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Blogging: A Self-Evaluation


communication, frustration, grandiosity, platform, literary agent, listening

I started blogging in earnest about 12 years ago, mostly because I kept running into the idea that all nonfiction authors have to have a "platform" if they want to snag a literary agent. By "platform" they mean a pre-existing audience already following what the author has to say whever it is that they say it.

But it was kind of contagious, this process of making these diaryesque entries, entries which rather quickly morphed into classroom lesson materials, with me playing Dr. Hunter, PhD in women's and gender studies, you know? I mean, that was the stuff I wanted to talk to the world about via the mechanism of my book, and presumably the lit agents not only want you to have a following, they want you to have a relevant following. Well, that was my thinking at the time at any rate. Besides, I wanted to put a lot of that stuff into words, to practice expressing it, to get it down. And ideally to reach out to people with it, share these concepts.

It turns out that people don't flock to a blog where they are lectured at, at least not unless they get a grade and some class credit for doing it. I had a handful of people originally, reading my blog posts, mostly other bloggers. But some of them drifted away from blogging and those who are still around have mostly stopped commenting and interacting.

Well, I'm also in a Facebook group someone set up, and the person who set it up keeps asking questions instead of providing lectures, and she gets much better interactive discussions going on.

I think it's been meaningful and appropriate that I've slowed my own blogging pace this last year. It's not that I'm giving up on this "communicate with other people" thing so much as thinking "this isn't working" and step enough back from what I've been doing to see what I'm doing wrong.

One thing I should try is asking questions. Creating space for the people who read what I've written to talk about what they think about various things.

I really am a self-immersed person, and here in this case I think it isn't so much that I haven't been caring what anyone else might think but that I somehow expected that me making a bunch of declarative expository intellectual content and flinging it out there was how you started a conversation. I thought people would talk back at me. But I didn't bother to invite anyone, just sort of assumed they'd show up!

I still have a lot to learn about this "communicate with other people" thing. I feel like I'm awful at it. Or I guess I'm reaching for a lot more than I'm able to grasp. Anyway, I've never been satisfied with how well I do it.


—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I am still querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking readers for reviews and feedback. I think of it as a jam session at this point: sure I'd like to get it published, just like a musician wants to get their song recorded, but in the mean time the musician's still gonna want to play it for people. Same for me as an author! So come read what I've written! It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts
ahunter3: (Default)
When I came out 44 years ago, I set out to follow in the footsteps of the social change agents I admired. I had a real and personal cause. Not that I'd been looking for one, I'd mostly been drawn towards social justice movements to distract me from dwelling on my personal life dissatisfactions so much; it felt good to care about someone else, and to feel drawn in to a righteous commitment, you know?



I have obsessed a lot lately with the sense of not having made any impact despite 44 years of making the attempt. I do occasionally see that this isn't an entirely fair appraisal --

a) I may have been there in various times and places where I was supportive of someone else's self-investigations or where I was perceived as some kind of role model, and then someone *else* went on to make the social ripples I never made; and

b) There's a lot of aggregate accomplishment, of changing the overall zeitgeist of our society about gender, where the same forces that made it possible for me to develop my sense of identity drew strength from me and others like me and it made an environment where yet more people could come forth with variant identities

c) Certainly, having a vision of a differently configured society has been a great and wonderful shield, protecting and insulating me from internalizing and worrying about the views of the society I actually live in. And I have a powerful distrust of Missions where one sacrifices one's personal life and personal happiness for some Higher Cause that's all about bringing about a world that one never actually gets to.


How much of it is ego? Wanting the satisfaction of having an impact, of watching the ripples become waves? Certainly some of it and probably a lot. I like to sit at the piano and smash big powerful chords down loudly. I like to craft sentences and paragraphs that make ideas resonate with people. No doubt about it, and no room to pretend otherwise. I want to rock my world.

At least some of it is a sense of responsibility and even duty, though. I promised myself as a child that if I ever figure out why it's like this, why my presence seems to bring out the mean streak in other people and they mock me and express contempt instead of receiving me warmly, I would fix it, not just for me but for anyone else like me. Whether it's a misstep that I made in understanding life and people or something that the rest of the people have gotten wrong about or whatever, that it has to be fixed.

And that's the part that is reluctant to let me rest and keeps prodding me to try to Do Something, to figure out a new and different approach that might finally work.


—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts
ahunter3: (Default)
MetaNostalgia is that state you get into by looking down at your pot pipe and remembering, nostalgically, one of the first times you got high on pot and how it gave you this burst of nostalgic memories.




I've always been nostalgic. I'm always backwards-looking, continuing to react to things. Processing in my head what I think of this event and that ongoing phenomenon and still being in that moment.

This is not a confession. I mean, you do you; maybe being like this wouldn't work for you, and I'm not trying to prescribe it for you. But I like it, and it works for me.

Do I sound defensive? That's fair. There's a lot of propaganda that favors the forward-looking. I'm not saying you're a part of that, just that it's loudly out there as an attitude. That if you're looking backwards, you aren't watching where you're going. That it means you aren't a planner. That, from a healthy psychology point of view, you aren't living in the present moment. And that, from a psychology point of view that's watching for pathology, that you're traumatized or haunted or imprinted upon by your past and therefore can't move on, as if your past were one thing and who you are is another thing, victimized by it. Does any of this sound familiar? You've heard it too then?

So yeah, here's the deal. I'm here in the here and now. I act and choose and make the same efforts to shape my life as you probably do, I'm not ignoring the present moment.

The past is how I make sense of the present. It's not a different reality, one that has expired. Now is Then, later. I'm continuing to look at all things, as they have been and on up until now when they're continuing to happen. I don't really know for sure if those of you with this present-moment attitude are doing the exact same thing I'm doing and we're just using different words, or if you folks think differently.

I'm not done with the past. I reminisce, I replay, I continue to learn from. Much of it is abstracting, seeing patterns that reoccur from time to time as part of events. That includes my own emotional and cognitive reactions at the time, what I was going through and what I was doing in those situations.

And yes, I replay in my head pondering what if had done this instead, all that second-guessing and trying on regrets like garments from the dress-up box, playing the scene out different inside my head. Of course I do that.

I am who I have always been. I never stopped knowing the me that I was when I had only recently acquired a language to think in. Maybe before then, too, it's just that I can't think back to my thoughts I was thinking because they weren't in words yet. Only some of them ever are, of course. But you can remember patches of the other stuff if you have the verbal-memory framework to anchor them to.


It hasn't been all pleasant. Or easy. The tendency is that I'm marked as Other, and marginalized, but I'm a participant in that marginalization too, pulling away from others. The problem isn't that I don't want connection and community. The problem is that other people want me to be more like them, and I want other people to be more like me; they, in general, are over there in that direction, in other words I'm different in a direction. There's tension, sometimes frustration; communication is a recurrent concern. So I'm not saying I've found Zen or sublime peaceful acceptance or whatever.

But I'm also not messed up, either by my past or by the ways in which I'm different. It hasn't been a miserable life so much as a struggly life. I'm passionate and intense even though I'm also mellow and sweet.



—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts
ahunter3: (Default)
This is me, a first grader, and I want to write about something very important.

First, pretend I'm you when you were a first grader, because the person who actually is me might not remember this, or I wouldn't need to write it down now and it's important.

---

I remember being four, so maybe there's no reason to think you won't remember being seven. Let's talk about being four. Nursery school. Sitting around a ring to hear the story being read. Little rows of kids, some in front, some behind them, up close. You're already worrying that this is going to get pedophilic. Yes I knew the word pedophilic when I was in first grade. I thought it was a totally creepy concept and of course I memorized how to spell it. No, this isn't that stuff. I didn't know the word when I was four but I felt the concern and got the general notion, minus the specifics, so back when I was already that much aware of the notion, this other thing happened, or was happening, around that time, and I wanted to write about that.

---

Bodies had dirty parts. No they didn't that's too simple. Parts that could have something to do with dirty. Diaper parts, potty parts. Don't put your hands in it, it's dirty. Don't talk about it, talking about it is dirty. That's too simple too but I bet you know what I'm talking about don't you.

Then something that people act as if it is kind of dirty but kind of not. There are parts that the girls have and parts that the boys have. It's described like if you are a girl you get these parts, like being a girl is first and then you get the parts. And boys. They have different parts. Boy parts. It makes you different. Well then it's having these parts, that's what makes you a girl, you weren't a girl and then got these parts. No. Well then having these parts doesn't make you different.

Liking the way they look. Pee from there, it's down there, it's dirty. Not to talk about not to think about but we think about it they call this dirty and it's liking the way they look. Oh I assumed. I didn't know some liked the way themselves looked. Oh I hadn't thought about. What if people with girl parts like me, the way I like theirs, and they're nice I like them anyway. But what if?

Yeah, little rows of kids, some in front some behind them, up close. Someone, somewhere, is playing with the waistpants band of the person in front of them, the latter someone being me. This unknown person wanted to slide a thumb under the edge of my underpants. I wasn't horrified, nor was I elated. I knew it was in that argued-about "dirty" territory. I could stop it. It felt like I was doing the unknown person a favor by not stopping it, and I liked that feeling and I was curious. Content warning update: that's as bad as it gets, we were four. As for the sensations themselves... nothing I saw any lure for. Although I found that I liked the idea that this person had been one of the tomboyish girls in our class and she'd done this to me.

We were defining our boundaries, and our sense of being in control of them, and we were experiencing ourselves as our own curators, granting or denying access, and we were doing that at four.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be an unfair situation if a five year old or a six year old started it, because they're bigger and more advanced, but you aren't protecting us by pretending all that stuff didn't come onto the scene until we were sprouting boobs and whiskers. Just because we're not sexless doesn't make it okay to do stuff to us like we're sex toys. Point is, we were *not* sexless. Or we were not sexuality-less and we were also not necessarily genderless (although some of us certainly might have been).

You're never going to understand it if you keep pretending it wasn't there all along.


—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts
ahunter3: (Default)
On an authors' message board someone started a thread asking if we authors were perhaps an arrogant lot.

I replied,


Damn right I'm arrogant. I have a story to tell. I'd prefer that folks fork over the cover price and voluntarily submit themselves to my thoroughly entertaining written word, but I would strongly consider chaining each and every member of my species to a convenient chair and prying their eyelids open with toothpicks and reading it out loud to them. I haven't worked out the logistics of that yet but morally and intellectually I have no intervening compunctions. (You have been forewarned). Hmm, now if I just went after the literary agents, maybe...


Before long, another author answered that with


Yeah..... admirable confidence. I can't help but want to applaud it.

But... nah... we don't all deserve to be read. We are not entitled. I hope you understand. We all have our causes.



Now, my instinctive initial reaction to that is to respond that this isn't about being an author, an artist, a creative person wanting to share an artistic work; it's about being a marginalized mistreated person, a victim of a systemic wrong that needs to be righted, and that yes, dammit it is too my right to speak and to insist that I be heard. The ethics of social justice says I have the right to rise up and do what I must. And so forth.

But like so many other things, that, too, is an oversimplification. And because indulging in that oversimplification really is a bit arrogant, it's appropriate and occasionally necessary to embrace a little self-doubt now and then. Come along with me, if you will...

* Authority — There's a built-in claim in my social justice assertions, that the way I see things is damned well the way things actually are. That sissy femme males are unjustly treated by society in general, that it does make sense to think of us (or to think of ourselves) in the specific manner that I'm advocating, as differently gendered people who aren't wrong or inferior, that society as a whole becomes better in its entirety if it changes so as to accommodate our existence and begin accepting us on our own terms, and so forth. Well, yeah, I do think exactly that, I do believe those things. But there are plenty of people who think otherwise. Some of them think that the things I'm making a big deal about are no big deal. Some of them think I'm as silly and my arguments as useless as someone screaming that gravity is unfair and should be repealed because skinned knees hurt. Some of them question the authenticity of my conscious motives ("You're trying to jump onto the LGBTQ bandwagon because you're a boring white hetero cis male who desperately wants to be edgy") or the coherence of my mind ("You admit you were diagnosed with a mental illness for spouting this stuff so pardon me if I don't take you seriously"). From what source other than unadorned arrogance does someone like me derive the confidence that right is on my side?

* Objective Meaning — Then there's the bandying about of these aggregate terms and the assignment to them of social meaning and significance, as if they existed and have always existed objectively, just like I describe them, whether people at any given time recognized them that way or not. The notion that in human society there exists a bunch of male people who are essentially girls, who have the same gender polarity as the girls have, and that this category exists independent of physical sex or from sexual orientation, and that I'm shining my spotlight on this phenomenon so that everyone will see it and realize it and recognize us and start thinking of us in a different manner. Yeah, so what's wrong with that? I mean, yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. What's wrong with it is that it assumes that human experiences have a meaning in and of themselves. And that isn't true. Human experiences have meaning to someone or else they don't have that meaning at all. Meaning in general is "to an observer", not divorced from interaction and embedded in things apart from people. And that is all the more important, as philosophical truths go, when the subject matter is our own human experience. If there are no sissy femme male people who think of ourselves as being of girlish gender yet male of physical body, then it isn't that we exist but think of ourselves wrongly or inaccurately, is it, so much as we don't exist as described in the first place?

You probably suspect that I have an answer to that. That I'm not really engaging in a bunch of self-doubt and purpose-questioning, and that I'm actually tossing all that out there in order to pontificate intellectually?

Of course I am. Wait, no I'm not. Um, well... the self-doubt is real, and questioning my arrogant self is genuinely important. But no, I'm not paralyzed by self-doubt and derailed from being able to continue. I said certain things were an oversimplification. I didn't say they were fundamentally wrong. Oversimplifications tend to contain quite a bit of truth. I think these do. That's why I continue to embrace them and behave as if they were entirely the truth (most of the time). Sometimes a simplified understanding of something is more useful than the fully accurate version. Earlier tonight I drove to and from the village of Huntington, behaving as if I were on the surface of a more or less flat and motionless terrain. I know the earth is round and is plummeting around the sun as well as spinning around its own axis, but it's just easier to drive when I bracket that stuff off as irrelevant to what I'm doing. You get what I'm saying?

So here's a somewhat less oversimplified notion of the social activism thing:

* How people think of themselves and their experience and identity is not limited to concepts that they could put into words and stick labels onto. Most people, at some point in their lives, recognize themselves in a description that they hear. Prior to hearing that description, they might not have thought of themselves in quite those terms, or seen the same connections, but the fact that they do recognize themselves in the description means that it resonates with what they understand about themselves emotionally or connects up a lot of little pieces that they understand about themselves cognitively. So there's no need to make it an either/or proposition. Yes, meaning is "to a subject", especially the meaning of human experiences themselves, but meaning is not the same as a specific verbal description.

* Verbal description is an art, not a precision science. There is not an exact set of verbal terms lying in a box, each one corresponding to a specific human experience. So none of the attempts to explain human experience are "objectively correct" but all of them echo something truthful and accurate, and the better ones resonate with people as truly significant expressions of what our lives are like.

* It is still arrogant to be so insistent about expressing my verbal description on the theory that it will, in fact, resonate with people. That it will shed light on the human condition, that it can change things. Arrogance is a form of being pushy, less than fully delicate with other people's sensitivities and perhaps their disinterest in considering a set of ideas that seem foreign and strange to them. I have often described my coming out to myself in 1980 as an act of permanently losing my temper about the whole gender situation. I act fueled by anger, by a constant glowing rage that makes me willing and able to be pushy in that fashion. That a marginalized and ostracized person would feel and react with anger and stand up for herself is predictable and natural. And socially healthy. It's not practical for me to chain people to their chairs and force-feed them my thoughts, so the social world surrounding me is not at risk from my anger — I can't attain my objectives coercively whether I'm arrogant enough to consider myself entitled to do so or not. And that's true of others in my position, specifically or generally.

As a practical matter, our fury reconciles as determination. Or stubbornness if you prefer.

The arrogance is something you're just going to have to live with.

———————

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ahunter3: (Default)
Last week I made another presentation to gender studies students, this time at Castleton University in Vermont. The hosting professor booked a lecture room -- one of those rooms with bleacher seating and a stage-like area up front for the lecturer -- and brought students from several classes to hear me speak. It was my largest single audience to date, about 65 people.

Before the presentation, he took me to dinner and got me checked in at the bed & breakfast, and we chatted about identity and growing up and coming out.

He warned me, "Now, this is a very non-diverse community. We're talking white rural people and small-town families, folks whose families have lived here for generations. They tend to be very stoic. They don't express surprise or amusement or agreement or disapproval, they keep their reactions inside. It's something that's an element of cultural pride in these parts". He took some more of his steak and potato and a sip of wine and continued, "Mark Twain came here once. People traveled from all around the area to hear him speak. And the whole time he spoke, they just sat very politely in their seats with their hands in their lap and didn't crack a smile the whole time".

I ended up being very glad that he had warned me about this. My audience was attentive enough, some people were even taking notes. No one was slouching and staring off in other directions or texting on their phones. But yeah, it felt like I was addressing a roomful of carved granite faces. I could not tell how I was doing other than by comparing my own rhythms and the pace at which I was going through my topic points to what I could recall of how I'd done those things in the past.

I was only able to elicit one question at the end, although it was a good one: "Do you find that people with a background in the hard biological sciences who focus on genetics and neurology to be resistant to these kinds of ideas?" (I replied with examples pro and con -- the "con" being researchers who were involved in trying to make a case for medical insurance companies being bound to covering medical transitioning for transgender people who seek it, and the "pro" example being neurologist Debra Soh and her column criticizing gender-neutral parenting).


Although it felt good overall to address yet another audience, the stone-faced audience left me feeling unsettled for several days, and eventually I realized it had evoked some associated emotional content for me, that it connected in my mind with a pattern I have some reason to worry about.

You see, back in 1980, when I was first coming out on University of New Mexico campus, I kept having the experience of handing out my writings and then going back to those same people to discuss the material, and people more often than not were cautious, saying very little about my core ideas and instead taking some small lateral idea and talking some about that. For instance, an older woman student from my Sex and Sexuality biology course talked about countercultural guys in the 1970s and how they had horrified their parents by growing their hair long and that their talk of peace and rejection of militarism had hit a button for the older generation who perceived them as very unmanly. It certainly wasn't irrelevant but it left me in the dark about what she thought about feminine guys upending the conventional notion of heterosexuality and what it could mean for feminism and for the rest of society and so on.

By the time my dormitory resident advisor was aking me to please go across the street and talk with the mental health folks at the university's medical center, I had spent an intense month trying to talk to people, trying to write my thoughts down and get students and professors and other people to read them and give me a reaction, and that had been the general pattern: people not directly addressing what I had brought up, and being very vague about what they thought of it, neither hostile and argumentative nor excitedly enthusiastic, just...cautious.

And because it was so important to me, this set of new ideas and their power to explain things, I began to imagine and guess a lot about what was really going on behind people's closed faces. I was expecting my ideas to be very polarizing: threatening to some people, exciting and revolutionary to others. Confronted with all these noncommittal reactions, I imagined that they were feeling highly ambivalent and needed more time to process these ideas. I imagined that they saw the potential impact but that some parts of that potential impact did not look like an unalloyed good thing, so they were holding back. I imagined that people who were gay or lesbian or were supportive of gay and lesbian rights and concerns were wondering and worrying that promoting the notion of a "heterosexual sissy" could have homophobic or hetero-normative social impact. I imagined that people who were feminist or feminist supporters were worrying about the impact of a male person pushing a new feminist-type agenda from so much of a "for his own personal reasons" standpoint, a very different thing than males being political participants in order to support women. I worried that conservative-minded people were hearing this as yet another assault on conventional sexuality and gender and were formulating negative and judgmental attitudes towards what I was describing, that their first reaction to "heterosexual sissy" was a disapproving and biased one. I imagined that people thought I actually had a different agenda of some sort, whether pro-male or pro-feminist or pro-homophobic or anti-christian or anti-transsexual or whatever. Or that what I was saying was going to play into one of those agendas.

I was really overthinking it all. The truth of the matter -- easier to look back on it and see it in retrospect -- is that most of them were not understanding more than a small spatter of what I was trying to communicate. And that a double-handful of the rest understood my main points but disagreed with me that they were important points and didn't see that they added any new understandings or new possibilities, that they didn't see why I was making a big deal out of this.

I have never believed that my mental state in spring of 1980 remotely justified placing me in a locked-ward setting and treating me as if I was incoherent. When I realized the extent to which I had been failing to make sense to people, and had disturbed them with all the intensity with which I was making the attempt, I laughed at myself and I reset my expectations immediately. I at no point in my life rejected the thoughts that had obsessed me then as nonsensical or as unworthy of the obsession. And I've gotten way better at expressing them, I think!

But I haven't forgotten the grandiose thought patterns. The tendency to assume I am affecting people whether they express their reactions or not, and, with that, the tendency to assume other thoughts in their heads -- their reaction-thoughts -- include reasons for them being so noncommunicative. Because I still do that. When faced with lukewarm or off-topic reactions to my material I tend more often to believe that what I've said or written has pushed some of their buttons, instead of jumping to believe that I didn't make sense to them or that they don't attribute any sense of value and importance to what I said.

Some of that is unavoidable. Any person attempting social change that involves putting forth new ideas has to rely on a degree of optimistic projection, of anticipating that their ideas will indeed affect people strongly. And you can't let indifferent reactions shut you down, because new ideas are, by definition, alien and will not be immediately and wholeheartedly embraced.

But it's unsettling. Grandiose extrapolation of this sort IS a form of not being fully in contact with what is real. It has gotten me into trouble in the past. And it is a way of thinking that does not come with its own built-in lid. It can self-perpetuate to the point of thinking that the outcome is preordained, the participants' roles already written in advance, and all people involved representatives of Huge Social Forces that they represent in this little theatrical play, very dramatic and with grave portent and Massively Important Things always hanging in the balance. It's addictive to anyone who is trying to have a genuine impact on the world in which they live. Don Quixote never wants to see himself as a silly fool trying to joust with a windmill that is neither a real opponent, nor the joust a purposeless endeavor with no possible meaningful outcome.

————————

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