The construction of my soul.
It's been pointed out, ironically, that I'm not very introspective. That is, although I'm very attentive to other people's feelings, and though I write a lot, I don't seem to look inside at how I feel very much.
Well, that's true. But I know it's true. And I can tell you exactly why I'm built this way.
There's a distinct turning point in my life: May, 1993, when my friend H committed suicide. There's pre-H Sven, and there's post-H Sven.
Her suicide impacted me in two major ways: (1) the way I relate feelings and actions, and (2) my sense of isolation.
Feelings and Actions
Pre-H, I was all about trying to be my "true self" -- I've got dozens of journals filled with soul searching. Being one's "true self" goes like this: there is a persona that is really "me"; I will discover it by examining how I feel; I will act upon my feelings.
I think that this feelings-based model of selfhood is what most people use as an operating system. However, in post-H life, I couldn't continue to just "follow my feelings". If I were to just follow how I felt, I'd wind up killing myself, because I was horribly depressed.
Well, in college I took a class on "self-experimentation and behavior modification", in which I learned the power of simple self-monitoring -- keeping records of what you do. I latched onto that, post-H. Part of the idea was that if I kept records about what things I'd done during the week, I wouldn't be able to get as depressed -- I'd be able to look at the records and see my successes (or at least how I got to where I was), rather than be absorbed in the despairing moment.
In essence, I reversed the relationship between feelings and action. Rather than not cleaning up the house until I felt like it, I would clean up the house, and then feel better because of it. I have to say, this worked pretty well. I had had several years of failing classes (particularly reading-heavy classes) -- the new work ethic brought me successes, and I started to feel better about myself.
The trick with this strategy, mind you, is that the main feeling it gives you is pride. Not a bad emotion to base self-worth around -- but a rather limited palette, nonetheless.
Most people manage to mix "follow your feelings" and "work first, feel afterwards" more flexibly than I have. I recognize that I've gone from one extreme to another... But that's softening with time, and I've been experimenting with paring back my record-keeping addiction.
Still, I'm not the only one who's gone to extremes -- I know people who are "follow your feelings" to an incapacitating extent. And I don't think record-keeping in itself is pathological. I think it makes me special, and in many ways it's served me well.
Isolation
When H died, I lost a whole circle of friends. I latched on to the few other people who knew H, and slept on their couch most of that summer. I went back to college, after having taken the previous semester off -- in part to put myself back into a community. ...But there wasn't anyone I could talk to there. On a few occasions people would ask me how I was -- and I'd actually tell them. Quickly learned that that wasn't going to work.
When H died, it felt like my reality pinched off into a little bubble apart from everyone else's. There was Planet Sven, and then there was the rest of the world. I was alone in my universe.
And sadly, that's damage that just can't be repaired at this point. I survived, and eleven years later the memory of H has faded to the point where I can almost forget about her anniversary when it comes around. I've made new friends, taken new directions, and become a different person than once I was. But there's still a scar there, in that place in me that knows how badly people can fail to connect -- and how someone can fall through the cracks, just when they need support the most.
The isolation coming from H's death coincided with my moving into queer activism, to a large extent. I had been doing anti-domestic violence work prior to that, and continued to try to do so for a while -- but the stress of it on top of the trauma from H was just absurd, and so I backed off to work on a less horrific issue.
Part of my thinking at that point was that if I killed myself, it would be letting the bastards win. So I decided "fuck it, I can go crazy, or I can be dead". My politics got far more radical at that point. [Ask me at some point about intentionally breaking gender norms by wearing dresses, and what I wrote about it in the campus paper...]
In terms of isolation, what better salve is there than love? Girlfriend #1 post-H lasted maybe a year and half. She left me largely because I was too morbid -- that is, I was still depressed. Girlfriend #2 is J... I got to work out a bunch of the issues around H's suicide when another friend of ours made a suicide attempt. J was the one who found her and called the ambulance. Both of us were her primary friends visiting the security ward. We created monthly rituals for a year afterwards, trying to give her something to look forward to.
Through that experience, I got to model how someone who's grieving should be taken care of.
Now there's G. Who is interested in being involved in my life in ways deeper than anyone else ever has been. [Eyes tearing up.] ...So, grand experiment, now I get to explore intimacy in whole new ways. The Berlin Wall of isolation is slowly being sledge-hammered away.
* * * * *
OK, so there are three more major aspects of the construction of my soul that should be touched upon: family, money, and feminism.
Family
My parents were married for twenty years. At their twentieth anniversary dinner out, my mother raised the idea that maybe they should separate. My father didn't object.
I didn't see it as I was growing up, but things weren't OK between my parents. My father was a workaholic who had an addition built onto the house for a home office. He got a fold out bed, and wound up sleeping there every night. He said it was because my mom kicked while she slept.
After the divorce, several revelations were revealed to me... My father, friends of the family say, had several affairs, mostly with his grad students. And just around the time my brother was born, he had made an actual decision that he would just let my mother "raise the boys".
I still have fond memories of my mom trucking us out to whatever state my father had digs at that summer. But as I understand it now, the marriage was a long, quiet suffocation.
I am estranged from my father, and have next to no communication with him. Which is fine with me. I see little there worth salvaging.
I have a fairly good relationship with my mother. She, of course, wishes that I would call more often -- but when we do talk, conversation is good natured. The one sadness for me, is that she's never cared for my activism. She hasn't resisted it -- but she's never been comfortable acknowledging it, or asking questions about it. And since activism is an enormous part of my life, that precludes deepening our relationship.
Other than answering the obligatory "tell me about your mother?" questions, the purpose of this bit is to point out that I grew up in a very emotionally subdued household. Apparently (I'm told), I didn't learn a lot of emotional skills that people from more emotionally authentic households did.
I've put a great deal of effort into developing my social skills, and all-in-all, I think I've done a good job. If you want to say that my affect seems somewhat artificial, though, I can't object. Who I am in this area, doesn't come from early training. It's a way in which I've built myself.
Money
I am in the fortunate position of not having to maintain a traditional job. My money comes from investments. What do you do with yourself, given freedom from a daily grind for bread and butter? My choice has been that I should devote myself to social change work -- particularly in cutting edge social movements (that haven't become institutionalized yet), where there's no paid work to be had -- but there's a profound need for activists.
From 1993 to 2000, I was deeply involved in activism. I worked with the National Organization for Men Against Sexism as part of its leadership collective, and I worked with the Portland Bisexual Alliance as president / executive director. ...Then I needed to take a break. Turning 30, I moved to a new home, switched emphasis to writing, and tried to get myself a life. Now I've reentered the non-profit sector, working with the Crisis Line -- but at a fairly low-level time commitment. I'm still in a period of sorting out how much I want to serve other people's causes, and to what extent I'm entitled to give myself a life that makes me happy.
"Money changes everything," sings Cyndi Lauper. So true. I see several ways in which this situation shapes my psyche...
I notice that I really do have a "time is money" mindset. Not in the "damn, I'm losing money for every second wasted!" sense -- rather, I think of time as something that you spend on activities; you purchase what you want through an expenditure of time; time (like money) is something to be budgeted with some thoughtfulness. If you don't fritter away time on lots of little things, a big block of time can buy you something that's worth a lot.
In a less flattering way, I think that some part of my mind also views everything as replaceable. If an item breaks, I can go buy another one. I get the sense that friends who are dirt poor invest more emotion in a prized possession, because if they lose it, it's just gone. Ironically, though, I keep trying to treat myself well by buying my "inner child" the toys it wants -- but they tend to make me feel more empty in the long run.
I know that my relationship with stuff is a problem area. My father was an archaeologist -- I tend to create collections, too. My sense is that the more my isolation issues dissolve, the healthier my relationship with stuff will be -- because it's no longer a replacement for having actual, living people around.
Feminism
Oy. This could be an essay unto itself...
So. There are lots of different kinds of feminism. I identify with what's sometimes called Radical Feminism [see Alison Jaggar's Feminist Politics and Human Nature (?) book]; the form of feminism that is more concerned with the problem of male supremacism than "identical treatment" via laws, or establishing an independent women's culture; the form that is predominant in anti-rape and domestic violence agencies; the form that originates with the Redstockings Collective back around 1969.
From this affiliation, I've taken an interest in subordinating my will to women's when an issue is identified to me as properly belonging to them. I invented a notion of "interpersonal affirmative action" that revolved around putting on "special listening ears" when an intimate partner played the "women's issue" card. I recognized from the beginning that this power scenario created a tension with the goals of egalitarian intimacy. The concept is not meant to be a permanent relationship -- it's meant to help strengthen an individual partner's personal skills in particular areas, to be in place for a temporary period -- perhaps several years. My period of doing this with J has formally ended -- but we've discovered that it's difficult to transition out of that mode, if it's how you begin things.
One of the things I developed through my association with feminism, that I still value very much, is my mindset that I should invest my self-worth in how I deal with a situation after I've caused harm -- not in being a person who never screws up in the first place. I've developed a personality matrix that is very non-defensive, that is good at listening to criticism, and then looking for constructive ways to proceed.
It can look to people on the outside, though, like I just always belly up. That I'm overly submissive, overly nice. Perhaps there's something to that too. But it makes me irritated that just because my personal decision-making locus is decentered -- in order to consider the needs of other people around me, rather than being solely self-centered -- people think that I'm a push-over. Neediness and selfhood are not synonymous.
And at the same thing, I acknowledge that the mindset that "it's men's job to end violence against women" has warped me in some ways. I'm rethinking this platitude, thinking now that I deserve to give myself a good life too. Of all the people that I try to help -- I should be one, also.
* * * * *
There you have it, the construction of my soul.
Yeah, there are parts that you might disagree with -- but I'd wager that they're points with enough intellectual merit that two people could have a reasoned discussion about them.
Fah.
So there.
It's been pointed out, ironically, that I'm not very introspective. That is, although I'm very attentive to other people's feelings, and though I write a lot, I don't seem to look inside at how I feel very much.
Well, that's true. But I know it's true. And I can tell you exactly why I'm built this way.
There's a distinct turning point in my life: May, 1993, when my friend H committed suicide. There's pre-H Sven, and there's post-H Sven.
Her suicide impacted me in two major ways: (1) the way I relate feelings and actions, and (2) my sense of isolation.
Feelings and Actions
Pre-H, I was all about trying to be my "true self" -- I've got dozens of journals filled with soul searching. Being one's "true self" goes like this: there is a persona that is really "me"; I will discover it by examining how I feel; I will act upon my feelings.
I think that this feelings-based model of selfhood is what most people use as an operating system. However, in post-H life, I couldn't continue to just "follow my feelings". If I were to just follow how I felt, I'd wind up killing myself, because I was horribly depressed.
Well, in college I took a class on "self-experimentation and behavior modification", in which I learned the power of simple self-monitoring -- keeping records of what you do. I latched onto that, post-H. Part of the idea was that if I kept records about what things I'd done during the week, I wouldn't be able to get as depressed -- I'd be able to look at the records and see my successes (or at least how I got to where I was), rather than be absorbed in the despairing moment.
In essence, I reversed the relationship between feelings and action. Rather than not cleaning up the house until I felt like it, I would clean up the house, and then feel better because of it. I have to say, this worked pretty well. I had had several years of failing classes (particularly reading-heavy classes) -- the new work ethic brought me successes, and I started to feel better about myself.
The trick with this strategy, mind you, is that the main feeling it gives you is pride. Not a bad emotion to base self-worth around -- but a rather limited palette, nonetheless.
Most people manage to mix "follow your feelings" and "work first, feel afterwards" more flexibly than I have. I recognize that I've gone from one extreme to another... But that's softening with time, and I've been experimenting with paring back my record-keeping addiction.
Still, I'm not the only one who's gone to extremes -- I know people who are "follow your feelings" to an incapacitating extent. And I don't think record-keeping in itself is pathological. I think it makes me special, and in many ways it's served me well.
Isolation
When H died, I lost a whole circle of friends. I latched on to the few other people who knew H, and slept on their couch most of that summer. I went back to college, after having taken the previous semester off -- in part to put myself back into a community. ...But there wasn't anyone I could talk to there. On a few occasions people would ask me how I was -- and I'd actually tell them. Quickly learned that that wasn't going to work.
When H died, it felt like my reality pinched off into a little bubble apart from everyone else's. There was Planet Sven, and then there was the rest of the world. I was alone in my universe.
And sadly, that's damage that just can't be repaired at this point. I survived, and eleven years later the memory of H has faded to the point where I can almost forget about her anniversary when it comes around. I've made new friends, taken new directions, and become a different person than once I was. But there's still a scar there, in that place in me that knows how badly people can fail to connect -- and how someone can fall through the cracks, just when they need support the most.
The isolation coming from H's death coincided with my moving into queer activism, to a large extent. I had been doing anti-domestic violence work prior to that, and continued to try to do so for a while -- but the stress of it on top of the trauma from H was just absurd, and so I backed off to work on a less horrific issue.
Part of my thinking at that point was that if I killed myself, it would be letting the bastards win. So I decided "fuck it, I can go crazy, or I can be dead". My politics got far more radical at that point. [Ask me at some point about intentionally breaking gender norms by wearing dresses, and what I wrote about it in the campus paper...]
In terms of isolation, what better salve is there than love? Girlfriend #1 post-H lasted maybe a year and half. She left me largely because I was too morbid -- that is, I was still depressed. Girlfriend #2 is J... I got to work out a bunch of the issues around H's suicide when another friend of ours made a suicide attempt. J was the one who found her and called the ambulance. Both of us were her primary friends visiting the security ward. We created monthly rituals for a year afterwards, trying to give her something to look forward to.
Through that experience, I got to model how someone who's grieving should be taken care of.
Now there's G. Who is interested in being involved in my life in ways deeper than anyone else ever has been. [Eyes tearing up.] ...So, grand experiment, now I get to explore intimacy in whole new ways. The Berlin Wall of isolation is slowly being sledge-hammered away.
* * * * *
OK, so there are three more major aspects of the construction of my soul that should be touched upon: family, money, and feminism.
Family
My parents were married for twenty years. At their twentieth anniversary dinner out, my mother raised the idea that maybe they should separate. My father didn't object.
I didn't see it as I was growing up, but things weren't OK between my parents. My father was a workaholic who had an addition built onto the house for a home office. He got a fold out bed, and wound up sleeping there every night. He said it was because my mom kicked while she slept.
After the divorce, several revelations were revealed to me... My father, friends of the family say, had several affairs, mostly with his grad students. And just around the time my brother was born, he had made an actual decision that he would just let my mother "raise the boys".
I still have fond memories of my mom trucking us out to whatever state my father had digs at that summer. But as I understand it now, the marriage was a long, quiet suffocation.
I am estranged from my father, and have next to no communication with him. Which is fine with me. I see little there worth salvaging.
I have a fairly good relationship with my mother. She, of course, wishes that I would call more often -- but when we do talk, conversation is good natured. The one sadness for me, is that she's never cared for my activism. She hasn't resisted it -- but she's never been comfortable acknowledging it, or asking questions about it. And since activism is an enormous part of my life, that precludes deepening our relationship.
Other than answering the obligatory "tell me about your mother?" questions, the purpose of this bit is to point out that I grew up in a very emotionally subdued household. Apparently (I'm told), I didn't learn a lot of emotional skills that people from more emotionally authentic households did.
I've put a great deal of effort into developing my social skills, and all-in-all, I think I've done a good job. If you want to say that my affect seems somewhat artificial, though, I can't object. Who I am in this area, doesn't come from early training. It's a way in which I've built myself.
Money
I am in the fortunate position of not having to maintain a traditional job. My money comes from investments. What do you do with yourself, given freedom from a daily grind for bread and butter? My choice has been that I should devote myself to social change work -- particularly in cutting edge social movements (that haven't become institutionalized yet), where there's no paid work to be had -- but there's a profound need for activists.
From 1993 to 2000, I was deeply involved in activism. I worked with the National Organization for Men Against Sexism as part of its leadership collective, and I worked with the Portland Bisexual Alliance as president / executive director. ...Then I needed to take a break. Turning 30, I moved to a new home, switched emphasis to writing, and tried to get myself a life. Now I've reentered the non-profit sector, working with the Crisis Line -- but at a fairly low-level time commitment. I'm still in a period of sorting out how much I want to serve other people's causes, and to what extent I'm entitled to give myself a life that makes me happy.
"Money changes everything," sings Cyndi Lauper. So true. I see several ways in which this situation shapes my psyche...
I notice that I really do have a "time is money" mindset. Not in the "damn, I'm losing money for every second wasted!" sense -- rather, I think of time as something that you spend on activities; you purchase what you want through an expenditure of time; time (like money) is something to be budgeted with some thoughtfulness. If you don't fritter away time on lots of little things, a big block of time can buy you something that's worth a lot.
In a less flattering way, I think that some part of my mind also views everything as replaceable. If an item breaks, I can go buy another one. I get the sense that friends who are dirt poor invest more emotion in a prized possession, because if they lose it, it's just gone. Ironically, though, I keep trying to treat myself well by buying my "inner child" the toys it wants -- but they tend to make me feel more empty in the long run.
I know that my relationship with stuff is a problem area. My father was an archaeologist -- I tend to create collections, too. My sense is that the more my isolation issues dissolve, the healthier my relationship with stuff will be -- because it's no longer a replacement for having actual, living people around.
Feminism
Oy. This could be an essay unto itself...
So. There are lots of different kinds of feminism. I identify with what's sometimes called Radical Feminism [see Alison Jaggar's Feminist Politics and Human Nature (?) book]; the form of feminism that is more concerned with the problem of male supremacism than "identical treatment" via laws, or establishing an independent women's culture; the form that is predominant in anti-rape and domestic violence agencies; the form that originates with the Redstockings Collective back around 1969.
From this affiliation, I've taken an interest in subordinating my will to women's when an issue is identified to me as properly belonging to them. I invented a notion of "interpersonal affirmative action" that revolved around putting on "special listening ears" when an intimate partner played the "women's issue" card. I recognized from the beginning that this power scenario created a tension with the goals of egalitarian intimacy. The concept is not meant to be a permanent relationship -- it's meant to help strengthen an individual partner's personal skills in particular areas, to be in place for a temporary period -- perhaps several years. My period of doing this with J has formally ended -- but we've discovered that it's difficult to transition out of that mode, if it's how you begin things.
One of the things I developed through my association with feminism, that I still value very much, is my mindset that I should invest my self-worth in how I deal with a situation after I've caused harm -- not in being a person who never screws up in the first place. I've developed a personality matrix that is very non-defensive, that is good at listening to criticism, and then looking for constructive ways to proceed.
It can look to people on the outside, though, like I just always belly up. That I'm overly submissive, overly nice. Perhaps there's something to that too. But it makes me irritated that just because my personal decision-making locus is decentered -- in order to consider the needs of other people around me, rather than being solely self-centered -- people think that I'm a push-over. Neediness and selfhood are not synonymous.
And at the same thing, I acknowledge that the mindset that "it's men's job to end violence against women" has warped me in some ways. I'm rethinking this platitude, thinking now that I deserve to give myself a good life too. Of all the people that I try to help -- I should be one, also.
* * * * *
There you have it, the construction of my soul.
Yeah, there are parts that you might disagree with -- but I'd wager that they're points with enough intellectual merit that two people could have a reasoned discussion about them.
Fah.
So there.
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