Nimue Brown's Blog, page 112

Being Powerless

I’ve been thinking a lot about power lately, and my own relationship with it. So, what happens when you are powerless? What do we do in face of things we have no means of changing? When do we let go and accept defeat?

I tend to be the sort of person who will bang their head against a brick wall until it breaks me – metaphorically speaking. I hate giving up. I will try everything I can imagine – and I can imagine a lot – before I’ll accept that there’s nothing I can do. Arguably, if you’re still fighting, you aren’t defeated. There’s a case to be made. But as I got older and wearier, my appetite for tilting at windmills isn’t what it used to be. I’m trying to pick my fights, and to be more realistic about when and how I might be wasting what energy I have. Sometimes it probably makes more sense to admit defeat. 

How much power we have can depends a lot on how much power we’re allowed to have. Perhaps the most depressing and frustrating form of powerlessness involves not being able to use the power you could have. Not being allowed to fix things, or solve problems or deal with a situation. This can take many forms. It can be about how we do things in this family and the impossibility of challenging that. It can be about workplace culture. Some people won’t let you fix things if that’s going to make them look bad – it may be preferable to them to pretend that the problem is impossible to solve.

Some people are afraid of change to the degree that improving things is too intimidating. Some people have been so messed about, hurt and let down in the past that they have no way of trusting what’s on offer. If you don’t believe in yourself, help from someone else can look doomed to fail. There are people who won’t accept help because they are too invested in the idea of doing things all by themselves, even if that’s utterly unrealistic. Not a lot can be done about any of this.

However, people can change. Situations change. What may be impossible to sort out this week might shift into something else entirely next week. I’m trying to hold the idea that admitting defeat is not a permanent state of being, it’s a decision about a situation, and that decision can be changed if the situation changes. I don’t need to bang my head against a brick wall to prove that I care about what’s going on. Wearing myself out trying to fix the currently unfixable isn’t a good or clever thing to be doing and I need a more measured approach. I need to be ok with being powerless.

Choosing who to be

In my late teens, I set about deliberately constructing a set of values to live by, and some aspirations about the sort of person I wanted to be. My twenties brought me a lot of challenges. I was living with someone who went to some effort to make me feel awful, useless and miserable. The things I had tried to do were weaponised against me. He’d tell me, for example, that I looked down on everyone else and this was evidenced by my holding myself to higher standards than other people. How do you go about trying to be the best person you can be in face of someone who treats that like arrogance and superiority?

When I first started talking to Tom online, he offered me a reflection of myself that was wildly different from the feedback I was otherwise living with. I felt like a shabby, unacceptable sort of entity. At the same time I desperately wanted not to let him down. I wanted to be the person he thought I was. I think that did a lot to hold me together and to give me motives for doing my best.

I’ve thought for a long time that your most authentic self is the person you aspire to be, and work to become. That’s not easy to do when there’s someone in the mix who sees you as your worst possible self, attributes terrible motives to your every action and reduces any good you try and do to ’virtue signalling’. Based on what I see online, there are some people who cannot imagine any other person having genuinely good or kind motives. When you start from that belief, anything another person does that seems nice must in truth be really nasty, manipulative, part of some plot or scheme that is even worse than the honest misanthropy they themselves are in to.

There are qualities I try to develop in myself. I want to understand people, because for me that’s the best basis I have for compassion. I want to be kind, without that enabling other people to be unkind. I try to be patient, but I do struggle with that. I try to notice how my own assumptions colour my interpretations of events. I don ‘t really mind whether anyone else notices me doing these things – I’m not in it for the applause, it’s simply about how I want to be in the world and what I want informing my choices and actions. I don’t always get this stuff right, but I’m also trying to learn how to be kinder to myself when I mess up.

There are questions I’ve been asking myself a lot recently. Could I have been kinder? Could I have been more forgiving, or more generous? I know I’ve been dealing with things where my failure to understand the other person’s perspective really hasn’t been helping, but I don’t have a lot of information to go on. How much slack should I cut myself for the way panic can influence my responses? Am I allowing the other person in this situation the same kind of understanding if this is because they are panicking? Do I have unreasonable double standards?

What I’ve learned is this: I have no hope of being perfect for anyone all the time. What I can choose to be is as fair and as careful as I’m capable of. I can choose to try. I can act on my best understanding of what kind and reasonable look like in a given situation. I am allowed to protect myself if I’m overwhelmed or not able to cope. I need to be ok with being fallible, because I’m human and I make mistakes. I need to be ok with not always being good enough by other people’s standards, especially when what’s wanted of me hasn’t been made clear. How I’m doing in terms of being who I want to be is not something other people can measure for me, and I should not allow anyone to tell me whether I am good enough in that regard.

Seasonal Walking

It wasn’t so many years ago that I used to do long walks as part of how I connected with the seasons. For the last 18 months or so I’ve been so relentlessly ill that my walking range has dramatically reduced. On a good day now I can go about a mile before I need a serious rest. That’s a hell of a lot more than many people have, and far less than I used to have.

I used to depend on the length of time I spent outside, and on the distance travelled for my feelings of connection to the wild world. I can’t do that now. I have to focus on details and in many ways that’s been good for me. I have to pay more attention and make the most of the time I get outside.

Today I saw that the garlic leaves are emerging from the soil. There are flowers on some of the wild fruit trees. I saw dogs’ mercury, which also has flowers on it. The small birds are very active, and there were also a few crows around where I am not used to seeing crows, so that was interesting. I also saw a heron in flight.

I’m fortunate in where I live. There are trees, fields and waterways right on my doorstep. I don’t have to be able to walk far to encounter some other living being.

Dystopian Forrest’s and the Merrily Method

A cheering review for an old book of mine. This review is also a very amusing read in its own right.

The Passing Place

I’m not a great believer in self-help books… I always find them a suspicious offering. I suspect the only selves ever really helped are the ones selling the books. Which is ultimately the point of them, to make money. It follows that if the point of the ‘self-help’ book is to make money then such books need a ready made audience of people who feel they need help, and that such help as they need can be found in a competitively priced paperback…

If your goal is to sell books to people who feel the answers to there problems can be found in a competitively priced paperback, then actually having the answers to their problems in said paperback would negate your audience for your next compactivity priced paperback.

So if your goal is actually to help people through useful advice and disbursed wisdom, the kind of publishers who make a…

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Spirits and Goddesses

These images were all drawn by me, using pencil, and without looking at any references. Partly I wanted to see how plausibly I could draw these figures without having to look at anything else. Once of them owes a lot to Neolithic Goddesses and none of them are meant to be realistic, but I did want to see what kind of bodies I can manage.

These drawings helped me think about what makes the representation of a body seem objectified, to me. I also came to the conclusion that the world has enough images of tormented, malnourished and impossible-sexualised female bodies. Probably we need more that celebrates and is rooted in joy and delight, both in terms of how the person creating the image feels about what they’re creating, and in terms of how the person is depicted.

What makes me happiest are depictions of people who are themselves happy and at home in their own skin.

Learning to be less efficient

One of my big personal projects at the moment is that I’m trying to learn to be less efficient. I’ve got a significant attention span – I can do things with my brain for longer than is good for my body, and I need to tackle that. It isn’t good for my hands if I colour for a couple of hours flat out, or type for extended periods.

Just because I can doesn’t mean I should. 

Years of practical and economic pressure haven’t helped with this. Taking breaks and being gentle with myself has, all too often, felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford. It’s not like that at the moment. Rest should never seem like a luxury. Basic self care to avoid pain and damage is not a luxury. I am not a machine, but I’m not very good at treating myself like a person.

So I’m trying to figure out how to slow down. How to take more breaks, and be gentler. It’s an interesting process not least because it means I have to be alert to what my brain is doing while I’m working. I’m obsessive, and I can fall into the rhythm of a thing and get stuck there, and some bits of my brain really like that and find it soothing. It takes a huge toll on my body if I’m not careful – too much strain on my hands and not enough movement elsewhere.

There will be a balance to find. Enough rhythm in what I do to sooth my brain. Enough movement for my whole body to allow me to be reasonably well. Enough rest for my hands to avoid hurting or damaging them.

Contemplating Brains

For various reasons, I’ve spent a lot of time in recent months looking for information about both neurodivergence and personality disorders. I minored in psychology back in the day and have remained interested in brain stuff ever since.

There are a lot of conditions that are defined by symptoms. When it comes to brain stuff and personality stuff this means as an adult, self reporting to someone who will then make a subjective assessment of how you’ve presented yourself. It’s not like looking at a broken bone, or how much insulin you produce. Given the way in which neurodivergent people tend to be traumatised, and how so-called personality disorders look a lot like pathologizing trauma responses, there’s a lot here that worries me.

I note with concern that diagnosis often has everything to do with how much of a nuisance you are to other people. Kids who act out at school are more likely to get checked out. Quiet but miserable kids may go unnoticed. I know historically that working class kids were less likely to be identified as dyslexic and more likely to be labelled as ‘thick’ and ignored. Girls who are shy and socially awkward but polite are more acceptable than boys having similar problems. Girls are socialised hard to be nice, in a way boys aren’t, all of which no doubt has a big impact on who gets diagnosed with autism. Boys underperforming with ADHD often get taken a lot more seriously than their female counterparts who get labelled as chatterboxes or as ditzy daydreamers. There’s a lot of sexism and classism tangled up in diagnosis, and more so in the past.

If you are a problem to your workplace, you might get an adult diagnosis. Otherwise it seems to be prohibitively difficult for a lot of people. There seems to be a general feeling that people who are high functioning and have viable workarounds don’t really need help. Be that with mental health or neurodivergence. These issues aren’t approached based on your suffering, it’s far more about the inconvenience you might cause to those around you. I think to some degree this is informed by lack of resources. There’s certainly not much support available for many people who are struggling.

We don’t actually get taught much about how our minds work. It would be useful if more people better understood what might be going on with other people’s heads, and their own. Education is always a good choice for reducing stigma and being more inclusive. Children who stand out as different may get help learning how to fit in, but why aren’t we teaching everyone how to better accommodate difference in the first place?

There’s so much more to quality of life than whether we can fit in at school and function in a workplace. I think there’s a lot of distortion created by how those aspects of life are prioritised. I wonder what different kinds of approaches to brains and health might be possible if we were willing to be a bit more thoughtful about it all.

Being Aggressive

There have been a few people in my life who found me problematically aggressive. In all three cases, this came up around my being distressed, and that distress being read as an attack from which the person then had to defend themselves. My experience, in each case, was of being upset, and then having to deal with someone acting like I had attacked them. It’s not a helpful situation to be in.

One consequence for me was learning that expressing distress was likely to only make things worse. If something hurt or frightened me it was better to hide it rather than risk the escalation and further damage. That was my experience in my first marriage, where making me tolerate the intolerable was very much the name of the game. I was always the bad guy, always wrong, always to blame and was told explicitly that when I was upset I got very nasty and aggressive. I tried so hard not to do that, but never was gentle enough about how I cried if that was at all visible.

I’m not sure what was happening with the other two people who did this. Possibly they knew that anger would be a fair response to what they’d done and so inferred it where there was none. I don’t tend to get angry, I tend to get upset. Any anger I have normally goes inwards, which is problematic in different ways. 

I suspect I’m not an easy person to read, emotionally. I know I don’t express pain in ways that register with other people. I can describe pain or distress calmly even when in the thick of it – which when I was giving birth meant I got no pain relief! So, I’m not surprised if I confuse people around making sense of my emotions. I don’t throw things or break things, I don’t swear at people or verbally abuse them when I’m upset, and I’ve checked with Tom and he says I am not a shouty person. So it’s difficult to know where this impression of anger and aggression is coming from, because I’m fairly sure it isn’t me.

Tone policing is an issue that comes up all over the place. It’s the unsavoury trick of making the delivery of the message more important than the message. I see it used a lot to shut down ‘angry’ black women who are talking about racism. The classic response is white-woman tears and expressions of fear about the threatening tone of the person complaining. It’s a way of shutting down conversations and treating the person who has been wronged as though they are the aggressor. This protects the person who messed up from having to apologise or make any real changes. It can even serve to validate the harmful behaviour that started the whole process.

Have I been experiencing something similar? I honestly don’t know. I think all a person can do with this is look to their own behaviour. It’s useful to think about the situations in which we think other people are angry. It’s also good to ask how we deal with justified anger, and whether getting things right is more important than defending ourselves from criticism. We all make mistakes. Wanting a free pass to make mistakes and be exempt from consequences is a really toxic way to behave.

Wind in my hair

I have a harder time of it with depression during the winter. For a lot of people dealing with similar things, this is a sun issue first and foremost. I’ve known for a while that part of my problem is that I hurt more when it’s cold. I get stiff. This winter I’ve identified a new component, and it has everything to do with skin.

In the warmer part of the year, I will be out in the world with a fair amount of bare skin. I don’t tend to be out in the sun to an excessive degree, but at any time of day, bare skin means feeling the air on me. In winter, the only bit of me exposed to the wind is my face.

I’ve really been noticing how much it affects me to feel the wind on my skin. I am more present to myself, more comfortable in myself if I get that kind of tactile experience. In warmer weather, rain on my bare skin can also be wonderful. In the winter, dressed to keep warm, I don’t get those experiences and so I feel a lot less connected to the elements.

The only way I can see to change this would be to have a physical activity that would allow me to be warm enough outside in a t-shirt in the winter. I have a lot of problems with running. In the past, things like cutting wood and cycling for transport have given me more options, but none of that makes sense at the moment. There’s plenty of time to think about this as spring advances.

Hopeless Optimists

Hopeless, Maine – Optimists is the fourth book in the Hopeless Maine graphic novel series I create with Tom. At time of posting it’s available for pre-order in all the sorts of places that sell books. My publisher for this – Sloth Comics – tells me there have been a happy number of pre-orders places already, which is cheering.

Sloth is not a big publishing house, and in normal years has depended a lot on direct sales at comics events. These have not been normal years, and many events haven’t happened. The creative sector has been even more precarious than it usually is. With the cost of living rising, people will, of necessity, cut their budgets for fun things first. Throwing coins at people makes a huge difference.

Of the covers we’ve done so far, this one is my favourite. I’ve only been involved in creating some of the covers, having taken on the colouring part of the work after several books had already been put out there. 

Hopeless, Maine graphic novels are generally available from places that sell books, including book shops – although you’ll probably have to order them. Optimists is, at time of posting, available for pre-order and due out at the end of March.

As Sloth isn’t huge, we don’t have much distribution outside of the UK for these editions BUT we also have an American publisher bringing out hardback editions, which makes it easier for people to get copies should they so desire.