Openness, Truthiness, and a Whole Lot of Ramble-ness

Over the past few weeks, I've been scraping around the depths of my mind. Well, a lot more than usual anyway.

This is when I typically follow up one vague "not really saying anything" with a "not really an explanation" elaboration.

While waiting on an appointment yesterday, I found myself pondering my tendency to do this. This hiding of myself (and that's what it really is) is a habit I learned out of necessity at a relatively early age, and over the years, it's been further reinforced.

But that doesn't make it right.

At some point I'd made the conscious decision to be more open about myself. Selectively so, in the sense that I'm more careful who I talk to, but those I do.. heck, if anything, I err on the side of too much information.

However, that openness hasn't translated into the online world. It's funny, how online stuff is considered highly ephemeral, yet at the same time, once it's out there, it'll always be out there. I've always held that one shouldn't post something online unless one was okay with absolutely everyone seeing it -- significant others, family, friends, acquaintances, employers, colleagues, google, script kiddies, pornographers, the NSA, whatever. At the same time, I also firmly believe that I'm accountable to what I say, be it in public or private.

As an aside, I've also found that in a general sense, you shouldn't tell someone something you wouldn't want everyone to know. 2010's disastrous conclusion was in no small part due to my confidences being betrayed, then repeated, distorted, and amplified. So maybe my keep-my-cards-close online persona is actually consistent with my meatspace persona after all?

But I digress. I don't talk much about myself here. I've had many reasons for this, but in the end I guess it comes down one thing -- Cowardice. It's a strong word to use, but it's appropriate. If I don't write anything, it can't come back to bite me later. I won't be forever held to something that could (and indeed, probably will) have changed, sometimes merely hours after it's posted. I won't have to worry about hurting the feelings of someone reading what I write, and dealing with their ire, deserved or not. I won't have to worry about getting fired if I complain about the pathologically incompetent project management practices of my employer, and yes, that's been a huge source of recent stress.

So, yeah, I'm a coward. Sure, there are some very pragmatic reasons for those decisions, and there's a part of me that asks "is it fair to use that label when you're just performing a cost-benefit analysis of the consequences?" After all, isn't that part of being a rational adult?

Throughout all of this, an obvious solution pops up -- take it anonymous; create a random account on tumblr or blogspot or whatnot and let my words flow forth. Yet that feels somehow dishonest; it feels like I'm still hiding myself, only coming out when nobody's looking. Is that a greater act of cowardice?

It's not like I fear for my life for speaking something unpopular. Here in my cushy, well-paid, generally healthy, middle-class life, what do I really have to worry about? Why can't I just appreciate what I have, and get on with my life?

Somehow I fear that I'll lose my soul if I keep silent, even as I know that ultimately nothing I have to say is of any real importance. I feel I must say to the world "Yay verily, this is what I am; This is Solomon", and somehow make my mark, even as I have no idea what that actually means or where this rambling will lead. There's no real purpose to this beyond discovery; both of the world at large, but mostly of myself.

I have no right to complain about feeling alone, that nobody understands me, bla bla bla bla -- look, Solomon, it's world's smallest violin! -- when I make it impossible to accomplish by being a closed-off introvert that actively resists what he claims to want. I let the uncomprehending stares (or outright "how-dare-you-question-my-world-view" hostility) dissuade me from even asking the intractable questions that have always plagued me, even as a child.

I sometimes catch myself in Catcher-in-the-Rye-esque rants about "the phonies", but I get over myself soon enough when I realize I'm just as guilty as the rest of 'em. It's an absurd position, being intelligent enough to see the bullshit of the world (my own included!), yet not intelligent enough to figure out what to do about it. Or perhaps it's not intelligence that I lack?

One of the books I've been reading lately is Flowers for Algernon. The main character, Charlie, is retarded guy in his 30s who undergoes an operation that boots his intelligence to that of a true genius over the course of a couple of months. Unfortunately, while his IQ shot off the charts, his emotional quotient was not affected, and much of the book deals with his struggles to reconcile and heal his deeply wounded emotional self. At one point, in a drunken rant to the scientists that "created" him, Charlie says:

Intelligence and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn.

That quote hasn't left my mind since I read it.

Raw intelligence and even education I have in abundance, but that's often as much of a curse as it is a gift, because it helped set me apart from the rest through no fault of my own; even apart from my own family. That intellectual barrier helped spawn an emotional one. It's something I'm still struggling to understand, much less rectify, and it's been sobering to realize that those patterns I learned in my youth are not only still going strong today, but that they are self-perpetuating in all their misery-induced glory.

As I've grown older (and at least a little wiser) I've been able to recognize many of these patterns and even slowly influence them, but I have little real guidance to what things should be; it's been a lifetime of trial and error, and mostly error as the list of "well that didn't work for me" keeps growing.

But I digress again.

Going back to Charlie's drunken rant, I want affection, yes, but I think more than that.. I want compassion. I want, no need to feel that I at least exist, that my struggles are not only real but are also understood, even if they're just another example of the human quest for permanence and meaning. I want to share that meaning, even as I recognize that everyone's meaning is ultimately unique to themselves, and may be something fundamentally private and thus un-shareable.

In the end, that desire for shared meaning is why I've not done this anonymously. Hiding, even if only behind a pseudonym, defeats the purpose of this exercise. Anything less than total open honesty is ultimately self-defeating. After all, what good is attention, affection, compassion, or even understanding if it's presented under false or incomplete pretenses? Is one selective edit of myself any more or less valid than another, when it's the totality that matters? If I leave one (perhaps embarrassing) detail out, it could completely change the results. While I don't think or feel that it should matter, I can't argue with the fact that it currently does.

So what I write must be Capital-T-True. I have to be able to stand behind it, since I'll suffer the consequences, good or bad. If I'm unsure about something, I've preferred to keep it to myself, because I see this world as one that demands absolute certainty and punishes doubt. Yes, I recognize the irony (or is that hypocrisy?) of this, as I damn the world for demanding certainty from myself when I hold myself to an even more ridiculous standard. Peeling back the layers to expose this doubt isn't an expression of defeat; it's the first step towards honestly looking for answers, and when it comes to a pursuit of truth, there can't be any sacred, untouchable cows standing in the way.

That doesn't change the fact that I'm still uncertainly afraid of making a fool of myself. But I'd rather be damned for what I am then liked or loved for something I'm actually not.

Speaking of sacred cows, another complication is that any expression of doubt opens you up to the hordes who believe they have TheOneTrueAnswer(tm). To these people, all questions have the same answer, or rather, what they have offer is an answer in search of a question; a foregone conclusion so desperate for support that even the most inconsistent explanations get held up as proof.

Yet, am I really any different? Am I not holding to some deep "conclusion", and searching for support of its validity? I console my self-accusations of hypocrisy with the knowledge that at least I'm not claiming to have the one true answer for everyone else, and I like to think that I learn and modify my quest when I find I'm wrong.

The real tragedy of those shouting hordes is that keeping them at bay takes effort, and that takes its toll. It's difficult to selectively harden oneself and still remain generally open. I wish more people would realize that while this quest for meaning is fundamentally emotional, it has to get past a coldly intellectual gatekeeper!

I suspect, at some point in the not-so-distant future, I'll re-read this and chuckle with some comment about how foolish I was at the time. But then I'll remember that the uphill road to wisdom contains a lot of foolish detours along the way, and that I did the best I knew how to do at the time.

Still, even now, three pages into...this, I find myself wondering what I've actually accomplished here, pouring my confused heart and mind through this keyboard. Will I just attract unwanted attention -- as opposed to the wanted attention I'm forced to admit a desire for? What exactly is it I'm actually after? Would I be better served by just going to the gym and doing my best to trigger an asthma attack?

(You know, maybe I'll do just that. Minus the asthma attack bit)

Deep down, I know that there aren't any certainties, that knowledge and especially wisdom comes from knowing how little I actually know and how that despite black and white ideals, life is about navigating infinite shades of grey.

...Now if only I could figure out how to get my emotional self to face up to and be okay with the paradox of that fundamental truth.