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Nov. 20th, 2019 11:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressGonna write about bells, since I just rang the entire night and I'm feeling pretty good!
***
Why is bells sometimes Really Hard for me, and what does that actually mean.
(an incoherent andprobablycertainly meandering essay by Sor Kyress1, that probably won't get finished tonight, but ought to be posted at least.)
So! I do change ringing! I have for a little over two years2 now! It is a mathematical loud hobby that involves patterns and going places you're not supposed to be and cooperation and precision and practice. It's a hobby where you have to spend several months before you can be a 101 level beginner. It's got a wonderful, warm, group of people (with _shockingly_ low levels of interpersonal drama, knock wood), and regular practices, and parts you can do alone (draw diagrams) and parts you have to do in a group (ring) and occasional competition and being in high places, and endurance challenges and a lovely mix of physical-versus-mental. I'm very fond of it, and will happily talk your ear off about it more later.
It also may be the single thing that has made me cry most (second most?3) in the past few years. Sooooo...why.
(I don't think I'm right now at a point where I have to ask "why are you doing this". I got asked that by both Austin and my therapist in the same week, back last February or so, which shook me enough to make a couple changes about how I was reacting to bell-stress, to wit, not writing self-hating things anymore in the ringing diary.)
But why does it make me cry? Because bells is designed to be a hobby that's very appealing to the smart, fast, precise part of my brain that revels in doing well at challenging things. But it's also designed to be a hobby that absolutely _brutalizes_ my rejection sensitive dysphoria because jegus christ kiddo, you're not perfect and how dare that be the case.
If you mess up in bells --and you will mess up, everyone messes up-- you can sometimes get back on track, but sometimes not. Sometimes you are just spiraling stuck and unable to scramble into a place. That's very frustrating, quadrupled when suddenly everyone is yelling at you to boot.
(There's more I could say about that, but it rubs very badly against some of the things I'm not good at talking about, so I'm not.)
If you mess up in bells, even if you get yourself back on track, sometimes you get other people off track as well, and it cascades and fires out but you know it was you who fucked up first.
If you mess up in bells and everyone gets back on track and keeps going, it still had that section that sounded _awful_. This is not a subtle hobby. You cannot hide your missteps. If your handling is poor, it will be evident to everyone in the band, room, and block.
Ways to mess up in bells seem pretty much evenly divided between handling mistakes (you're not practiced enough, your body is not good enough at doing this thing you are asking of it) and method mistakes (you are not smart enough, your mind does not hold things well enough.) And I suppose also focus mistakes (wait, hunting five or six? Is this a plain method or am I treble bobing? Did I miss a dodge? Did I skip a place?)
I have spent at least seventeen years actively struggling against and with the concept of perfection. Intellectually, I can know it's not attainable. But my upbringing was such that the expectation of me was nothing less, and now my internal judgement is absolutely locked onto perfect as the only acceptable answer4.
Furthermore, perfect is the only acceptable answer, but it's not something to be lauded or rewarded. If you are less than perfect, you should feel shame --and I am using a very specific form of the word "you" here that means "me and absolutely no one else", aren't pronouns fun-- but if you are perfect, well yeah, that's where you should be in the first place.
So praise doesn't exactly work for me at bells. I like hearing it, I suppose, as intellectual calibration/confirmation of how I'm doing, and every once in a while something cuts through particularly nicely5, but praise doesn't actually...feel...good? The close cousin to perfection is arrogance, and that's probably how I come off if you say "you did that well" and I say "yes I know", but that's all my brain has space for --yes, I did it well, I was _supposed_ to do it well, I'm also breathing well and you're not applauding that.
I just don't understand being praised for something I _should_ be doing right in the first place.
And entangled with _that_ is the fact that, despite being a fucking trainwreck failure at self-assurance6, I do actually have a reasonably close idea of what I can do. It needs tweaking every now and again, but most of the time when I make a request or grab a rope, I know what I'm getting into. So again, if you ask for a touch of Stedman doubles, and talk me through what happens during a single, and I say "cool, I'm good for this" then yes it's very likely to go first-time well. But I don't get _praise_ for that, it went well because I wouldn't have said I was good if it wasn't going to be.
So bells is a lot of fun and very pretty to listen to, but I'm not so good at it as to not totally make it sound less pretty, and then the rest of the touch is essentially ruined because jegus, why did I fuck up the beginning so badly?
I want to be good at this. I want to be so much better than I am at this, I want my handling to be smooth and accurate and sharp and crisp and forget methods, I can learn methods, I just want to sound right. And believe you me, every time I don't, I notice and I file it away.
And depending on where my mood is at, that filed away "yep, imperfect and therefore failure" can be something I can laugh off or something that crushes my heart with the weight of the implied worthlessness. That second one is the thing I do when I have to go vanish, I go to the secret places a little bit and sob out "not good enough" at myself for a few minutes until I can unspiral and return. But returning is tempered by recognizing my own inherent lack of worth, and for the rest of practice I tend to be very very quiet. This is maybe a concentration thing? If I turn off emotions and engagement, I can focus better on the bells? Maybe also an accountability thing, if I stop taking ropes on my own and instead wait for assignments, I don't have to worry as much that I fucked it up for everyone else.
Anyways, it's fifteen minutes past bedtime, and I don't have any conclusions, obviously. Tonight I rang every single thing (small band, the way it shook out) which means I did two touches of Bob Minor inside, a touch of Stedman Doubles, treble-bobbing to both minor and major bands, Cambridge Places for the very first time, ringing up the tenor, and ringing down the treble. Some of it I got compliments on after, specific ones to me. Some of it was less successful. I feel _happy_ about all of it, I do like this hobby after all, but I don't know that I can feel _successful_ about any. It's hard for me not to see the flaws in what I do.
Objectively, it was a phenomenal night. Subjectively...*shrugs* I didn't go off and cry, and I didn't dissociate, and honestly, I'll take that win.
Maybe more later someday, if anyone ever reads this monstrosity.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: (unrelated) This is actually my full name when I'm being Sorcy. Which means my full name is longer than my nickname, but shhh. There's like...at least three different renamings by friends that takes me from my original Sluggy.net username of Sorceress to Sor Kyress, and I am way into it, honestly.
2: Two months, 23 days...
3: Gender bullshittery is waaaaaay up there. And admittedly, so is worrying about my job. And occasional other stuff. Okay look, I cry a _lot_ okay, it just is. I've brought it up to my therapist, t's probably fine.
4: It remains so frustratingly weird that I never really felt like I could celebrate passing my unit five, because of the 25 categories you can get ranked on (of which you need to get B or better in a certain two, and no more than 2 D's) I got 24 A's. People don't really share their scores around, but the bits and pieces I've gleaned is that this is unprecedented. But it wasn't perfect, so who cares?
5: Tonight Bryn asked if I was working on Cambridge, and when I said that maybe I should start, she told me "I think you'll do very well" --we did Cambridge places as part of kaleidoscoping.
6: I am alluding to the hour it took me to write my fucking AGM application, because one of the questions was something like "what are you competent at ringing" and it broke me because nothing obviously but that's not a helpful answer and I am compelled to give the people what they want.
***
Why is bells sometimes Really Hard for me, and what does that actually mean.
(an incoherent and
So! I do change ringing! I have for a little over two years2 now! It is a mathematical loud hobby that involves patterns and going places you're not supposed to be and cooperation and precision and practice. It's a hobby where you have to spend several months before you can be a 101 level beginner. It's got a wonderful, warm, group of people (with _shockingly_ low levels of interpersonal drama, knock wood), and regular practices, and parts you can do alone (draw diagrams) and parts you have to do in a group (ring) and occasional competition and being in high places, and endurance challenges and a lovely mix of physical-versus-mental. I'm very fond of it, and will happily talk your ear off about it more later.
It also may be the single thing that has made me cry most (second most?3) in the past few years. Sooooo...why.
(I don't think I'm right now at a point where I have to ask "why are you doing this". I got asked that by both Austin and my therapist in the same week, back last February or so, which shook me enough to make a couple changes about how I was reacting to bell-stress, to wit, not writing self-hating things anymore in the ringing diary.)
But why does it make me cry? Because bells is designed to be a hobby that's very appealing to the smart, fast, precise part of my brain that revels in doing well at challenging things. But it's also designed to be a hobby that absolutely _brutalizes_ my rejection sensitive dysphoria because jegus christ kiddo, you're not perfect and how dare that be the case.
If you mess up in bells --and you will mess up, everyone messes up-- you can sometimes get back on track, but sometimes not. Sometimes you are just spiraling stuck and unable to scramble into a place. That's very frustrating, quadrupled when suddenly everyone is yelling at you to boot.
(There's more I could say about that, but it rubs very badly against some of the things I'm not good at talking about, so I'm not.)
If you mess up in bells, even if you get yourself back on track, sometimes you get other people off track as well, and it cascades and fires out but you know it was you who fucked up first.
If you mess up in bells and everyone gets back on track and keeps going, it still had that section that sounded _awful_. This is not a subtle hobby. You cannot hide your missteps. If your handling is poor, it will be evident to everyone in the band, room, and block.
Ways to mess up in bells seem pretty much evenly divided between handling mistakes (you're not practiced enough, your body is not good enough at doing this thing you are asking of it) and method mistakes (you are not smart enough, your mind does not hold things well enough.) And I suppose also focus mistakes (wait, hunting five or six? Is this a plain method or am I treble bobing? Did I miss a dodge? Did I skip a place?)
I have spent at least seventeen years actively struggling against and with the concept of perfection. Intellectually, I can know it's not attainable. But my upbringing was such that the expectation of me was nothing less, and now my internal judgement is absolutely locked onto perfect as the only acceptable answer4.
Furthermore, perfect is the only acceptable answer, but it's not something to be lauded or rewarded. If you are less than perfect, you should feel shame --and I am using a very specific form of the word "you" here that means "me and absolutely no one else", aren't pronouns fun-- but if you are perfect, well yeah, that's where you should be in the first place.
So praise doesn't exactly work for me at bells. I like hearing it, I suppose, as intellectual calibration/confirmation of how I'm doing, and every once in a while something cuts through particularly nicely5, but praise doesn't actually...feel...good? The close cousin to perfection is arrogance, and that's probably how I come off if you say "you did that well" and I say "yes I know", but that's all my brain has space for --yes, I did it well, I was _supposed_ to do it well, I'm also breathing well and you're not applauding that.
I just don't understand being praised for something I _should_ be doing right in the first place.
And entangled with _that_ is the fact that, despite being a fucking trainwreck failure at self-assurance6, I do actually have a reasonably close idea of what I can do. It needs tweaking every now and again, but most of the time when I make a request or grab a rope, I know what I'm getting into. So again, if you ask for a touch of Stedman doubles, and talk me through what happens during a single, and I say "cool, I'm good for this" then yes it's very likely to go first-time well. But I don't get _praise_ for that, it went well because I wouldn't have said I was good if it wasn't going to be.
So bells is a lot of fun and very pretty to listen to, but I'm not so good at it as to not totally make it sound less pretty, and then the rest of the touch is essentially ruined because jegus, why did I fuck up the beginning so badly?
I want to be good at this. I want to be so much better than I am at this, I want my handling to be smooth and accurate and sharp and crisp and forget methods, I can learn methods, I just want to sound right. And believe you me, every time I don't, I notice and I file it away.
And depending on where my mood is at, that filed away "yep, imperfect and therefore failure" can be something I can laugh off or something that crushes my heart with the weight of the implied worthlessness. That second one is the thing I do when I have to go vanish, I go to the secret places a little bit and sob out "not good enough" at myself for a few minutes until I can unspiral and return. But returning is tempered by recognizing my own inherent lack of worth, and for the rest of practice I tend to be very very quiet. This is maybe a concentration thing? If I turn off emotions and engagement, I can focus better on the bells? Maybe also an accountability thing, if I stop taking ropes on my own and instead wait for assignments, I don't have to worry as much that I fucked it up for everyone else.
Anyways, it's fifteen minutes past bedtime, and I don't have any conclusions, obviously. Tonight I rang every single thing (small band, the way it shook out) which means I did two touches of Bob Minor inside, a touch of Stedman Doubles, treble-bobbing to both minor and major bands, Cambridge Places for the very first time, ringing up the tenor, and ringing down the treble. Some of it I got compliments on after, specific ones to me. Some of it was less successful. I feel _happy_ about all of it, I do like this hobby after all, but I don't know that I can feel _successful_ about any. It's hard for me not to see the flaws in what I do.
Objectively, it was a phenomenal night. Subjectively...*shrugs* I didn't go off and cry, and I didn't dissociate, and honestly, I'll take that win.
Maybe more later someday, if anyone ever reads this monstrosity.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: (unrelated) This is actually my full name when I'm being Sorcy. Which means my full name is longer than my nickname, but shhh. There's like...at least three different renamings by friends that takes me from my original Sluggy.net username of Sorceress to Sor Kyress, and I am way into it, honestly.
2: Two months, 23 days...
3: Gender bullshittery is waaaaaay up there. And admittedly, so is worrying about my job. And occasional other stuff. Okay look, I cry a _lot_ okay, it just is. I've brought it up to my therapist, t's probably fine.
4: It remains so frustratingly weird that I never really felt like I could celebrate passing my unit five, because of the 25 categories you can get ranked on (of which you need to get B or better in a certain two, and no more than 2 D's) I got 24 A's. People don't really share their scores around, but the bits and pieces I've gleaned is that this is unprecedented. But it wasn't perfect, so who cares?
5: Tonight Bryn asked if I was working on Cambridge, and when I said that maybe I should start, she told me "I think you'll do very well" --we did Cambridge places as part of kaleidoscoping.
6: I am alluding to the hour it took me to write my fucking AGM application, because one of the questions was something like "what are you competent at ringing" and it broke me because nothing obviously but that's not a helpful answer and I am compelled to give the people what they want.
no subject
on 2019-11-21 12:24 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2019-11-21 04:58 pm (UTC)I am cursed with an above average interest in introspection, and sometimes I remember that the user manuals I create for myself would be useful for other people as well. If only I also knew how to edit! ;)
~Sor
no subject
on 2019-11-21 12:48 pm (UTC)1st short answer - yelling is not helpful except in tiny, very directed bits, and should be replaced by a clearly projected voice, not shout (using your example, a shouted "we're hunting on 5, not 6" could help). Very focused incremental praise is supposed to be pedagogically useful. As an aside, it turns out that I'm not the only ringer in the world who issues stickers.
2nd I am chagrined that the AGM questionnaire caused you anguish. I was touched by the number of people who clearly had put a lot of thought and maybe emotion into their answers. I could talk for ages just about how ringers answer that question, either verbally when being visitors or on forms.
no subject
on 2019-11-21 04:55 pm (UTC)Tea or ice cream or a walk sometime would be very lovely, yes!
1st answer --The stickers are a'ight, I quite like the stickers. In general, I like praise from you-specific when I'd be more indifferent to it from a general population. My sense of your ringing is that you value the same things I do --precision and accuracy-- and I have a lot of trust in the fact that you're *not* going to give me false praise, and you're going to understand if I respond to "that was pretty good" with "well, not the first lead"
2nd answer -- please don't be? It's so _very_ much more a reflection on me than on the question. And I promise you, I did put a _lot_ of emotion into my answer, it's just that most of that emotion was on the "waaaaay too much and kinda sad" side, so I stripped it down to be as utilitarian as possible in the end. I found my initial notes of it, and may post them as well.
(Part of the problem was also that I was in the middle of a lot of Sad Life Bullshit right then which has, as predicted, settled out and is no longer nearly so severe a problem. I do find a really interesting contrast of that answer with my recent answer about "what do y'all wanna ring on quarterpeal day" where I divided things into "trivial, probable, and stretch".)
~Sor
no subject
on 2019-11-22 09:12 pm (UTC)Accurate self-assessment is really useful for a session planner. I suspect it is often hard to do, and not just in ringing.
no subject
on 2019-11-21 06:02 pm (UTC)I just don't understand being praised for something I _should_ be doing right in the first place.
I've seen you articulate this in different ways before, but this specific framing of it reminds me that I have been meaning to write about something that feels like close kin to it: I get really prickly when people thank me for things that I have no option but to do. (This sometimes includes "things that I do because my brain won't let me not," even if it externally seems like there is, in fact, a choice involved.) Don't thank me for things that I have to do; don't praise me for things that I should be doing in the first place—not the same thing, but siblings, maybe.
...all of the things I want to say about both of those things right now seem really REALLY self-evident (like that they both stem from a high degree of self-awareness and higher standards), so imma let it sit some more. Maybe I'll come back with a longer comment, or just make the post I've been meaning to make about it.
(ok work just got distracting so imma come back later with the other half of my thoughts, which are riffing a bit on the not-good-enough/quiet afterwards point)
no subject
on 2019-11-30 10:56 pm (UTC)Here is a twitter thread on RSD that hits it dead in the black for what it feels like during bells.