12. 2026-02-27 / index

Good morning and welcome to thread.

We've been rather dysfunctional over the last week and we pin a great deal of the blame on our sister and her boyfriend having camped all of the last week (and some) at our house. This is normally a three human, three animal home, with several sorts of balance between, so lifting the total to eight makes for trouble. Mostly, it's overstimulating, and those two earn their keep in ways which are not cleaning up, so inertia quickly sets in and the place gets messy and we do not match pace. It's supposed to work out alright if they also eventually leave. If they don't, it accumulates. Within our system all of us work better if the place we live in is - not necessarily "tidy", but not compounding inevitably worse day after day, because it's just beyond what we're dealing with - we breathe easier trusting that the space we occupy is more or less under good control, and "breathing" is pretty early down Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

We've been over the rest with friends already: there are other stressors, but those are easing, so despite the local chaos, we're beginning to have the heart to step out and work out of burnout.

In this (extended) moment we are mostly trying to deconstruct how we relate to senses of feeling "tough", of feeling "resilient". The mantra lately (have I written it here?) is "no superhuman solutions for human problems". I'm using this as a ground principle and just trying to figure out how to categorize "superhuman" and "human". We meant it almost literally when we laid it out at first: no exceeding whatever level of your own capacity you believe is reasonable, to address problems which are presently completely within the ordinary. And we applied it to our job, consciously, with a sense that it would be meaningful for our work on the music wiki, too, despite that we've hardly "really" returned there since setting this for ourselves. (There's a nastily uncomfortable sense that we are "really" returning there, already, and our current presence is completely in line with the new principles we're working out for ourselves, and deeming "oh, I'm not really back yet" is only a distraction measure. It's useful, but watch out, because it's also a lie.)

The mantra isn't textually about capacity; it's not about any quantity, or if it is, then only in the barest sense. But "capacity", even though I despise almost all psychological self-help framing THEREIN DERIVED, is still the language I'm familiar with. The other almost-but-not-quite unpleasant keywords on my mind are "girlboss" and "bodybuilding". (Can I call those the two genders?)

Let's take loaded terms, "good" and "bad", and not dress them up, rather tear them down. Put it in terms of adaptation: good means adapting toward set constraints, bad means adapting away. Now let's load up a term: "Agency" means having the opportunity to decide your own constraints, and willfully taking it. (Usually continuously, or at least continuously reaffirming that these are the constraints you still decide for yourself.)

I want to put on your radar some idea of "okay, but what is loss of agency? What if I continuously reaffirm my prior decision only because of a person or set of circumstances which continues to shape me?" Agency is an illusion which makes it easier for us to believe in and thereby harness creativity; the illusion is emergent because creativity is pretty much our strongest tool for survival and we each get to personally see that illusion reinforced, through life, if, well, it works out for us. If it doesn't work out, we "lose" agency, and pick up other adaptations instead. And those hold better, or get discarded too, and on and on until a dragon smokes us and we're toast.

If we ground agency as an illusion and then assess or take-for-granted the purpose of the illusion, then we find a sneaky and powerful combination, "despite" whatever nihilism / meaninglessness angle you'd like to throw. First we gain a sense of awareness on which actions' consequences reinforce/punish our sense of agency (generally, acting creatively, meaning with freedom to use one's conscious thought to guide one's action; and for us, now meeting where we feel a gap in our agency, with an aim to impact the localized world such that other people use their sense of agency in reaction). And second we gain a grounding in the process of finding agency for people and community and culture and society and on and on as a whole, focused at whatever scale. By realizing language or patterns in the steps we're taking to reinforce our agency, we suspect that we're really not on our own, and that many others - most others, maybe all others - are in this current too, and teaching themselves, and making their own movement. This is an aspect of connection which is important for us. It relates to reciprocation but also, more importantly, to non-reciprocation: our presence, companionship, swimming side by side, is often wanted but never intrinsically needed. We and all around us are free to let go. Moving together and apart is ultimately neutral. Banking in and out is willful; only inertia, stasis, stillness is the default. Every aspect of our experience means something if we let it, and it all vies for attention, and there is very good reason to offer it attention—in moderation!—because we would not have a sense for it if it did not help our forebears.

Anyway, toughness, resilience.

I'm scared of working hard and rubbing off on people the wrong way. I live in a background context, a given "truth", that overachievers should be embarrassed of themselves. Not for what they achieve or don't, not at all, but for the way they lift themselves up at all others' expense, utterly unaware. It's not good to be good at a thing if everyone around you hates that they're worse, and chooses to quit while they're only a short ways behind. It's not good because your values are such that you want to be surrounded by people trying, caring, attempting, working, always eventually achieving (one of the most important lies—one dangerous to assume everyone is compatible with). In fact you're only working at all because you want their conditions to improve, and you know that "every man only can improve his own condition", and you want to rip that truth to shreds and grapple the nugget of truth, both fists bared; or maybe hug it and accommodate it and let it be, contradictory, the sort of conflicting given you know you wrap up in illusion, blankets, clothing, unite in something greater than raw being, unite in a person, a self, a shared self.

You just want to embody the struggle. You want to make it visible, and be a person someone likes in their life too, in their world, in their home. You want to show that the struggle is perhaps the core of you, but it's also not quite all of you. —I really don't like transitioning between writing in second person and first person and not actually meaning anything by it—I don't like this autopilot switching of perspective which is really just staying in the same perspective, being one, living the absence of distinction ("one" and "multiple", "I" and "you", "us" and "them")... I'd like to learn to use that technique on purpose but it's still completely automatic, and I don't know if it can be used on purpose, and that's a magic to me...

At least one pattern has become clear to me in a way that I am more comfortable making use of, fitting into my thought, even if it's still automatic of its own, too. I like approaching the ideology and frame of thinking and being and self-construction and social-placement and blah blah blah, which has made me who I am and given me so many problems to deal with, and... addressing my relationship not by swearing off my context, or any aspect of how it's made me. Addressing my relationship instead by treading with care and searching for the truths it has revealed about me, the principles I've learned which, in the end, the framing struggles to accommodate, but I still couldn't have spotted without starting where I did. In fact there are infinite ways to tread "with care" and lately some of them are with violent imagery (whether or not we see that as actual violence) and upset me and scare me and on and on, but they all feel realer than looking away. I still extract something I would like to hold more bare, and rehome with an awareness for where it comes from, what it owes, what I owe. Old and long and strong teachings hold firm. Firm, but not too tight...

I don't want to hurt people or still people by moving in their presence. But I choose to trust, through a principle and a kind of learned knowing rather than logically deduced truth, that my own stillness is more contagious, and never quite the answer. I need to move for my own sake, first, and I hold this above what I want for anyone else. This is a core boundary; it is a constraint. If agency is an adaptive illusion and adaptation is defined as movement toward or bounded by a constraint, then I choose to make my own illusions, refine my world, by clarifying which constraints I must follow. That is agency.

So I do move for my own sake, and I also try not to hurt anyone or still anyone. I figure that the previous teaching of "overachievers suck, bro" is itself oversimplified and rooted in blaming its target above all else, a very pointed kind of punishing movement and rewarding stasis. I'm sick of swords, which are single-minded! I ask the wrist who it isn't bringing-with, who it's left behind then ran away. It is just not that simple. The presence of effort is never the reason, not on its own, that another doesn't try. So what else? This is the precise question. I want to look as far away from myself as I can—no, not myself, but the fact of my effort. Not just because my effort is non-negotiable. No, mostly because it's the only language I've been shored up in, the firmest, and I want to sail "on my own" centering "my" as the meeting of a hundred contradictory and unrelated perspectives, and just learn to think about a bigger picture. What else, what else, what else?

Earnestly, if I sense that I hurt people in my effort, then how else am I hurting them, than in the sheer fact of trying? If I pick up on an impact that I have then can I imagine reasons, reasons, aspects of my behavior, apart from my believing in something which I think is too much for them, is incompatible, is not their truth? I've become very, very attuned to the signals that I am doing something wrong and am making someone upset. Hypervigilant is probably the right word, but I don't do psychology. I want to demote this way of thinking, but I can't just discard it. It's too much part of me, and in the end I still believe in it. So instead I have to accept the signals and work them into something smarter. The senses are honed (probably too honed, tunnel-vision, a hawk useless up close) but I only work them into changes in my action with the language of shame and guilt and fear and regret and occasionally, even, spite! Wouldn't I have so much broader a scope of change if I felt with different words? Wouldn't that inspire me to pick up on different signals, more, not just the nuances of the ones which I keep taking this way? (Can't I believe I've already developed those signals, learned in better times, taught myself things I only think I forget...? I'm not going in blind. Release the romance, for a time just do without: I trust that...)

Sorry, I have work and stuff. I am going to make an effort to regret starving myself in preparing these words instead. I'll probably fail. Catch you later.