision-making quite difficult to model.

Extending a model to predict the decisions of other people is perhaps ambitious, then, but in the spirit of George Box (“all models are wrong, but some are useful”) I wanted to share one that I’ve found useful lately. Thus:

Our decisions are mostly a function of our identities.

I don’t want to claim this as my own model. I first heard it expressed by Mark Weber, who has written very lovely papers on what he calls the “logic of appropriateness”. Rather than weighing pros and cons, or calculating expected utility, a logical decision is one that answers the subconscious question “What would a person like me do in a situation like this?”

This logic resolves some paradoxes created by rational models of choice. For example, I was surprised to learn that voting is considered a logical paradox in some circles. The paradox stems from the fact that a single vote is very unlikely to influence the outcome of an election. Therefore, the bother of heading down to the polls ought to outweigh the utility of hardly-at-all affecting the results and everyone should stay at home. But then, if everyone stays at home, a single vote suddenly starts to have a lot of power and we should all dash out again!

Now, I don’t see tides of people flowing back and forth between home and the ballot boxes, so clearly “calculated utility of influencing election results” is a poor model. This is confirmed by studies showing that one’s perceived influence only plays a small role in explaining turnout.

One well-studied resolution to the paradox of turnout models voting as an expressive action: expressing our preferences affirms our identities, which makes us feel good, and so we go vote. Adding in the identity factor, we find that the logic of appropriateness resolves the paradox.

Setting aside the concerns of rational choice theorists, I believe this model can be useful on a quotidian scale. My friend Malcolm recently wrote a post in which he described his effort to understand why an artist had to cover his tie-dye designs with a “Berkeley” brand in order to sell them. He concluded that most people didn't have room in their identity for “wears neon green tie-dye” but could make room for “wears Berkeley shirt, which is tie-dyed in true Berkeley style”. This gave him a pretty good explanation for the artist’s choice.

I’ve been able to use the identity model to make better decisions, despite, as mentioned at the start, lacking a good general sense of why I decide the way I do. You see, my reflexive answer to the titular question often runs along the lines of “a person like me would scroll through Tumblr and eat pastries” (this is apparently a good response to most situations).

By making the question conscious instead of subconscious, I find it easier to dismiss that response as what dopamine or “moment-me” is deciding. Meanwhile, I’m trying to identify more with what I call “meta-me”, the part of my identity that persists beyond spikes in fun neurotransmitters. “Meta-me” is more likely to respond to my life with actions such as, um, finishing up the quizzes for my Coursera course before their looming deadline.

In the past, I've often responded to akrasia with guilt, but I find it much more convincing to say “no, a person like me wouldn't choose to do this, I should stop”. When I ask myself “what would a person like me do in a situation like this?” and then respond with an action that I like, I’m also conditioning my internal logic of appropriateness to make better decisions.

Although my model of decision-making still needs plenty of revision, I feel like the logic of appropriateness is more powerful than any other model I’ve tried.

[fearofletterwriting]

Why I'm Not Offended By Rape Jokes

I am not offended by rape jokes. Offended is how my grandmother feels if I accidentally swear during a conversation with her; the word describes a reaction to something you think is impolite or inappropriate. It is a profoundly inadequate descriptor for the sudden pinching in my chest and the swelling of fear and sadness that I feel when someone makes a rape joke in my presence.

I’m offended by fewer and fewer jokes, lately. I’ll give you an example: I used to be offended when I heard a joke hinging on stereotypes about native people. I’d think, in a detached way, that it was in poor taste, a bit rude, maybe inconsiderate- offensive. I stopped feeling offended by native jokes when I watched my friend start crying in the middle of our grade twelve law class. We were discussing racial profiling in Canada, looking at the example of a native man who was (most likely) pulled over for his physical appearance but was found to have suitcases of illegal drugs in his trunk. When people started spouting stereotypes to defend the police officer’s actions, my friend broke down. Through sobs, she tried to explain how the casual prejudices that she hears, all the quick jokes that try to wrestle a laugh from mocking her identity, how all the little cruelties add up to make her feel like shit.

Now, when someone spits out some bile-disguised-as-humour about native people, I see my friend’s face scrunched up as she tried to hold in tears and I am not offended. I feel angry. I’m indignant, upset that the person doesn’t understand the harm their words can, and have, done. This isn’t the same chest-pinching I feel when similar jokes are directed toward my identity, but I think it’s a more powerful and more relevant feeling than a detached offendedness.

So I want to share a story that I hope will stop people from being merely offended by rape jokes. It’s a story that I don’t tell very often, and when I do tell it I tend to frame it flippantly, because I don’t like to acknowledge how scary it was.

When I was fifteen, I pushed a man off me and ran out of his house. He was my neighbour; he lived half a block down the street. I ran out his door, ran the half-block to my parents’ home, ran up the stairs and into the bathroom, where I filled my mouth with hand soap and tried to scrub out the taste of him. I ran to the shower and scrubbed my body until my limbs were red, yet still felt dirty. I felt like I’d done something wrong, since, even if I hadn’t wanted him to kiss me, I’d let him. He’d invited me into his house to show me some of his watercolor paintings and I’d followed him, assuming he was just being friendly. I felt afraid. My neighbour is an old man, but if he was younger, if I was not stronger than him, I’m don’t know what would have happened. The possibilities frighten me. I still cross to the other side of my street when I walk past his house.

It is experiences like that one which make it so difficult to hear rape jokes. I wonder, if I hadn’t been stronger, if I had been raped, how would that joke sound? I wonder, if I hadn’t run away, would I feel able to tell my friends my story, having heard them congratulate one another for “raping” their exams? I am reminded of my fear, the fear I feel walking down my street, the fear I now force myself to feel when I meet a friendly older man. The joke also alienates me, because I suspect its teller has never felt that fear. I find it difficult to imagine that anyone who has thought to themselves “if I don’t run now, I will likely be raped” would make a rape joke.

Does that sound like feeling offended to you?

When you make a rape joke and, seeing me cringe, apologize for offending me, you have misunderstood my reaction. When you say to your friend, “hey, don’t make rape jokes, they offend me,” although I commend you for speaking up, you are making this less than it is. Rape jokes are triggering and depressing and maddening and hurtful. Rape jokes remind me, and others who have had to confront rape, or the possibility of it, of the fear. The feeling that a rape joke engenders is not offendedness; the strength of the feeling is often so sudden, so disarming that I’m not able to respond to a joke before the conversation has left it behind.

I wrote this partly so that I’ll have something ready to say, next time, so that maybe I can shake the feeling quicker and address the joke before it’s been forgotten. I also wrote it with the hope of someday sharing it with people who are offended by rape jokes. If you are offended by rape jokes, please reconsider. Next time your hear one, please try to imagine me at fifteen, with soap bubbles sputtering out of my mouth as I try to hold in tears, and do not feel offended. Feel angry, feel ashamed, feel indignant that the person doesn’t understand the harm their words can do. I want you to feel these things, because you, you who are detached enough from these jokes that you could feel only offended, you can help.

Please, for the sake of us who are still trying to push down the clenching in our chests enough to speak, say something. If you do, it will make it easier for us to swallow the feeling, knowing that we have an ally nearby. If you are going to speak up, though, please call the joke what it is- hurtful, unacceptable, cruel- not offensive.