Becoming the Living Poet

This is the second half of Maybe If You Don’t Want To Do Something You “Shouldn’t” which was becoming frightening in it’s length and breadth so I split it into two posts for the sake of readability.

So I stopped going to S.A.M.E.‘s organizing meetings and in the near the future (I’ll keep checking in with myself on this one) I’ve stopped going to marches because it got to be so scary that it was hurting me. I wasn’t rising above my fear, I was sinking in it and gritting my teeth and slogging through it while coughing on the quicksand. This is a phenomenon I believe Havi would explain much less verbosely as forcing yourself to leave your comfort zone rather than growing your comfort zone.

And now I want to bring this incredibly, caricaturishly long post disguised as two rather long posts, back to the original take home statement:

Not wanting to do something you “should” want to do is a completely legitimate reason for not doing it.

I would be remiss if I were to start talking about the concept of the “should” and not give credit to a fellow Havi disciple, Lucy Viret who wrote a brilliant post yesterday teasing out the concept that there is no “should”.

In a really good conversation I had yesterday it suddenly occurred to me that some very traumatizing moments in my past happened largely because I was entirely focused on the “should” of the moment and not my own desire to not be in the situation I was in. To be a little less vague (but not much because this isn’t something I’m ready to talk about here) I was afraid, but my fear did not feel legitimate to me. It felt like something I needed to overcome so I ignored it as best I could because you “should” always face your fears or so I thought at the time. But in those situations and I think in many situations, the fear was legitimate (actually fear is always legitimate, it just isn’t always rational). The fear unlike the “should” was coming from inside of me, whereas the “should” was just some common sense, general knowledge sort of thing free-floating through the world that I latched onto.

Was I wrong to latch onto the “should”? Well, no. It was a popular “should” that I’m sure has served many people much better than it served me. And let’s get away from phrases like “wrong” for a second. I’m an agnostic for Bob’s sake and yet I keep running into this nasty streak of moral absolutism in both my thinking and my writing.

The take home point from all of this is that it was not useful and indeed harmful to trust a stranger, a wayward floating “should”, over my own internal preferences. Not wanting to do something “should” (yeah, I know, shoulds are like roaches, they’re pesky buggers to kill) have been a neutral position, but it wasn’t because it conflicted with the external more popular “should” that visited my brain, gave me bad advice, and didn’t even leave a dollar in the box for the slice of pizza it ate.

The dissenting voice on this question is what happens when the “should” is something with authority behind it like paying your taxes. No one wants to pay their taxes but they “should” because if they don’t then they’ll go to prison.

But I don’t think this disproves the take home point at all and here’s why:

You only think you pay your taxes because of the all-knowing power of the “should”. Really you pay your taxes because your internal preference is to not go to prison. (Now we get into questions of coercion and what constitutes a free choice if the alternative is something that no reasonable person would choose and all that jazz but that’s a very long conversation for another time, so let’s get back to the main point.)

Not wanting to do something you “should” want to do is a completely legitimate reason for not doing it.

If you’re making a decision that is good for you, it’s never the “should” that holds the explanatory power for the decision. The “should” is a mental shortcut for an if/then statement. I don’t care about the consequences. Well, you “should” because if you ignore them then…

If you look at the most probable consequences of your actions honestly “shoulds” become completely irrelevant. (As long as you know yourself well enough to understand in a general way what outcome is desirable, but that’s another subject entirely and let’s not muddy this beautiful moment of mental clarity.)

So that’s all for now and I hope I’ve written these two posts (which are really one post) clearly enough so that I can come back and read them periodically and understand what the heck I was getting at when I wrote them because I think for this whole being kind to myself journey that I’ve been on for the last couple of months (and probably less consciously for most of my life) this issue is at the heart of the matter.

You being you is not as depressing as you think.

That’s a quote from Havi’s blogging therapy post about Why Even Bother When Other People Are Doing It Better? I love Havi so much right now. I’ll admit it. I’m becoming (we’ll say it’s a process and not a state of being) a little obsessed with her at the moment because I’m going through a rocky, emotional time in my life and she feeds me seemingly simple, but really incredibly insightful gems like the one above.

So a warning for those who were thinking that a blog called the Living Poet might (gasp) actually be about poetry. At some point in the future we’re going to talk about submitting to literary magazines, preparing chapbook manuscripts, and there may even be reviews of poetry books. It’s coming, honest. But right now what I really want to talk about is the process of “destuckification”. Because when it comes to being a poet, specifically the act of writing poetry, the line between the personal and the professional is pretty darn hazy if it exists at all. So I’m going to tangent on mental health issues for a bit because that’s where I’m at right now, but rest assured we’ll come back to poetry.

So now I want to tell you something I learned this week that is so simple that I may forget it. But I want to write it down on the off chance that writing about it makes it stick in my head for just a few more nanoseconds then it otherwise would.

Not wanting to do something you “should” want to do is a completely legitimate reason for not doing it.

I got the idea from rereading this post on The Fluent Self about how to tell whether you’re just giving into your fears or legitimately respecting your own limitations. (I’m cool with being a broken record about how awesome The Fluent Self is for awhile because it’s really helping me more than anything else has in a long time.) I think this may have been the first Fluent Self post I ever read and it had me hitting the subscribe button right then and there because at the time I found the post linked to by another blog I read called Remarkable Communication the issue was completely 100% relevant to an issue I was dealing with at the time.

I was (still am really if I can ever get past the guilt of making the decision I did, but that’s not the stuff we’re working through right now) an LGBT rights activist and at the time I was reading the post I was fretting over whether or not I should leave an activist collective I was involved with called S.A.M.E., who are really awesome and great and wonderful and in-your-face about fighting for marriage equality for same sex couples. I love the organization and everything they stand for, but what I had issues with was the in-your-face part. The main thing that S.A.M.E. does is put on marches and protests to raise awareness about LGBT rights legislation and to remind politicians that living, breathing people care about these issues and that we have numbers on our side.

When I first started going to marches I loved it. It was exciting and I felt so brave and committed for standing up for something I cared about. Then the social anxiety started to kick in again and suddenly things weren’t so exciting anymore. In fact things felt really scary, but (or so I reasoned at the time) something being scary “shouldn’t” be a relevant concern when you’re a committed activist. You “should” be able to bulldoze your way right on through that dread and terror and come out of the situation stronger for it.

Yes and no.

As much of a coward as I think I am falsely believe I am, I’ve always been a big believer in the healing power of feeling the fear and doing it anyway. I’ve never even read the book and I’ve made it my personal motto. Coincidentally it might be a wonderful book so don’t let the fact that I’m about to temper the advice I got from its title dissuade you from reading it.

In high school I was the kid who was terrified of public speaking and decided to join the speech and debate team. And guess what? That worked for me at the time and I even made it to the state finals in original prose and poetry (a speech competition event where you write your own speech and perform it).

I was looking for the person who said Courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it. It was Mark Twain and while I was looking up that quote I found another one which gets to the heart of the matter.

Courage is the fear of being thought a coward. – Horace Smith

Yeah. That. That’s the other side of the face your fear coin. Sometimes the idea that maybe you don’t have to face your fears is actually scarier than the idea that there’s some invisible moral force compelling you to do the bravest thing possible every single moment of every single day.

And I’m going to split the post into two posts right here because the length of the single long post was terrifying. I was just scrolling and scrolling. So go read Don’t Take Candy From Strangers & Don’t Listen To Shoulds if you want to hear the rest of the story. If you’re bored now that’s cool too. Go make yourself a bowl of cereal or something…