MOOP!

Gonna 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 and probablycertainly 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.

I can't not shape myself to your desires, and so I'd really prefer not to even try

Wow wow wow. Okay, so, I don't know that I have a lot to say about this, not really, but look, one of my chief coping mechanisms for every negative emotion ever is to go away for a while. I find hiding spaces like I breathe, and the first time I ever truly loved my sir instead of feeling some degree of interested lust was the first time he ever found me inside one and held me tight and worked his will such that I was able to explain my failings.

(I still have had hiding spaces he did not know. Not used more than maybe once, but I _must_ be able to remove myself if necessary.)

But anyways, the abovestated quote is a really interesting perspective on _why_ I need those spaces alone from all else. I've always had this sense of not wanting to pretend to be happy, and not wanting to make people sad by burdening them with things they can't help with --and yes, I know lots of you are my friends and would cheerfully share those burdens, but that doesn't help when I'm at, say, a dance event and more than half of everyone around is a friendly acquaintance at best. There's no acceptable way to explain to vague members of your social circle why you're covered in tears without fracturing any sense of privacy or maturity.

There are simply not enough socially acceptable explanations for crying that I can lie through all of them, and one of the terrible side effects of being me is I express just about every negative emotion and a very many positive as well with weeping-crying-sobbing. As often as not, it is ugly and self-destroying¹, and not something I've any interest in sharing.

I have also known forever and ever, even before I had words for it, that I will absolutely become what you are craving, to the best of my wants and abilities. The clearest note of this is the way my gender will adapt to be the one my desired desires, but in so many other ways, I will strive to give you -and be- what you expect and want. There are limits, of course (I predict I've fucked many fewer people than have wanted to have sexytimes with me), and in moments of negativity -anger, stress, fear, sadness- I will become much more sharply my own self than your projection.

I don't think this is particularly a bad thing. It is a thing to be mindful of, but I suspect it has rather a lot to do with why people seem to like me. I am very good at figuring out --not even consciously, mind-- what you would like, and offering it up to you. So long as the offering does not become sacrifice --and it won't, resentment is a negative emotion and as stated that brings me back to my own sharpness--, it is a good way to be.

But when I go into one of my hiding places, it means that I don't have to pretend to be what you want. You can't have expectations --prediction or obligation-- of me if I'm physically absent. And please don't say that you don't have expectations or that you only want me to be myself, because I've met very few people who don't at least want me to be happy. If you have emotions, I am obliged to share somehow in those emotions, and that's fine, that's brilliant, that's _what humanity is all about_.

If I hide --and make the decision independently to hide-- I am no longer obligated to participate in that humanity, and fuck it, sometimes I really just don't want to! When independent, I don't feel any great need to force myself to be happy. Sometimes it's nice to just sit and examine ones negative emotions.

So yeah. That was much longer than expected, and I have abruptly run out of steam. I feel right now as if I almost can't keep words from falling out of my fingers, but at this precise moment, I've little else to say. Dunno.

I'll be fine, in case anyone was worried for that. I will always always be fine in the end. I'm going to be immortal, after all, and it'd be an utterly foolish idea to fuck that up before I'd even lived out my first century.

~Sorcyress (ged Athe, ged Gaea²)
MOOP!

1: I fell asleep with a monster of a headache last night, the strain of crying too much coupled with physical eyestrain. It made me nauseous, which meant I couldn't eat (eat, I could barely keep down water!) which certainly didn't aid any. It ebbed with morning, of course, as such things are wont to do.

2: I'm not sure why this post wants a priestly signing, but it does, so there, have my major affiliations.

Adding to the ever-expanding list of reasons and ways I am somewhat less sane then I should be:

I am mentally incapable of social imperfection. I can't have people upset or angry or annoyed or anything through my actions, most importantly, I can't have them hurt. Because if I've hurt someone, that burns like a mofo.

More later, she lied. Like all promises of continuation, I doubt I'll ever come back to this entry and write more.

Sor

Original Tags: hurt, why i'm fucked up, nosce te ipsum, emo, self, me, hate, sorcy is fucked up, perfection, selfhate

This is a lovely TNA-ish thing I wrote.

Alternitivly: This is something about the dance concert.

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This is a meme I stole from Anne:
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Original Tags: cloneconvo-fin, tagged, writings, memage, unfiled people-lrhs, tech, memage-assorted