Here is another way of explaining the spirit of the frustration I've been trying to express recently.
Early in high school, I was in a jazz band class. The below quote was taped to the wall of the band room; I specifically remember one time the band director had someone read it out loud to the whole class but I also remember just seeing it every day on the wall for a year or so. Remarkably, Google almost completely refused to produce this quote for me, but I finally found a version of it sloppily tucked into a high school band syllabus posted online apparently a lot of years ago and attributed to no one (I guess it's a sort of "folk quotation", perhaps more popular 20 years ago than now?). After a little cleaning up, it reads as follows:
Because you can understand that a person can’t play well, or forget their reed, or doesn’t feel well, or overslept, or didn’t have a chance to practice, or has sticky valves, or lost their music, or couldn’t get a ride, or is having a bad week, pretty soon you have a whole lot of understanding and a terrible band.
I remember being very annoyed at that quote when I was 14, a period of my (and most people's) life in which authority figures endlessly seemed to be lecturing us kids / "young men and women" along these lines. And I can't really recommend it as necessarily a very effective form of preaching at children or young teenagers. But obviously enough essence of that particular quote stuck with me persistently enough that I was able to remember enough approximate phrases to google it tonight, two decades later. And increasingly over the past year or so, it's kept coming back and back into my mind because of a certain harsh truth it reflects.
The main utility of acknowledging one's own disadvantages or disorders/conditions or less-than-ideal circumstances in assessing one's failures is to prevent one from being hard on oneself in a way that is on the net unhelpful and destructive, and to help with setting realistic instead of unreachable goals, etc. There are other advantages as well that I think of as sort of "second-order" (for instance, being able to name one's disability can be extremely helpful in figuring out how best to deal with and get around it). But all of that is true, while at the same time something else is true: being understanding of your own challenges in the end amounts to nothing more than a whole lot of understanding and you still don't get to your goals.
In my case, I see a place in life that I desperately want to reach which involves a permanent professional position that I can do well in and actually feel efficient enough at that I can balance it with owning a home, being a good partner and family member, and possibly being a parent, a relationship for life, preferably with someone wanting and able to have children with me, and being able to feel like a truly cemented part of some meatspace community. It may be privileged of me just to be able to wish for these things, and I have to acknowledge that I do already have many of the most sought-after things in life (e.g. better-than-basic health and financial stability), but it doesn't seem unreasonably entitled of me to want the rest.
I could spend all day dissecting the conditions and circumstances which have played a role in making it hard for me to attain these things that I want: obvious neurological issues that affect both my social and work performance, a career lifestyle that involves relocating every few years and going through a particularly strenuous job application process even more frequently, the backdrop of a turbulent job market through much of my adulthood, moderate-to-severe acne from teenagerhood all the way through my early 30's, hell, even my lower-than-average height, etc. And to a certain extent I've needed to be able to step back and acknowledge these things and view my shortcomings in that context. But I'm in a state of fierce rebellion against the temptation to sink into all that understanding because the moment I do, it feels like I'm going to fall into an abundance of understanding and I won't be one inch closer to the place that I so badly want to be in. At the end of the day I can't allow myself to lose sight of the fact that I want to get the actual concrete things I want, goddammit. I feel like if I take my eyes off that, I ultimately lose and that a ton of sympathy for myself is a crappy consolation prize. And I react badly to a certain type of online culture because it seems designed to lead me (and others) astray from keeping my eyes on that hard and unbending truth.
Like with most things, this is about finding the right balance of perspectives and partial narratives. I would be writing a very different kind of rant if Tumblr and my social bubbles seemed deeply immersed in another set of cultural values, the ones that were dominant until very recently and still are dominant in more traditional parts of society today. But as it is, my deep fear is that a massive social movement is relentlessly creating a whole lot of understanding and a terrible band.
