The Patreon Letter - 18th Jan, 2020

This letter was brought to you by the Victory Gundam soundtrack, which is now on Spotify along with a lot of early Gundam music! Just search with  ガンダム  and it'll bring them up!

Hi everyone, Em here basically a week late with the patreon letter this time. Apologies, our goal in 2020 is that we are never ACTUALLY a week late, but I sure am cutting it close with the first letter I had to write for this year.

My reason for delay is also the basis for the topic of this letter. You see, I was going to write a bunch of capsule reviews for the 70s sci-fi collection that the Criterion Network has streaming this month, but I kept putting it off saying that I should wait until I'd seen some more, and then got to the point where I was trying to watch two movies in one day and ... well, you know how production brain can be, if you've been reading these letters for any length of time, or similarly struggle with making things as a hobby.

I still might do those capsule reviews, or pull my thoughts into a broader piece when I'm done watching the movies, but really what I wanted to do was dig into production brain a little bit beyond just the usual Abnormal Mapping stance of capitalism being bad and forcing you to instrumentalize your passions into work.

That's true still, of course. But it doesn't explain why I still feel so bad when I'm not doing that. Or, it doesn't explain it wholly. There is more going on, and even if it's related it is distinct enough to bear mentioning. And so today I want to talk a bit about insecurities. 

The thing I've been realizing as my brain runs in circles and I careen into depressive episodes is that alongside the torture of living in capitalism where we hustle or die, I also have this desire to be validating myself and my pursuits by Making Them Count. And I don't just mean in a spreadsheet way, I mean in a way where if I can't define my consumption as critical and intelligent and enriching, I have a very hard time engaging in the act without anxiety slowly overtaking the entire experience. This happens most often with games, but it creeps into other things as well. 

This is a fraught set of criteria to apply to your life, for obvious reasons. Let's go in order, and start with critical. Critical is the easiest one to explain, because most of us know what it is to have critic brain where all you can do is pick things apart and while it's totally fine to enjoy doing that it makes it very hard to relate to people who don't also have terminal critic brain. I talked about this on VoIP Life 43 briefly, but it becomes very hard to operate outside of internet spaces when you've acclimated yourself to the declarative stance -> (usually peaceful) argument version of relating to your friends. 

It's just not how the world works, and makes socializing in real world spaces very difficult for people like me. 

Which only increases my social anxiety, but also makes me insecure that I might just be a hopeless ideologue. 

Intelligent is more fraught, and comes loaded with a lot of assumptions that arise out of my personal history. I was a bullied kid through my elementary school years, because I was shy and fat and probably too feminine to be One of the Boys even then. The one thing I had going for me was being a good student and clever, a combination that became more in vogue when I got into the back half of school and the popular kids were the smart and go-getting ones. I was still awkward, but shyness wasn't nearly the deterrent it used to be, and praise for scholastic and intellectual accomplishments just reinforced my overcompensating that I had developed years before. 

But because this value system came out of fear and coping, it could also be vicious and judging, especially since it was a catch-all defense for other increasingly important problems in my life (namely, gender feelings and class insecurity, as a poor kid in an affluent school district). Things that did not meet my criteria of sufficient complexity or nuance or broadly defined 'intelligence' were inherently bad and worthy of derision. Anyone in 2020 can see how this is fraught, but I was 14 in 1999, I barely had the internet at this point. Honestly, the only thing keeping me from going full on galaxy brain sapiosexual rationalist edgelord was a) the aforementioned gender feelings and b) that didn't really exist yet, or if it did it wasn't readily accessible. Again, 1999. Social media was the sailor moon webrings and AOL chatrooms I'd hang out in.

Honestly, the two things together are still something I struggle with. We talked about this at length in VoIP Life 44, but it's very easy to turn being judgmental and critical into just going in on people who you otherwise like and agree with when they disagree with you on the most trivial shit. Part of this has to do with the way that online is set up, of course, but part of this is disposition. When you're already wired poorly to see the smartest arguments as personally self-validating of your worth? Every fight is a fight for the soul. 

A lot of the last few years for me has been trying to learn to work around this deep psychic wound that makes me like this. Working on positively reinforcing friendships, on building a community, has gone a long way towards teaching me how to be the kind of person that values more than just being the smartest person in the room or being the quickest with a barb (which are, of course, the flourishes of the clever and not a projection and deflection of our own fear and sadness). 

Enrichment is the third one then, which I kind of nebulously define as 'can be justified as teaching me something or giving me a better base of knowledge for my work.' This is a broad category that generates a lot of productivity traps, as I find myself say ... crunching through a bunch of 70s Sci-Fi movies so I can write about them and fill in my many gaps around that era. In this instance, it fulfills both. It's also how I can justify spending a particularly bad October crunching through the entirety of Naruto. It's for work, I say, not questioning just how relevant a ninja boy shounen from the 00s is to a Gundam podcast covering the early 90s. It's how I can ignore doing things I should do like laundry or practicing the piano in favor of starting a new book even though I'm already in the middle of two oh no Em what have you done this is too many books.

The thing with this is that it easily masquerades as both self care and a wise thing to do, but it comes out of a place far from either and has a compulsive quality to it. I'm not losing myself in a book, I'm trying to jam art in my brain as fast as possible to bandage up two assumptions: fear of limited time alive (I can't fix that, outside the scope of this letter) and insecurity that I am not the smartest person I know and thus a useless failure but I can work harder than almost anyone so I can make up the difference if I can only go fast enough. That is exactly in the scope of this letter, and is the thing I'm actively trying to fix.

It also is the one tied most directly into the opening here where I said these weren't fully sprung out of capitalist oppression. This one? Definitely part of the culture we live in, birthed from the expectation of production. For a critic, for someone who values 'intelligence', reading or watching or knowing things is in part production. Accumulation of knowledge equals wisdom. This is how 'expertise' is formed, a very fake idea used to entrench hierarchies of who is worth listening to and who is not. It's all very terrible, and it's something that most of the people who read this are probably susceptible to. 

We don't become people interested in internet criticism without a certain disposition, after all.

But the reality of course is all of this is created by social pressures as much as it is my own specific insecurities and problems. The thing I can change is trying to not buy into them, trying to not feel like an idiot when other people are smarter or simply know more (or different, a bad brain isn't picky) things than me. I am pretty good at extending this to others, I don't judge people for not knowing what I know, but it's very easy to be hard on one's self and much harder to be cruel to other people for me. I know me, I can see all the failures, and I have not found a bar for measuring myself so high I don't feel compelled to try to hit it. 

This is such a toxic metric of self worth, but it's one that I struggle with daily, even as it has in part been responsible for all the successes I've had with Abnormal Mapping in the past and present. Which is, indeed, it's own problem: how do I continue to make and produce when the reasons I make and produce are so negative, but they are motivators I need. I can't just walk away, I need to hot swap maladaptive reasons for being for positive ones in the middle of an engine that must keep trucking along.

I have no answer to that, that's just what I'm going to talk about in therapy this week. Which means it's time for this letter to come to a close. I hope there was something in here that was worthwhile by any metric.

Until next time, 

Em