Authenticity versus our training

Authenticity is problematic within the structure of a society that runs on and expects conformity. 

Most of us grew up with expectation and were praised or punished by parents who themselves experienced much the same process. It becomes legacy which is passed on to successive generations until we break the chain. 

Therefore becoming fully authentic is almost impossible since it requires ignoring so much of learned behaviour. If we start to determine the point of where the real us begins and the child who received training stops, we may be hard pressed to identify it. 

This is why it can take years or decades to fully determine identity. We then have a type of "coming out" where we say "I don't care what anyone thinks anymore: but only after we tire of doing it so long. 

Authenticity can be scary because it always risks breaking rules. It is disruptive in nature but if the alternative is to live a life full of suppression and being out of touch with the self, the answer becomes more obvious.

Buttons

Dealing with an older parent can be a challenge sometimes. They have slowly become more child like and the roles have slowly reversed. 

At 90 my mother repeats herself a lot and I have given up on my pronouns and dead naming because it isn't worth it. She you accepts you and loves you which is enough. 

My mother isn't educated but has plenty of life savvy to spare. Her prodding me out of shyness is what helped get me where I am and I will be forever grateful. It was my father who was the intellectual and counted on her earthy pragmatism as counter balance to his bookish ways..

Yes, they can frustrate us but that is because no one knows better how to push buttons we were certain by now were defective; the ones that prompted us to want to hide under furniture from the embarrassing behaviour they inflicted on us in public when we were kids. 

She is well surrounded with a large family who cares and is happy to return the favour for her tireless energy.

In reverse

Science doesn't work in the direction of trying to prove a hypothesis. It actually works in the direction of trying to disprove it. 

We notice a phenomena, propose a theory and go about, in a sense, trying to disprove it through experimentation. The aim is to make sure we don't infect the process with wishful thinking and bias. 

Pseudoscience works in reverse in that it proposes a theory which it then spends all its time looking for shreds of proof to bolster. 

The earth is flat and that's all there is to it. Don't bother me with evidence to the contrary.

In pseudoscience the bias is baked in and once enough data points exist to the satisfaction of the true believer, they can stop there despite the existence of gaping holes.

Social contract

What we need now is a new social contract; one which returns us to caring about each other. 

The navel gazing and chasing prosperity through consumerism failed miserably as did the oversharing the most mundane details of our daily existence on social media. 

No one should care about what you ate for breakfast or what your skin routine is. They should find out through living their own lives or look into what people who do it for a living recommend. 

I know I don't care and I say it with all due respect because we aren't all that important.

We've made ourselves less happy than when we worked physically much harder but then those times had a greater spirit of community and didn't obsess over productivity by timing bathroom breaks. 

We messed up and the clean up starts now in earnest.

Talk with the people

More reasons to love Mamdani :)

Passing

First time director Rebecca Hall makes a movie about passing for white. Her mother was a black opera singer who was light-skinned and so the subject matter invited itself as a matter of personal interest. 

Set in 1929, movie protagonist Irene Redfield is recognized in a very nice restaurant by former high school friend Claire who is now living her life passing as white. Irene is shocked at the transformation (blonde hair and all) even as she herself blends in well to white society under her snuggly-fitting flapper hat. Her brim is lowered at key moments when suspicion threatens her with trouble. 

Irene lives a more affluent life in Harlem than most black people of her time and she and her husband can afford to have a maid. However they are still second class citizens in an America that has always had and continues to have a clear pecking order. 

Claire is living in stealth but is married to a racist white man who has no idea of his wife's origins. She is getting tired of her life and the cover up and it gets increasingly complicated from there. 

The parallels with transgender people invite themselves here. The hierarchy of privilege, how people use it and how messy life is in general.

Frail

The best way to remove power from ill-intentioned people is make them feel small which is accomplished by magnifying their insignificance. 

When we show they don't matter it plays on their already frail egos; a problem which secure people don't have. 

There is nothing more frustrating than removing whatever small grasp on power they think they have.

On another note, this blog has been regularly receiving between 5,000 and 6,000 views per day, a healthy increase which I am at a loss to explain since I have not changed my approach at all. I never have, nor will I ever chase traffic.

However, I will take it I guess.

The why of it all

Online positions and viewpoints on things tend to be hard line and black and white because people often have very fixed ideas on subjects despite their lack of knowledge. 

If we recall Bonhoeffer's three tenets of stupidity: outsourcing critical thinking, willful ignorance and conformity, you can see why so much of what we take in fails the test. 

Nuanced discussions are abandoned in favour of staunch positions that are at best flimsy. They may have an agenda or simply absorbed it from somewhere else and are now preaching it. 

Being comfortable with grays is pretty much mandatory and because we don't have all the answers we must be prepared to say "I don't know" 

The problem is the ego gets in the way of many people who can be derailed very easily by asking them a simple question 

"Explain to me logically and clearly why you believe this?"

Gotcha.

"No one is going to save you"

 

Doubt is normal

There will be plenty of times that you doubt your transition (no matter the type) but this is not because it was the wrong thing to do. It is because you are human which means it comes with the territory. 

You have largely removed yourself from the euphoria/ dysphoria roller coaster and everyday normal life gets to be routine. 

That doesn't mean your existential angst goes away.That's permanent. 

Little things will go wrong which will then get lumped in with your being transgender which is perfectly normal. 

What would be abnormal is if you never doubted at all.

Rapid fire

Both the internet and plenty of books are full of advice about how to control our thoughts and our minds except that they generally don't work. This doesn't prevent the authors from selling their formulas like a magic elixir. 

The problem is that they advertise something that the human mind cannot adequately achieve. 

Our mind fires off random thoughts at rapid pace and we cannot always process them fast enough. Many of them play on our deepest fears and insecurities. 

The best we can hope for is mitigation and placing them within buckets of seriousness and prioritize them. Even then, just when we think we have achieved a method that works, some new crisis will derail our organization once again. 

That is because the brain is a noise generation machine which means it's output cannot be controlled. We can work on cleaning up our personal issues but that does not mean the mind won't operate any less randomly. 

It's firing tennis balls at us like a catapult and what we need to do is become a better player.