On balking
Mar. 7th, 2018 04:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sebenikela(This has a point, bear with me…)
When I was a kid, I did gymnastics for a while. When I was maybe 12 or 13, I learned how to do a roundoff back handspring back tuck so I could move up to level 6.
One time at practice, my coach was telling me my back tucks were getting really low to the ground, because I was throwing my head back instead of setting properly and going up first. So I tried again, and in the middle of doing the skill, I went “wait wtf am I doing?” In midair, upside down is not a good time to experience sudden self-doubt. I fell on my head. Nothing serious was hurt, but I was done with practice for the afternoon just in case.
And after that, I couldn’t do back tucks without someone spotting me. I fixed the actual physical problem, I could do the skill better than I ever had before, but I could not make myself do it unless someone was standing out on the floor to spot me. They weren’t helping me, they didn’t even have to touch me, they just had to be there.
This went on for ages. I could do the thing with a spot. I could even do a back tuck from standing, which is objectively harder because you don’t have any momentum to help you. I could not do it in e.g. the level 6 compulsory floor routine.
And the most helpful thing a coach said to me wasn’t “you can do it!” It was “look. realistically? the worst thing that could happen is you land on your knees. you’ve done that before, it’s not that bad.”
And so finally, at a meet, mostly out of sheer frustration, I went “fuck it, I probably won’t die,” and did it. And I landed on my feet.
And I feel like there’s a metaphor there. For the times where by any objective measure I can Do The Thing–but that doesn’t matter if my brain won’t let me because it is convinced that flinging myself up into the air, backwards, is a fucking terrible idea and what the hell am I thinking?
There’s a lot of things about life, especially right now, that feel a little like I’m flinging myself up into the air, backwards. All the evidence suggests that I will land on my feet. But nobody’s standing there to catch me, and what if? What if I get up in the air and forget how to do it and fall?
But what if I fall?! is my brain trying to protect me. It doesn’t help to yell at it about how wrong it is. What can help is saying “OK, then you fall. But you know how to fall. You’ve done it before. You fall, you get up, you figure out what went wrong and you try again.”
When I was a kid, I did gymnastics for a while. When I was maybe 12 or 13, I learned how to do a roundoff back handspring back tuck so I could move up to level 6.
One time at practice, my coach was telling me my back tucks were getting really low to the ground, because I was throwing my head back instead of setting properly and going up first. So I tried again, and in the middle of doing the skill, I went “wait wtf am I doing?” In midair, upside down is not a good time to experience sudden self-doubt. I fell on my head. Nothing serious was hurt, but I was done with practice for the afternoon just in case.
And after that, I couldn’t do back tucks without someone spotting me. I fixed the actual physical problem, I could do the skill better than I ever had before, but I could not make myself do it unless someone was standing out on the floor to spot me. They weren’t helping me, they didn’t even have to touch me, they just had to be there.
This went on for ages. I could do the thing with a spot. I could even do a back tuck from standing, which is objectively harder because you don’t have any momentum to help you. I could not do it in e.g. the level 6 compulsory floor routine.
And the most helpful thing a coach said to me wasn’t “you can do it!” It was “look. realistically? the worst thing that could happen is you land on your knees. you’ve done that before, it’s not that bad.”
And so finally, at a meet, mostly out of sheer frustration, I went “fuck it, I probably won’t die,” and did it. And I landed on my feet.
And I feel like there’s a metaphor there. For the times where by any objective measure I can Do The Thing–but that doesn’t matter if my brain won’t let me because it is convinced that flinging myself up into the air, backwards, is a fucking terrible idea and what the hell am I thinking?
There’s a lot of things about life, especially right now, that feel a little like I’m flinging myself up into the air, backwards. All the evidence suggests that I will land on my feet. But nobody’s standing there to catch me, and what if? What if I get up in the air and forget how to do it and fall?
But what if I fall?! is my brain trying to protect me. It doesn’t help to yell at it about how wrong it is. What can help is saying “OK, then you fall. But you know how to fall. You’ve done it before. You fall, you get up, you figure out what went wrong and you try again.”
no subject
Date: 2018-03-09 06:34 am (UTC)Like many kids who are too smart for their own good, I grew up terrified of failing. Particularly terrified of failing school, but also terrified of failing at plenty of other things. At some point when I was in undergrad (not actually that long ago) I was like, gosh this is a stupid anxiety that is actively interfering with my life.
The thing that worked the best was literally telling myself that it was a Life Goal to get a C in at least one course. This was my best approximation of The Worst Thing Possible(tm), which, yes, I know that's ridiculous. This worked in the following way:
a) It was absurd enough that I could start squinting sideways at the thing itself.
b) Whenever I had a week/day/assignment that went badly, I would say, "you go self look at you succeeding at your Life Goals! Gold star. Have a chocolate." This is not a thought particularly compatible with panic, since if nothing else the sarcasm is like actually funny.
c) After a while (okay, after over a year and my nearly dropping out of school) in the background my brain was like, "You have listed Fail A Class as a goal. Why is this a goal." And being the powerful instrument of rationalization that it is, it came up with a whole bunch of answers:
- because that way you'll see how the rest of the world lives
- because then people won't think you're ridiculous for stressing about school
- because fuck everyone who insisted you succeed so they could brag about you
[nb this wasn't actually my parents. it was just like all of the culture everywhere]
- because it will help you be a Good Example for your siblings who are also all stressed about school and probably shouldn't be
- because if you are bad at a thing and hate it, maybe you should like, figure that out earlier so you don't overcommit
Brains are like, really amazing at rationalizing! It's kinda scary. And the specific reasons are, like, specific, but I think the principle that if you just insist hard enough you will eventually get backfill-reasoning holds generally.
After that part was underway I had a lot more reasons to believe in this Life Goal, rather than just using it as a Sarcasm. And when I did eventually succeed [last quarter of my senior year], I was momentarily upset/disappointed but also a bit proud of myself. And it definitely did not ruin my day much less my month, and I don't think I would have believed anyone who said that back at the beginning of this whole thing.
I think that when something is The Worst Thing Ever (tm) it's like a divide-by-zero. There isn't a way to reason usefully, every attempt at at thinking about the subject just produces panic. Finding a way to have thought-processes that don't short-circuit means that you can actually think about, "okay so if that happens I Have A Plan," or, "okay so if that happens I Officially Don't Give A Shit," or whatever. Fixing the divide-by-zero is the most important thing, and if you're lucky you can brute-force getting to I Have A Plan or I Have A Silver Lining, but also, like, making jokes about it every time the subject comes up in your thoughts can ease up / add / replace the associations so you can think straight-er about it.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-09 02:37 pm (UTC)this is so true oh my god. Also have you read this post about The Worst Thing In The World? It's kinda a similar deal
I was lucky in terms of the academic fear-of-failure thing because I went to Caltech and got hit in the face IMMEDIATELY with "you're not the smartest, you're basically average, and (this is important) NOBODY CARES." People say "Admissions doesn't make mistakes" when you (almost inevitably) decide you're not smart enough to be there. But it's really not competitive, like...at all. Failing a class, or failing out of school even, didn't result in weird social consequences (idk about you but it definitely did in high school and prior for me). It just...wasn't interesting, or important. If I had gone to Purdue (or wherever) I could have kept "smart science nerd" as an identity, but when your entire school is smart science nerds, you gotta branch out. And there were built-in ways to do that that were awkward nerd-friendly, because........they were built by awkward nerds for other awkward nerds over decades of haphazard history.
So like... I was in an intro CS class my first term freshman year, and it was making me CRAZY it was so hard and it assumed all this background programming knowledge I didn't have and you had to get your code to run before you could turn it in so I was behind even though I was spending a ton of time on it...
And I complained to an upperclassman after House Dinner (think Harry Potter with math instead of magic) and he was like "you should drop the class."
I was sort of dumbfounded. They (the nebulous "they") had encouraged freshmen to take this class, I needed to learn this stuff, I am the stubbornest motherfucker I know and I wasn't going to just QUIT because it was HARD?! ...except yeah, I did. It was a great decision. I dropped that class, I blew off some others, my GPA my first couple years was like 2 or something, and... it was fine? Life went on? I learned how to Officially Not Give A Shit and that's a way more important thing to learn than how to solve differential equations.
All of which is a long-winded way to say YEP, you're totally right.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-10 05:00 am (UTC)I'm glad it's been helping you lately, and glad you had that coach back when who figured out what the most useful thing to say was.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-10 08:41 am (UTC)-----------
Whereas I went to Cornell, which (should have been, wasn't actually) fine from the "you're basically average" view, but everyone there in STEM was like, planning to get rich quick on Wall Street, in a horrifying mix of evil and naive. So I did not so much manage to make friends, and instead I managed to turn my imminent dropping out into a transfer to local U State, where I could commute from home and have Zero social life dependent on classmates. (I have, erm, ~issues~ with school-like environments.)
Everyone expected me to hit that wall in college! I expected me to hit that wall in college. I .. didn't. I mean, I have like zip ability to context-switch so I can't Take All The Classes like some people do, but the ones I did take I pretty much never failed because of not grokking the material. (Being overwhelmed, yes, deciding that memorization is what google is for, yes, accidentally falling down the wrong rabbit hole, occasionally, failure to successfully organize a group project, yes, failure to understand stuff that's deep enough to be worth understanding, no, and that was the only one that I actually saw as reflecting-on-myself, so.)
Social consequences for failing, um, idk? I am *bad* at noticing that kind of thing, which doesn't mean it doesn't have an effect. I did fail/drop out of math my senior year of high school. Mostly because the teacher was like, you're smarter than me so I'll give you harder problems that the rest of the class, fail to explain the methods even when asked, and then give you a grade based on those harder problems and not the problems that the rest of the class was doing (that I could & did totally do). At which point my dad was like, you don't need this bullshit in your life she can't teach you anything that a textbook can't. So I spent 10 weeks teaching myself electromagnetism instead and took the AP; do not regret that choice in the slightest.
There might well have been social consequences but I have a tendency to ascribe those to "people are inherently random & unpredictable" rather than remembering that cause and effect is a thing. And at this point my memories are fuzzy enough that I'm not sure if there were chronologically related consequences or not. It's certainly true that there were all sorts of weird status things about grades: it was better to do better but not if you didn't visibly put in effort and not if you were stressed about it (cause how dare you be stressed when you already have the grades that the person you're talking to badly wants).
(The really impressive thing was that I was a consistent A student in math throughout high school despite having what I now think is mild dyslexia; when doing arithmetic on paper I get the right answer, eh, maybe 2/3 of the time? Depending on how complex the operations are. The rest of the time I accidentally reordered something, flipped a fraction upside down, etc, and I never had any ability to detect that kind of error. My grades for problem sets on paper definitely did not survive the transition to college; happily, I didn't have to do many of them. I only did as well as I did in high school because my teachers all knew me and knew that I understood the thing and were mostly willing to cut me variable amounts of slack for not being able to multiply in a straight line.)
no subject
Date: 2018-03-10 04:32 pm (UTC)I actually have a friend who went to Cornell and hated it for basically the same reasons you're describing. This is why I'm like "ok idk how but caltech was apparently magic" because yeah, there were some douchey techbro types or "i'm gonna go make $$$$$ on wall street" types but I had a bunch of "people i do fun stuff with" friends (as opposed to "people I Talk About Stuff with" friends, which are rare creatures indeed). And all of us were ok-ish students and mostly just interested in doing cool stuff and learning new things? And then I left and it turns out way too many STEM people are not like that? And it made me sad. (also, apparently this is becoming less and less true for caltech because lawyers and admins, which also makes me sad because then it's just another ~prestigious~ school for nerds. anyway.)
The sort of defining feature of my life through 10th grade was that I was in _the_ Gifted class in elementary school (there was one class for the whole school system), so I was with pretty much the same 20 kids from 2nd-6th grade, and most of those same kids were then in my Gifted middle school and high school classes. So the kids I knew were basically all Those Kids and they thought grades were important... So in 7th grade the fact that I was STILL doing the arithematic review worksheets when everyone else got to move on to whatever the fuck else got me eye rolls and weird looks...but I still couldn't y'know, memorize shit well enough to do arithematic faster. Because, as it turns out, ADHD is a thing, even in smart girls.
Amusingly, and again, because caltech is weird, my "i can't memorize shit and i do math pretty slowly" problems were less of an issue, because all our tests were take-home and usually had a 4 or 5 hour time limit, and preeettty much all of them at least let you use notes. Because that actually makes sense! that lets you actually test understanding and not memorization! you can still make seriously fucking hard tests, too, the average grade on some of those was like 35%. Which is EXCESSIVELY hard and incredibly frustrating, but that's a separate problem. (Apparently kids from caltech do notoriously badly on subject GREs because they're like "wait I was supposed to MEMORIZE THINGS? wtf is this?")
anyway.
i have feelings about math and science education. i just have nowhere NEAR the required amount of patience to actually work in that direction.
(and this is incoherent but i should stop procrastinating so here you go anyway)
no subject
Date: 2018-03-10 04:34 pm (UTC)And yeah, it's nice to have a very straightforward physical analogy sometimes.
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Date: 2018-03-14 06:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-14 01:05 pm (UTC)good luck with work summit, those things are exhausting.