Hope is the thing with the feathers / that perches in the soul / and sings the tune without the words / and never stops at all

I have a post that is half-written, but I can't bring myself to finish it today. Maybe another time. I just came here to say one thing, and that is: I still believe. I still hope for a better future. It may not be one that we can imagine right now, but I do not believe that all goodness is dying. And the reason I still have hope is that I know people in their 30s who are smart and thoughtful and they are figuring things out. I know people in their twenties who are afraid and worried, but still doing their best to make things right, to act in ways that honor their best selves. And I know teenagers who are brilliant and funny and hard-working and dedicated. Those of us who are old may have royally fucked things up, but I know these kids. Whatever mess we leave them with, they will work their hearts out to fix it. They are my reason for hope.

What is your reason for hope? 

(the post title is Emily Dickinson)

a deep dive (that is a joke)

The first time I came in contact with the idea that Representation Matters (the idea, not the phrase, which was still years away), it was circa 1980 and I was in college at a conservative Christian school, not the place where you would expect it to show up. 

I was taking Intro to Sociology, and the female professor was a bit of a renegade, and she wanted us to understand that male experience is not universal. This is so obvious now in 2022 that it seems difficult to imagine it was ever otherwise, but at the time, I had been trained to believe that what white men experienced applied to all of us. 

Since it was a Christian school, the vast majority of the students had been born and raised in middle America Christian homes and we all bought into this idea. In hindsight, it doesn't even make sense. In the churches where most of us grew up, only men were allowed in leadership positions, so how could their experience be the same as women who could only make coffee, teach children's Sunday school, and work in the nursery?

I still remember when I began to understand her point. We'd been having a discussion in class where all of us good little girls stated quite firmly that we didn't need to have the patriarchal language of the Bible untangled, because we knew God was beyond gender (it's right there in Genesis 1:27, the image of God is both male and female, and we were so pleased with our progressive selves for knowing that). So it didn't make any difference to always hear God referred to as capital-H Him, or Father, or even to hear believers referred to as men, because we knew that language covered women, too.

Then she had us read a number of bible passages and traditional hymns aloud, substituting her for him, and mother for father, and woman for man, and she was right. It was entirely different. There was no mistaking: it makes a difference.

Rise up, oh women of God, in one united throng,
Bring in the day of sisterhood and end the night of wrong!

(That's a hymn, not the Bible, if you didn't grow up in a similar church.) So fast forward 25-ish years to the first time I heard the actual phrase Representation Matters (meaning it matters that you can see yourself, your self, your gender and race and orientation and economic status, in a book or on the screen or online), and I got it. I may be slow to the party at times, but I can learn.

Since I'm about to talk about my own representation, I should say first of all: I know that I don't have anything to complain about. I am privileged beyond belief, especially in a global context. I understand this more and more as time goes by. I'm not trying to paint myself as a victim here, because I'm not. This is not a tale of woe, this is a tale of me sorting through my experience.  

All of that setup was just to tell this story. I know now that I am a nerd, in both the good and bad senses of the word. I love knowledge, I love being smart and knowing things, I love being good at tech. I roll my eyes when a podcaster says, "We're going to do a deep dive into (some topic) today," and then they spend about three minutes talking about it. (Seriously, that is not a deep dive. Call it something else.) When I set challenges for myself, they are intellectual challenges. I am a nerd.

But the category of nerd didn't even exist when I was a kid, and it certainly didn't exist for women. By the time I was in high school, there were Radio Shack home computers and a computer club at my high school, but the closest most of us got to personal contact with a computer was by using state of the art Texas Instruments calculators. Which were miracle enough. 

Real computers were so far out of the realm of what I could conceive of as possible for a teenage girl in East Texas in the late 70s that it didn't even occur to me that I might be interested. I didn't learn to use a computer until I was in graduate school (my first, abortive attempt at grad school, in 1983)--so like everyone else, I typed all my undergrad papers on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter. 

But once I finally made it to the world of tech, I was immediately in love. It felt like I had found my niche, my people. We weren't great at social skills and we were always wearing the wrong clothes, but we knew how to program the damn VCR. C'mon people, it's not that hard.

I loved the online forums and the listserv email groups for specific niche interests. I loved everything about all of it. I knew how to write DOS batch files. I knew how to create data-driven graphics in Lotus 1-2-3. I was a regular reader of Slashdot. I loved being the one who knew how to fix the laser printer. My favorite job ever was database programming, which I did for a couple of years in the late 80s, just as the shift from flat-file to relational databases was happening. I was ON IT. 

Since the bar for admission to all of this was being comfortable with all things tech-y, it was a self-limiting field. Pretty much everyone online back then was a nerd, and we were all self-taught. The real techies, the ones who had taken computer science classes in college, were writing machine language (code that communicates directly with hardware).

But alas, times have changed. Now there are all kinds of programs that act as front ends to the tech. That's not to say they are dumbed down-- I'm not nearly smart enough to know the social media tech that teenagers handle with ease. But there aren't the same kind of social and knowledge barriers to admission that there were back in the 80s and 90s. 

So now the internet has become just like real life. Once again I am a nerd that doesn't really get it, the one that doesn't know how to write a good post on Instagram or Twitter, isn't really all that interested in the vast library of makeup and skincare tutorials on YouTube, and really, seriously does not want to make pop tarts or ketchup from scratch from a cooking blog. I do not want to shelve my books by color, or drape them with ribbons so they look prettier. 

In other words, I no longer fit in on the internet. Those are not my people. And since years of being out of the industry have dulled my tech skills, I don't really fit there either. This has been true for years, but I couldn't figure out what had happened until an online friend from back in the 90s pointed it out to me. *sigh* It was nice while it lasted.

(You know, I'm kind of cringing to think of this as an issue of representation, but I don't have time to totally re-write this post. Just think of this post as two separate stories.) 

7ToF: off we go again, with a detour into mental health

1. We've been on two trips recently. The first was to the Oregon coast, and it was our first trip with the new camper. The camper was great, although the drive was a little challenging since it poured, I mean poured, on all of our driving days. It was like the downpour was moving with us. But once we got there, the weather was beautiful and we had a great time. My boys played a lot of golf and I got to spend time reading and relaxing and recharging. Then it rained for the whole drive back.

2. The second trip was just me, going to Texas to visit my mom and my sister. One of my nieces was graduating from high school, so that was the centerpiece of the weekend, but mostly I was there to visit. It was so hot. That is the best thing about travel: it reminds me of the good things about where we live. I'm back at home now and it's beautiful -- everything is finally green and we're even getting some flowers blooming. And it is not 93 and 90% humidity.

3. Apologies for the pity party in my last post. I hadn't been out of town in months, and that always makes me a little nuts. I used to think there was something specific about this area that made it necessary for me to get out of here regularly, but over the years I've realized that it's just me. Wherever we lived, it would have been the same. I get all tangled up in my head and it takes removing myself from my normal life to be able to untangle. The good news is that getting out of town for even a few days usually solves the problem--partly because I get somewhere else and realize that however difficult certain moments may seem, I'm still lucky to live here and to have friends who put up with me.

4.  The older I get, the more I realize that my mental health takes some care and management. I don't know if this is true for everyone. It doesn't seem like it, but then this isn't something people our age talk about. Nobody who who grew up in the fifties and sixties was raised to think about how to manage their mental health. 

We were all about conformity back then, especially for women-- there was little diversity in how you could dress, what kind of job you could have, what kind of personality you could have, all of that. And you were not supposed to be depressed or anxious or conflicted. Back then if you weren't killing it (a phrase we never would have used), you just took valium and zoned out, I guess. I was a kid, I'm not sure how it felt to an adult.

Anyway. I think I developed a persona that I thought would make my parents happy (they, especially my mom, were certainly not happy with my nerdy, introverted self), and that would help me fit in. I spent my twenties and thirties shedding that persona, and then I think I spent my forties and fifties trying to make things work without a social persona at all. I thought that was being "authentic." 

But here's what I know now: you have to have a social persona, and if you shed a previous version, it takes work to build a new one. I hope the new one I'm working on is more true, more based on being confident in myself, but it's not something that happens on its own. At least, it hasn't for me. 

Defining terms: What I mean by social persona is: a part of you that runs interference between what you're thinking and feeling, and what you actually say and do. A part of you that can consider how your words and actions will affect the people around you, and modify them accordingly. My impression is that some people have this naturally, but some of us don't. It takes some effort.

Does that make any sense at all? I'm learning this right now. I don't know what I'm talking about. I haven't vetted that with a therapist, since I haven't seen one in awhile. I spent years going to therapy and I highly recommend it, but I haven't been recently. 

Hey, OK, this can be #5. I tried the advertised-everywhere online therapy website Better Help during lockdown. I didn't feel like I needed full-on therapy, but I thought if I had a few sessions and developed a relationship with a therapist, then when I felt the need for a check-in, I would be able to just get online and schedule an appointment. It sounded like a great idea. 

But I didn't read the fine print about how you pay, so I'll tell you so you don't have to waste (an amount of money I'm embarrassed to admit) like I did. Better Help operates on the "athletic club" model of payment-- you pay a set fee every month, whether you use it or not. At the time I tried it, there was no pay-as-you-go option. Like an athletic club, if you make full use of it, the fees are reasonable. But if you're only doing 3-4 sessions once or twice a year, it's ridiculous. So, I had two sessions (which were good, the therapist seemed competent), and then I figured out the payment thing and opted out.

This post has ended up not lending itself to numbered paragraphs, but I'm pretty sure you've heard enough from me. We're already heading out again--Doug's family's annual vacation together is in North Carolina this year, and as you read this we will be on our way. We always have a great time with his family, I'm looking forward to it. I have two other half-written posts, so if I get them done and scheduled, you might hear from me next week, otherwise it will be when I get back.