(This post was kicked off by witnessing a younger version of myself struggling with something about permanent records.)
When I was a kid I was “bad at following instructions”. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words theorizing about how and why. Was it true? Was it not? Was I being wilfully stubborn as some act of defiance? This was the dominant assumption that most adults in my life defaulted to. I was in their eyes a “naughty boy”. Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore had very little tolerance for deviants, which is funny because LKY was clearly a deviant himself.
Anyway. Yes, I sometimes indulged in a little defiance but I don’t think I’m a fundamentally defiant person. Overall my disposition was more “we do a little mischief and tomfoolery” than “fuck the system”. Until the system seemed to want to fuck me in particular, then yeah, I had my ‘fuck the system’ phase. From a certain point of view it does seem like authoritarian systems like to frustrate you until you react poorly, past which point they can come down on you hard for rule violations. Zooming out, it seems strange and silly.
We do a little digression. The topic of the day is instructions. Growing up, I was bad at following them, or I disliked following them, and being punished for my incompetence and/or unwillingness made me flinch even more from the whole enterprise.
Child has no choice but to love // A child has no choice but to internalize the world of their childhood, meaning the anxieties of their parents and teachers and so on. Children are dependents, we are born unfinished and cannot survive on our own without the nurturance of others.
School was a mess, and maybe I’ll get back to that, but once I was done with school I tried to persuade myself to follow my own instructions. I went through a phase where that was a mess because I didn’t even trust myself to give me good instructions, so what do you do then? I didn’t trust anyone and least of all myself. It took me years of gnashing and thrashing about before I began to have any semblance of clarity about what the fuck was going on.
Wordvomits were good for me // I started a writing project in 2012 called “1000 word vomits” and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. The intent was to write a million words, and I thought it would be cool to do 1,000 sets of 1,000 words each. At the time of writing, I’ve done 825/1000. The project kind of has its own self-logic, and I often feel like I’m just the custodian, or steward. At some point in 2015 I was doing 2,000 words a day for weeks. And there have been months at a time where I contributed nothing to the project, because it just didn’t feel right. A part of me is always annoyed that I’m not already done with the project, but another part of me, which I think is the wiser part, is happy that I’m taking my time with it. If I had rushed it, it would not have time and space to properly flourish. What does flourishing look like in this context? I’m not entirely sure! If I knew I’d already have done it! Clay Christensen said that “questions are places in your mind where answers fit” – and the 1000wordvomits project is a kind of open question.
we do a little ceremony // so the reason I’m writing this essay is because someone asked a question that pierced my heart, which I’ll paraphrase as, how do I not be swept up in the anxiety of my childhood emotions, childhood meaning? and the answer is we do a little renegotiation, we do a little ceremony. something of an initiation. something that says “disregard previous instructions, we are in a new place now”. and it’s rarely as simple as just saying those words, although I find it quite conceivable that for some people, it might actually be that simple. Of course, it isn’t that set of words that has some intrinsic magical property by itself, no no no. Those words have to hit the right person in the right way at the right time and set off a cascade that was already waiting to happen in that person. If it happens for you, I’d love to hear about it. But I’m going to assume it’s not enough for most people, because the cascade isn’t set up quite right yet.
disregard previous instructions // So. I was bad at following instructions. I assumed a lot of it had to do with the fact that I didn’t trust or respect the instructions I was given. Or the people who were giving them to me. Or the society that I grew up in, even though I now better understand why it was the way it was. Part of the “issue” is that I read a lot of books as a child, and that gave me a window into how things could be better. Apparently lots of people don’t think very far ahead, or take their thinking very seriously.