why all this music?!?

joy, expressing feelings, my relationship with work, etc

Fear is just a foggy lens, and anger is just love under enormous pressure, love contorting itself, throwing its voice, disguising itself in order to go undetected

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where do i begin? i hardly know where to start, because part of me has been the way i am for as long as i can remember - reserved, stern, a bundle of nerves held together by anxious wires strung too tightly

perhaps find me at age eight, when my friends at school were the other kids interested in math contests, when friendship was primarily about outscoring other people and feeling jealous when i couldn’t. i did not yet understand what it meant to like someone or care about them, and i did not yet realize that one person’s gain did not need to be another person’s loss, and i could not know at the time that it would take a decade and transcontinental flights and going off to college to finally escape the shadows of those relationships

maybe catch me at age eleven, with an older sister slipping in and out of depression and parents never more than a tremor away from erupting in criticism. happiness, i learned, sticks out like a sore thumb; better to put on a poker face and never take it off, better to learn to dissociate, better to keep your head down and work work work

or fast forward to age sixteen, when the person that i thought was my best friend suddenly turned on me, pointing out every little inaccuracy in my words, pouncing on every sign of weakness or inconsistency. i was at a loss for how to respond, so i did the only thing i could think of - forge a suit of armor devoid of chinks and wear it whenever i felt threatened. i did not understand that armor weighs down on your soul, that you can’t draw a clean line between people who make you feel threatened and people who don’t, that by trying this i would inevitably stunt all the other relationships in my life as well

at what point do i stop framing these events as this is what happened to vincent and begin framing them as this is how vincent chose to respond to what was in front of them? when exactly does agency emerge? it is pointless to speculate on this; all i know is that all of these things happened and that i have hurt people as a result

my ex told me after we broke up that i seemed like a serious person and that was part of why it was difficult to connect. i thought back then that seriousness was necessary to get anything important done, never mind that realistically speaking i wasn’t working on anything that important anyway. a few of the foggy lenses i could not see through at the time: that my seriousness was a fear of letting myself run free. that my sarcasm - the vein of sarcasm that runs through too much of mit - was a fear of saying how i really felt. that my deflections of compliments were not modesty, they were a fear of setting other peoples’ expectations high and then failing to meet them. that my sadness was a fear of sharing more of myself with the world, because when you project sadness you are allowed to withdraw into yourself and other people will excuse you for it

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a couple weeks ago i was going about my usual morning in the office when suddenly i saw all the feelings in the world as a jumble of feedback loops. the loops had always been hiding in plain sight, but i’d never stopped to consider my relationship with them. feedback loops such as - open body language puts me in a better mood, which further opens up my body language. when i express excitement, my friend becomes happier and that in turn makes me happier. i only managed to glimpse of a small portion of all the loops but suddenly i could see how all the feelings and people and objects in my life were connected as if by strands of an invisible net

i spent most of my life under some illusion that things are just the way they are - that my feelings were the consequence of recent events and whomever i’d been spending time with, that other peoples’ moods were not something i could influence, that the nature of our interactions was some complicated function of what kinds of people we were. none of these statements are incorrect, but taken too literally they give the impression of a lack of control, specifically that there is no point in expressing emotions, because they fail to acknowledge the other direction of the feedback loop

i am thinking now about all the feelings i was too scared to share over the years, all those loops that i never allowed to run their course, all the joy that i prevented myself from grasping, all the genuine excitement and laughter and hope that sparked inside me and then fizzled out because there was nowhere else for it to go. you’re telling me that this entire time i could’ve been so much happier and freer than i was, and all along it was just me blocking myself from all these experiences for literally no reason? i cannot believe how silly i have been

sometimes i wonder why it took me so long to see things as they are. probably the most important reason is that i had to develop friendships where i felt safe enough to internalize at a very deep level that other people have my best interests at heart, and this only happened over the past year. (i wasn’t able to get this from my parents, because i want you to be happy coming from them always had too many other meanings attached to it, like i want you to be successful or i want you to feel good so that i don’t feel guilty as a parent)

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last month i was driving up a mountain in tennessee when i encountered a mountain biker. they must have been cycling at around 30 miles per hour, because i spent twenty minutes right behind them and never felt like i was being forced to drive slower than i wanted to. it was perhaps the most inspiring physical feat i’ve ever seen in-person, and it reminded me of that moment in circe when the protagonist meets ariadne:

“I watched her dance, arms curving like wings, her strong young legs in love with their own motion. This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun.”

i have been neglecting my gardens recently, i think primarily due to some misconceptions about the nature of good work - that it must be serious, that it requires sacrifice, that it has to come at the expense of hobbies and having a life and so on. probably the more accurate version of this sentiment is that outworking people and moving faster requires making sacrifices, but conflating making sacrifices with doing good work is a bit absurd (though unfortunately quite common)

one of my coworkers often frames productivity as about determining your peak sustained performance level and figuring out what it takes to maintain that. maybe that was supposed to be obvious, but i never explicitly considered this framing? anyway i think that good work must in some way be sparked by joy and that it’s important to keep the feeling of joy unblocked to sustain peak performance, which necessarily involves keeping other feelings unblocked too. all this is a bit new for me as i’ve always thought of work as having some component of suppressing feelings for the sake of focusing

anyway, all this is to say that i think it’s time to get back to tending my gardens

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some of my current goals are to love more wholeheartedly and to share more freely and to let go of myself. i know this implies a more volatile life and opening myself up more to vulnerability and disappointment, but i think it will be good. i’ve always thought that joy amidst a backdrop of sadness is one of the most beautiful feelings in the world, and i am excited for it

If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?