Friday, July 24, 2020

July 24th Friday Update: Showtunes, Memory Palaces, and Shame

Microblogging time!

1.
Just watched a YouTube video where a vlogger named the showtunes that reduce them to a weeping puddle of goo, so I figured I should compile my own list.

Turns out I already had a Spotify playlist of "Showtunes That Make Me Cry" which consists of 26 songs, so I'll pull out my top 10, from "make me cry the most" to "make my cry a little less."

Rent- I'll Cover You (Reprise)
Godspell- On the Willows
Avenue Q- Fantasies Come True
Fiddler on the Roof- Chava Ballet Sequence
Matilda- When I Grow Up
The Last Five Years- Nobody Needs to Know
Rent- Will I?
Dear Evan Hansen- Words Fail
The Last Five Years- I Could Never Rescue You
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog- Everything You Ever

Kudos to Rent and TL5Y for being the only ones who needed to be on the list twice.

2.
This last week or two has just, like, sucked for depression stuff. I'm just completely out of spoons to do much of anything but also full of anxiety and panic at how little I'm doing. And it sucks.

3.
I ended up writing this as a comment on a friend's post but wanted to share a slightly amended version of it here, too, it encapsulates some of what I've been thinking about this week:

I admit I've been struggling myself with "God is in control" language, as so many of my evangelical friends and acquaintances have turned that into their reason for not being cautious or look out for each other, and now those words actually bring up more fear. So while I do believe God is in control, I've found myself needing to reframe the concept a bit before I can really let go of my anxiety. So for me, my mantra has been that God is the only one that can pick up where my efforts end. That doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't fight HARD for safety procedures, or feel stressed or angry about where things are, or research overseas grad schools. But it means that when I come to God, sobbing that I've done everything I can and don't know what else to do, he's like, "Yeah, I know, you've done everything you need to, I've got it from here." And I've been working on leaving that with him. So difficult, but working on it!

4.
So my policy over the last couple weeks for watching my old church's sermons is "I watch until something triggers shame, then I turn it off, document what that was, and return next week." Some weeks I can get through 3/4 of the sermon. Other weeks I'm done 5 minutes in. I have not yet made it through an entire sermon.

I think there are two pieces to this. On one hand, I am well-versed in training myself to feel ashamed (or "convicted" as I would have framed it as a teen). Could you even call yourself a Christian teen leader if you didn't repent after every sermon and repent of like a whole BUNCH during every summer retreat? I mean, you probably could, but the vibe I got was that the more often you were convicted, the better a Christian you were, so I got so, so good at narrowing in on the part of the sermon meant to make me feel bad. I never really sought to be encouraged. (I'm suddenly having memories of pastors saying "I want to encourage you today" in a context which clearly really meant "I want to convict you today." ...I wonder if people think they are the same thing?)

So on the flip side of that, while I definitely am good about ferreting out the language I'm supposed to use to shame myself, there is a lot of that language in the evangelical church. Like we can only make God look good by making ourselves look bad, or we can only motivate people to do good out of fear of doing bad. So the church trained me to read these sermons this way, and I eagerly accepted, and we worked together to build a really strong shame response to, like, everything, and called it the Holy Spirit.

So I'm documenting the phrases, the analogies, the verse interpretations that I'm trained to respond shamefully to, in the hopes I can undo some of that conditioning.

5.
Reposting this thing I wrote on my Twitter. I quote-tweeted someone saying, "Normalize 'hey can we reschedule I don’t feel like hanging today' without people getting offended cuz some days I really wake up and don’t feel like doing anything" and then wrote the following:

So this is getting just CRAPPED on in the comments. "Don't make plans if you can't follow through." Which, I mean, you obviously should follow through on commitments as much as you possibly can.  But on the other hand, the logical conclusion of that is believing "people with chronic illnesses shouldn't make plans or try to hang out with people." Because life can be unpredictable for us!

If you would rather we show up to hang out with you but be miserable the whole time, then that's fine, you just maybe shouldn't be a friend to vulnerable people, because what you value most isn't what they can provide.

And there are compromises. If you keep moving your schedule to spend with them and they keep needing to flake, start scheduling your times with them for when they're truly convenient for you is you won't be resentful if they step out.

I've been the one who flaked. I've been the one who pushed through and was glad she did, as well as the one who wished she hadn't. I've also been the one who's been flaked on and just started relabeling people in my life to "don't count on them but I hope they're there" status.

And sometimes it's just a friend incompatibility. There are friends I can't make space for for months, because I don't have emotional spoons to carve out time to be with them and have them not be there. But when I do, I will. And if I never do, I hope someone else will.

TL:DR;


6. 
So I just finished reading this book about memory competitions and techniques, and it was intriguing, and I need like a party trick because I don't have any, so I am teaching myself to memorize shuffled decks of cards. At this point I can do it, just verrrrrrrryyyy slloooowwwwlllyyyy -- not a good party trick yet, it's like 15 minutes of memorization and then another 5 to recall them.

The basic idea is to use visual and spatial memory to create associations with the cards. So for each card, you're supposed to come up with a specific visual image of a person doing an action with an object. So, for example, my ace of spades is "The Phantom of the Opera playing music on an organ." And then you memorize them in sets of threes -- so you imagine the person from your first card doing the action on your second card with the action for your third card. So then for each of set of three, you place them along a mental pathway with a clear linear progression.

The one I've been practicing with is a walk around my house. So, for example, I imagine my front door, and with the cards in front of me, I see Lady and the Tramp (2 of hearts) stabbing each other (nine of spades) with beer steins (seven of clubs). Which is a truly bizarre mental image, and it sticks. Then I mentally walk through my front door, and directly to the left, in my front closet, there's Christine Daae (six of diamonds) trying to warm herself up (ace of hearts) with mustaches (three of spades). That's my second set.

I was kind of startled how well it worked. On my first try, I memorized about 24 without going back to them or trying to remember them at all, but then when I did my mental walkthrough, there they all were.

Right now the slowest part is remembering which cards goes with which image. I had to redo my images a couple times just because I could NOT remember them, so I ended up grouping them by numbers -- so all my tens are Steven Universe characters, my nines are Star Wars, my fives are New Life friends, my Jacks are people who make me laugh. And then I even tried to think about associations I'd naturally make between suits and those characters. The diamonds characters usually have something to do with money, the hearts are often people whose central storyline is about love, spades tend to be stabby people, clubs tend to be strong. Whenever I could make an association, I did.

It's fascinating and I love it and I am going to be so cool in an exceptionally nerdy way when I can get my time down.

7.
While "2020 sucks" is pretty widely-agreed upon, I'm learning that some people mean "2020 sucks because people are dying and I can only do so much to stop it" and some people mean "2020 sucks because masks are annoying."

We're not in the same boat.

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