True Nonconformity

I’m getting really tired of hearing this argument over and over that doing anything that aligns with what is considered “mainstream” means that you are a blind sheep that doesn’t know how to think for yourself.

Any time you are convinced that there is only one accurate view of reality, and anyone else who doesn’t subscribe to that school of thought must be unintelligent and blind, you have instantly narrowed your field of view and become blind yourself. Just because that worldview is centered around the idea of rebelling for rebellion’s sake, does not mean that you are actually a nonconformist. In fact, the idea of nonconformity is more popular than ever. Dare I say… even mainstream?

You want to know what’s conformist? Fighting. Segregating. Judging and criticizing people for their perspectives. Labeling other people as stupid and walling yourself off in your own comfy bubble so that you can hide away from any worldview that makes you feel threatened in your own, because the idea of living in uncertainty is too terrifying to even consider.

More than being subject to “mainstream thinking” we are much more subject to our ego, our emotions, and all of the unconscious drivers that cause us to make the decisions that we do. Those are the things controlling and manipulating us; not the external forces that we love to point fingers at. And both the ego inside of us as well as the mainstream is telling us over and over and over that we are smarter than, better than, in the right, and we need to pick a side and FIGHT.

You want to actually rebel?

Start genuinely listening to people that you don’t agree with. Start finding it within yourself to have respect for them as human beings. Start practicing empathy— it’s a muscle, you either use it or it atrophies.

Find the common ground that connects you rather than sorting and labeling people into camps of “good” and “bad”. Recognize that there is a part of you that judges others and feels threatened by those who think differently than you do, and it comes out sometimes; but don’t allow that part of you to make all of your decisions for you.

Realize that it is possible to strongly disagree with someone and still see them as a person and treat them with respect. Take the time to consciously consider things that don’t immediately align with your current perspective.

Remind yourself that just because you believe something so strongly that it burns hot inside of you and fills you with fury, isn’t an indicator of your level of rightness.

Open doors, build bridges, have impossibly hard conversations.

That is true nonconformity.

I Hope It Was All Worth It

Why do human beings have this tendency, this overwhelming push, this excruciating desire to misunderstand one another?

Why do we create stories about people and events and then oversimplify them, distill them down to caricatures in black and white, and then refuse to recognize that most things operate somewhere in the gray area, not in the boxes that we draw them into? Is it really so much easier to make up stories about the way that the world is, so that we can make some semblance of sense out of things, in order to feel safer and more comfortable about how things are in order to get through our day? Is it that actually taking a closer look at the complexities of things is so threatening to us and we can’t handle how unsafe that makes us feel, so we lie to ourselves and others about how things are because we need those lies in order to simply feel okay?

I’m feeling so exhausted and burnt out on people anymore. I just don’t have the energy to put up with most people’s filters that they insist on seeing the world through.

I never realized how fortunate I am to be able to empathize with others; to imagine myself in their shoes and be able to picture the way they see the world. I’m sure it’s an imperfect picture, because none of us can ever truly fully understand one another — but at least when I can imagine what it’s like for them, I feel a sense of compassion. I care about them and their humanity, even if I don’t agree with them from my own perspective. And sometimes, imagining what it’s like for other people even changes my mind about things. I learn, I grow, I broaden my worldview. I can still fiercely dislike the monster that I perceive as the conservative party, all the while learning to recognize that the liberal party (which I have long allowed myself to be lumped into by default) is simply another head on the exact same monster.

I find it ironic that my ability to empathize has made me somewhat blind to the fact that many, many people do not, in fact, have this same ability. I make the same mistake that most people do, of assuming that other people are like I am, and I get confused and frustrated when other people insist on seeing me through their distorted filters, instead of being willing to walk a few steps over and feel around in my shoes. I have to open my eyes wider to realize that it’s not so much an unwillingness as a muscle that was never used and so has atrophied in a great many people. Not only do many people not know how to try on other people’s shoes, they see no value in it whatsoever. They’ve learned that keeping their own shoes on, thankyouverymuch, and walling themselves off from the rest of the world is a far superior way to operate.

And it frustrates the fuck out of me. It’s difficult for me to untangle myself from my own perspective that this behavior is lazy, it is narrow-minded, and it is cowardly.

I’m trying stupidly hard to have compassion. And yet, I find myself instead taking it very personally. I recognize this in myself, and I hate it. Because as much as I want to step out and keep my “higher” perspective on things, I am a human being, and very much subject to my own emotions and challenges. My feelings are hurt, because I see the (what I perceive as) narrow-minded perspectives of others as a personal affront to me. The socially anxious part in me that cares so much about others seeing me accurately feels furious at being painted as something that I am not. I revert back to the little girl who was told over and over again all of the horrible things that were wrong with her, when she was doing the best that she knew how to do. The little girl that felt hurt and angry at being mischaracterized and mistreated, and utterly powerless to do anything about it. The little girl that was bullied and abused and excluded and belittled for reasons that she could never understand… that part of her as an adult decades later still struggles to fully understand.

Life repeats itself. Cycles swirl around with maddening momentum until she starts to believe all over again that even after all of this work, this growth, this tremendous (and visible!) change she has forged — she is still powerless to the fact that she is and will always be a problem. Other people recognize that she is a problem. That there is something deeply wrong with her that can never be fixed. In spite of all these fanciful ideas about how she is a sword of truth that cuts through bullshit, a mirror that reflects people back at themselves and helps bring change, the truth is just that she is an infuriating trigger that somehow always seems to find people’s buttons (you know, the buttons hidden underneath the armor that they don’t want anyone else to know exist) and rams into them with the kind of force that only comes from tripping, tumbling, and falling flat on her face, button square in the forehead.

It always leaves a dent… in both parties.

I feel so angry. Because somehow, even as it seems like things have gotten so much better, I still find myself pushing others’ buttons when I’m not intending to. I’ve learned these wonderful, helpful things: becoming able to speak up and verbalize my truth eloquently, and with compassion, and to actually value what I am thinking and feeling; bringing a nuanced perspective to the table; to listen and ask thoughtful questions, and to have respect for what other people are saying and thinking and feeling, and to believe them when they tell me their experience; to care about others and to trust that others can see that I care about them. So it hurts me deeply when other people get angry at me, and see me as someone that is rushing in to try to hurt them (simply because I might not necessarily agree with everything they are saying) and vilify me, and treat me like I am stupid. Even as I have made it abundantly clear in every way that I know how, that just because I don’t agree with them doesn’t mean I am condemning them.

And it bothers me the most when it happens to be someone that I care a lot about, that I have a good friendship with. Probably because I have so few close friends. It takes an obscene amount of effort for me to build close relationships because I have to expend all of my energy forcing myself through the discomfort I feel being around someone as they move from an encounter to an acquaintance to a friend… exposing pieces of myself to them over and over and over again until the discomfort slowly, gradually eases, one step at a time, until I finally start to feel safe with them. I can be myself with them without constantly cycling around in my head, rehashing all of the same morbid fantasies about how they must be judging me.

Yes, that’s probably why it hurts even more when they do in fact judge me, and shove me out the door and lock it closed behind them and tell me to go away. And why it feels like twisting the knife when I discover that their judgement isn’t even something that I feel to be valid (as there are many, I think, legitimate reasons to judge me) but instead that they have created some wildly inaccurate fantasy about who I am. That they’ve contorted reality to fit me into a box that makes them feel better about themselves, so they can partition off pieces of themselves and their experiences in order to keep out the things that make them question their world and feel horribly uncomfortable because they don’t know the answer to them. That they’d rather have the safety and comfort of black and white thinking than extend a hand of friendship into the murk of grey that is where I live so much of my life.

The powerlessness that I feel about how others perceive me makes my head throb. I want to curl up in a corner, wall myself off from the world, and never look back. I have all of these good intentions that seem like fruit that is ripe for the picking, yet I grab each one and find that it has sat too long in the sun, turned to mush, and is filled with maggots feasting on fermenting flesh. I want to nourish people and instead I find myself making them nauseous, making them gag. It’s times like this that I reach a point where I’m ready to throw in my towel on the world. Fuck them all. They are so hell bent on misperceiving me anyway, and there’s nothing I can do about it. So why am I allowing myself to care? I want them to be something that they are not, and I need to stop torturing myself with hope.

If I am forever meant to be a clumsy button-hammer, maybe it’s best if I remove myself from the places where the buttons reside. If the whole world wants to segregate themselves into camps and deliberately superglue filters to cover their field of vision so that they can feel safe in knowing that their story is the correct story, who am I to poke holes in those filters? It’s not right for me to insert myself into their worldview, to ask them to take the filters off every so often and recognize that they aren’t the actual state of the world, to see that in fact we can never really (from our current perspectives) accurately perceive the real state of the world. It’s unfair of me to want that from people that don’t want that for themselves. I’m like the person sitting in the movie theater reminding people that it’s a movie when they are content to lose themselves inside of it. Just because I care about it and believe that it matters, doesn’t mean that they do, too. In fact, let’s be honest: the vast majority of the people on this planet not only don’t want that, they vehemently despise it.

The predominant worldview is that it is important to see things in black and white, to cling tightly to our unbalanced and subjective views of right and wrong, to pick a camp and put up a flag and get a big weapon and dehumanize the other side and refuse to see the possibility that there might be value in what they have to say, and to fight them to the death, flatten them to the ground, pulverize their heart and their mind and their guts — the very things that made them the same species as us.

But you get caught up in the story of it all, and you do it because you are righteous in doing so. You are on the right side of history.

And as all of the dust and ash settles to the ground and nothing is left of the voices that you wanted so fiercely to silence, and all you can hear is the dull echo of yourself, left defensive but with nothing left to defend itself against: I hope you finally find the sense of safety that you’ve been searching for.

I hope it was all worth it.

The Comfort of Being a Pandemic Recluse

Living with social anxiety has always been difficult enough as it is. But life generally forces you to be social, and you get used to living in discomfort. Day to day existence is painful, but it’s also normal.

But when the state of the world suddenly gives you permission to almost completely withdraw from life, and that drags on for over a year, you quickly realize how much of your life you’ve spent doing and doing and doing and doing, interacting with people, socializing more than you ever fully wanted to. Not because you didn’t necessarily want to actually do most of those things in spite of simultaneously feeling like it was torture, but because you get used to having a lot of people asking for your time and you’re told to overfill your schedule, so you do. You get so used to living in a state of unyielding fear, and that it’s just how it is.

But the pandemic hits, and you take a step back, and for the very first time in your life you feel like you’re allowed to actually relax.

Like, really genuinely relax.

Initially, it just feels like sweet, sweet rest. Kind of akin to what it’s like when you’ve been running on adrenaline for such a long time that when you finally stop, you crash. You’re forced to actually spend time recovering by falling off the map and resting deeply. The kind of rest that later makes you feel refreshed, rejuvenated, even energized.

But then the pandemic drags on.

The newfound shortage of invites you get from various people, to various things, continues to feel like massive relief. You can do nothing and for once you don’t have to feel guilty. It’s amazing. Now there is all this space in your life for the suppressed you — the part of you that doesn’t want to do all the things; the part of you that has been constantly forcing, forcing, forcing, pushing uphill with all its might. It comes with a sense of freedom.

You realize that, while it was incredibly empowering to reach a point in your life where you could make yourself do things and you were in a better place than you ever had been before, another part of you actually still kind of hated it.

And as the pandemic slogs on and normal people want to get back to their old social lives, the invites start coming back in. They still keep wanting your time, your energy, your interaction. They ask you to join them for virtual meetups and games and classes and movie nights. Except now you’ve had a taste of what it’s like to stop letting everyone in. To stop saying yes to things that of course, part of you still wants to do. But the other part of you that has always wanted to say no no no no FINALLY now gets its way, and it feels like such sweet relief. You find yourself in a place where no is the only thing you ever want to say anymore. The idea of forcing yourself to go back to the level of stress you lived your whole life in feels so utterly overwhelming that you feel like you can no longer handle it. You don’t even want to respond, because for the first time in your life, you’re not living in an almost constant state of fight-or-flight. On the contrary, you’ve gotten spoiled by this state of relaxation.

On top of that, it’s also the first time in your life that you’ve been in a relationship with someone that completely understands, and doesn’t constantly berate you for struggling with social interactions, pushing you to do things you don’t want to do. You’re with someone that you feel completely comfortable with and feels completely comfortable with you. Someone that is so easy to be around that it doesn’t feel like a social interaction at all, it just feels like comfort. Like home.

Even to all of the close friends and family that you love, that you do actually want to spend time with. They reach out. But that part of you, that you had to have a death grip on your whole life, just so you could function? It suddenly now has a death grip on you.

Interacting with others is harder than it ever has been, purely because you no longer have the momentum of forcing yourself to say yes all the time. Not only that, it’s become socially acceptable. Instead of life and society punishing you for hiding out, it’s now the default way of being.

And so saying yes feels like the most exhausting, stressful, gut-wrenching thing — even when it’s something that many other parts of you want to do. When you do say yes to something, it’s a week in advance, and it sounds good at the time. But when the day finally arrives, you feel overwhelmed and no longer want to participate. Interaction feels way too hard. The amount of effort it would take to get the social train moving again just feels impossible.

So you start to say no to everyone. You stop talking to people. You withdraw from the world and relish in the comfort of being able to finally crawl into a blanket and curl up in the corner and stay in a state of relaxation, relief. To get to choose to push the pain of anxiety away, something you’ve never had the luxury of doing before now except in brief bursts.

And it’s this weird, frustrating, exhausting dichotomy of absolute relief and a simultaneous struggle as you feel the relationships with people that you care about slowly sliding further and further away. But you don’t want to admit it or talk about it because if you do, then you know people will reach out and you’ll have to respond. No matter how much you want to say yes, you still just want to say no.

You feel sad and worried that people that you like and love and care about will think that you don’t care about them anymore. That they don’t matter to you. The social anxiety creates a story about how they judge you for withdrawing. And you know you could set the story straight, but that would require interacting, so you don’t.

And honestly? You can’t decide if this is the first time in your life you feel mentally and emotionally healthy, or if this is just the first time you’ve completely allowed yourself to be broken and okay with it, without still trying to do what society tells you that you are supposed to do.

Maybe both.