I dreamed the tide was turning and fash were being held to account.
Oh yeah, new year, next phase, begin
Look who's got you goin' crazy again
I'm a trend, I set one every time I'm in
I go out, and just come back full circle again
-- Eminem + Dr. Dre, "Encore"
29g protein cocoa, creatine+
2 eggs, 1/4c chz, fajita-size tortilla :: 20g+
eml inbox weeding
7:33 ofc opened
* * *
secure your own mask before helping others
I must have been chewing pretty hard on something last Sept, because I went blog-silent from the 11th to the 27th. I don't think I'd quite circled back to pondering Stoicism deeply at the time but the 11th's thought resonates with the Stoics: life's most basic demand is to carry our own weight. I was undoubtedly struggling with big hard feels about what it meant that a cramped guest room in a household with constant lifestyle/personality friction was the best of a not-great set of options.
There are exceptions and contexts to that philosophical principle of course; it's also part of our essence, as a fundamentally social species, that we nurture each new generation from radical helplessness / dependence toward self-reliance; cooperate to build more together than we could individually; and not merely comfort, but carry the aging, the sick, the broken according to their need and our means, not vice versa. So, sure, prosocial values are valid too. Life is not just this one challenge: self-sufficiency, nor that one challenge: prosocial integration - but an endless dynamic adaptation to the evolving complex of tensions between individual and community needs. The balance is never settled.
Doing for oneself is a point of pride, so what's the opposite of pride? Being dependent was humiliating. Or there's an even more concise emotion-word, shame. Brene Brown would remind us that shame and guilt are related but distinct: shame is about essence, or what we are, what infuses/defines our whole being. Guilt is granularly tied to something we do (or have done). To the extent that we can make amends, and shape ourselves to not keep doing the same things over and over, mistakes made shouldn't load us with self-loathing shame. Making amends and adapting to do better is the remedy for guilt. Learning to distinguish what we do (a mixed bag of successes and failures!) from what we are (humans! deserving of dignity and care!) is the remedy for shame.
* * *
It was only rather late in that 14.x months between DC and Car-town that I probed the topic of "smart kid syndrome". AKA "gifted kid syndrome", there's no formal clinical term, it's an informal but recognized bag of "challenges often associated with high cognitive ability":
- perfectionism, analysis-paralysis, risk aversion
- procrastination
- identity / self-worth tied to performance, especially being seen as exceptional
- a sub-constellation of emotional patterns incl chronic achievement anxiety; hypersensitivity to perceived unfairness and mistakes; emotional suppression.
Perfectionism isn't just a fragile self-image tied to performance; it can also be interpersonal, e.g. holding others to overly rigid expectations/standards. For example, I had an advanced talent for spelling and vocabulary, it wasn't a thing I had to work at, I couldn't turn it on or off, it was just part of my being but people praised me for it? So I think I must have worked out this calculus on a preverbal level: IF my spelling is praiseworthy, THEN conversely, poor spelling must be contemptible! And certainly in grammar school this was reinforced with vocabulary quizzes and spelling bees. More insidiously though - since this thing which others seemed to judge valuable was part of my being, not an effort, so too must less-than-perfect spelling imply something essentially unworthy, less-than, about others.
* * *
Articles that explore the connection between "smart kid syndrome" and procrastination often propose this weird logic: when gifted students fall into a pattern of procrastination, it's a reflection of an internalized idea that "if I have to work at it, then that means I'm not smart after all".
ACoA's "laundry list", in the Big Red Book, tenders a different explanation: "we became addicted to emotional turbulence; we use procrastination like a drug" to recreate cortisol-spike states. I rolled it around my brain a while but it never quite rang true.
What does feel more true, and it's a combination of two things really: First, as gifted students graduate from effortlessly absorbing, filing, and recalling granular information, into more complex high-school level projects ... they often lack critical experience in effort itself. And second, having mastered extended reading in the effortless "flow" state, and also having trained my spatial relations skills on LEGO and model kits with super explicit step-by-step directions - I was thrown off-balance when teachers assigned projects without a step-by-step roadmap of how to "do it right". There was a "perfect" way to assemble a 1972 Revell model of the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise; it was illustrated in the model's accompanying build instructions. There was no such instruction manual for "in 500 words, compare and contrast gender roles in The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible". And much less so assignments like "pick a current events article from this week's newspapers and, using at least 3 primary sources, write a report about the article's central issue topic".
* * *
I've shook the Internet periodically over the years to see what insights about it might fall out. One reco that emerged very recently, and I had to roll it around my head a while to decide whether it rings true, is "having hobbies with low stakes for failure". Another emergent direction for therapy is the cognitive shift of basing self-worth on "process" rather than "performance".
What does this process-not-performance shift mean? Performance-based self-worth ties self-worth to metrics: grades, income, awards, external validation. The sense of "being enough" rises with success and crashes with failure. For perfectionists, this means fragile identity - "if I'm not exceptional, then I'm a fraud". By contrast, process-based self-worth anchors value in controllable inputs: effort, curiosity, persistence, integrity. I can judge myself (and others) on whether I showed up honestly, learned something, or tried meaningfully, regardless of the result.
| Performance-Based | Process-Based |
|---|---|
| "I earned an A :: I'm smart/worthy" | "I studied thoughtfully :: I honor my learning" |
| Failure = proof of inadequacy | Failure = data for growth |
| Worth fluctuates with results | Worth remains stable through ups/downs |
| Identity = what you accomplish | Identity = how you engage |
| Others' approval matters | Internal values guide you |
| Risk avoidance (protects image) | Risk-taking (enables learning) |
As far "hobbies as practice space for safely failing" ... there are endless examples. Cardio and strength training were pretty instructive for me in feeling good about simply showing up and putting the time/effort in, especially after the first few months when gains slowed. The mindset we bring to creative practice (painting, sketching, music, cooking, whatev) becomes much more important than producing a perfected piece. Let learning be the goal, develop neural/behavioral pathways that ring the reward bells decoupled from "production" / "acheivement". Let mistakes be a fun/funny part of a game. Normalize the struggle through imperfect results into adequate results. No grades, no audiences.