Measuring up to Spock
I'm afraid this is going to be a lengthy one, even by Ornoth standards. It's a good example of how one inoccuous comment can trigger a whole series of discussion topics.
Inna and I have been very close for four years now. During that time, we've become more intimately familiar, and more open and forthright, with one another than with anyone either of us has known before. I think it goes without saying that our relationship is something I treasure immensely.
Certainly there's an investment in education there: we've taken the time to really get to know one another deeply and intuitively, which only comes through long months of shared experiences. Contrary to popular myth, that kind of understanding cannot happen overnight, or in a matter of weeks. But the investment of time certainly isn't the most important reason to value a relationship.
Instead, there's a special joy in sharing your life with someone who really knows you, and who interacts with you at a level of depth and real understanding and intuition that simply can't be approached without that investment. For someone to take the time to know me so well is priceless to me, for that is the baseline for genuine appreciation and understanding.
At the same time, offering that intimacy of understanding opens one up to unparalelled criticism. To let someone know you that well is also to let them see your worst and most feared faults, even the ones you choose not to acknowledge, and hide from yourself.
A couple days ago, on the way home from a dinner, I was walking across the Harvard Bridge, accompanied by Inna and two of her friends, when I made the apparently understated comment "This isn't bad".
All that night, Inna had been hounding me to express an opinion about the evening. It is, of course, one of her triggers, because she is excessively concerned with how others perceive the events she chooses to take responsibility for. In addition, her emotional state is influenced to a large degree by how demonstratively happy the people around her are. In a phrase, she is more affected by how the people around her enjoy an event than by the event itself. All this results in people's reactions being an emotional trigger for her.
On the other hand, I am extremely conservative in demonstrating my emotions and enjoyment of any given event. It's just the way I am (I'll get into the reasons for that in a moment). But you can see already how this combination of personality traits will result in Inna feeling insecure, and me feeling pressured or criticized.
Inna reacted to my comment by indicating that "This isn't bad" is "the highest praise possible from Orny", and going on to attack me for being so stingy with my emotions. I went on to defend myself, and the evening ended quite unsatisfactorily, with each of us feeling hurt and angry for expecting something different from one another. Nothing that won't get settled, it's just that I needed to relate that bit in order to proceed from here.
In the rest of this entry, I discuss why I am so reserved. It's a lot of self-analysis and some of it I admit will sound quite adolescent. It's naturally something I typically try to rise above, but at the same time, it's also still something that continues to influence my behavior.
So why am I so reserved? It would be easy to cite the familiar axiom that it's easier (or safer) to be negative than to be positive. In the past, that has certainly been a factor in my tempering my reactions, even recently. I think that I've made great progress on this one recently, thanks partly to Inna, and partly to my increased participation in the creative community. I'm learning, gradually, how to be more supportive and less judgemental, at least when the circumstances require it.
But there's much more to it than that. There are ultimately two big reasons why I'm not more demonstrative: first, I lack the ability to feel, express, and act on my emotions, and second, I fear what might come out if I tried.
I'm unable to feel, express, and act on my emotions? Isn't that the easiest thing in the world? Well, to many people it must be, but I've never been ruled by my emotions; I've always kept them under smotheringly tight control, to the point where today I have great difficulty even identifying when I have emotions, much less what they might be. I know that's probably counterintuitive to most people, but trust me on this one; I know of what I speak.
The root of most of my insecurities surely lies in my reaction of our family moving to an unfamiliar town when I was nine years old. I think it's typical that most children will react to such a traumatic event either by becoming extremely extroverted (in order to attract new friends), or by becoming extremely introverted (out of fear). I fell into the latter category, and never had a large number of friends until late in high school (see below). My family reinforced the value of intellect over emotions, and my life goal became to live forever, so that I could learn everything there was to know and know how the world would turn out. And after all, what use are emotions when you're alone?
When I began find myself attracted to women, my introversion and insecurity kept me from actually pursuing relationships. They of course seemed extraneous to my life's goals, but with no outlet, the unreleased sexual tension of adolescence worked inside me, turning me into a very hateful, judgemental racist: a very dangerous hooligan, but without the disregard for traditional values that would have enabled me to do real harm.
The stage was set for my first real romance, which took place during my final year of high school. Jean was, of course, everything I was not, but most especially she was positive, in touch with her emotions, and impulsive. My entire life turned around in one moment that took place in my parents' back yard. On a warm, lush spring day, I watched as Jean actually laughed and skipped down a set of rock stairs into the grass beneath a maple tree. I (quietly, of course) stood there dumbstruck, watching her suffused with joy to overflowing: an emotion I never let myself feel, expressed in a way that I could never express. That was my revelation, and I made a very conscious, deliberate decision to be more impulsive (ironic, eh?).
At that time, I was one of the principals in the New England Tolkien Society, a group of young fans of the author who wrote "the Hobbit" and "the Lord of the Rings". The group had one or two camping trips each year where everyone got dressed up in medieval garb and pretended to be hobbits or elves or whatnot. This was to be the testing ground for my new impulsiveness.
At NETS gatherings, I stopped caring what people thought of me, and actually pushed myself to become an extrovert. I started acting before thinking, incorporating random acts of silliness and flirtation into my behavior. Amazingly to me, I became quite popular, even with the girls. I had successfully been able to "flip the switch" from cold, hateful intellectual to outgoing, silly, and impulsive extrovert.
The problem was that I was still living at home, where that kind of behavior would never have been acceptable. So in order to rationalize my different behaviors, I borrowed from schizophrenia, describing myself as two separate people. David, the name I used up until college, was the master of intellect and self-control; Ornoth, or Orny, which I'd used as a name in Tolkien fandom and other medieval recreationist events, was the flirtatious, uninhibited fool. That was the situation when I graduated high school.
Throughout college and into my marriage, I went through several phases when one or the other of these two "personalities" were dominant. Any given phase would last about nine months, but within those larger phases, I might switch back and forth (intentionally or not) for a period of days or hours. Friends who knew me well said that they could see in my eyes when I made the discrete transition from one to the other.
But as my language indicates, these two halves were never integrated, and my intellectual half never learned how to demonstrate, or even see, my own emotions. Two decades later, Inna wisely told me that this division was contrived and that perpetuating it from adolescence was unhealthy, so I tried to set it aside. Unfortunately, for the most part that meant losing touch with my emotions, though I shouldn't lay the responsibility for that wholly on Inna. After all, my ex-wife's parting shot was to give me a Mister Spock tee shirt, effectively saying that my coldness and rationality were the equivalent of the Vulcan's banishment of all emotion. And while working for Sapient, I twice took the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, perhaps the most famous personality test in the world, and never scored so much as a single point on the "emotions" scale.
One thing I pride myself on is expressing myself accurately in written form, after I've had a chance to digest things and determine how I feel about them. But I am wholly inarticulate, unable to detect or describe my emotions in "real-time", as events occur. This was particularly well demonstrated when Inna and I spent a week on Cape Cod two years ago. At the time, Inna had no idea that I was enjoying the trip. To be entirely truthful, I don't believe I knew it, myself. But after coming back to Boston, I realized how much I treasured those memories, and how much I'd enjoy repeating them, and only then was I able to show Inna how much they meant to me. Of course, to her, who trusts emotions far more than words spoken after the fact, this sounded insincere.
So for more than a quarter century I've practiced a uniquely successful method of denying my emotions, to the point where today I find myself questioning whether I have the capacity for emotions at all, and if I did, how I could possibly recognize them in myself, much less allow myself to publicly demonstrate them and act upon them. There are, of course, both advantages and disadvantages to this way of life, but I think it would be nice (and healthy) if I had the capacity to choose whether to demonstrate my emotions or not, rather than having no choice at all because I cannot even register them.
And then there's the other question: if I demonstrated them, what might come out? As I mentioned above, I was a pretty angry kid in high school, and there is still some residue from that. I was hateful, racist, reactionary, and, more than anything else, judgemental. Those were the emotions that were most natural to me then; would they resurface? Of course, I've thankfully evolved out of most of those. I've put aside most of my racism and hatefulness and prejudices, and I've tried to be more supportive and less quick to judge.
But one thing remains with me: I'm really not fond of people at all. I can't say that I truly hate people anymore, which is good, but my tolerance and patience with them is extremely low. As my relationship with Inna proves, there are people out there whose friendship has immense potential for me, once it reaches a certain level of depth. I think my problem is that as an introvert, it just doesn't seem worth the effort to make that investment. Most people either aren't compatible with me (through no fault of their own, of course), or simply don't desire the depth of friendship which would make the investment of time and energy worthwhile. Most people operate at a very shallow level, and that bores me to tears. I need a few good friends who know me very well, who are intelligent and articulate, with broad interests which include some of my own, but also include other, new things that would help me grow.
But establishing those kinds of friendships takes time, during which you have to slog through all the common, surfacey stuff before genuine depth comes through meaningful shared experiences. And putting that time and effort into a surfacey friendship that might never "pay off" is what I, as an introvert, shy away from. And that's why I am so alone, though I live in the very heart of the city.
So my fear is that if I really allowed my emotions to show, my general impatience and intolerance of people would drive people away.
With such an attitude, one could reasonably ask why I need people in my life at all. For the most part, indeed, I have concluded that I don't. But there are certain reasons, most of which are either very practical or mundane.
First, being alone is dangerous. What happens if I have a heart attack or cannot live unassisted? That's a problem, but it's hardly a great basis for friendship!
I'm physically attracted to people. This is the one thing that I find most frustrating, this unquenchable desire. There's so much turmoil that I wouldn't have to face if I could just rid myself of my sexual desires. I've tried; that's just not going to happen...
People are necessary for my entertainment and growth. Even living a purely selfish life for my own amusement, I need what other people create. I need live music, interesting artwork, architecture, graffiti, fashion, literature, dining, modern technological innovation, and all kinds of shared activities. I need intellectual challenge, and people who can bring me new experiences and ideas. That's why I live in the middle of Boston, and why I can't just pack up and live in isolation up in northern Maine, even though that has its attractions.
Of course, none of these are terribly lofty reasons for interacting with people. The one thing that I really need from people, that I could never possibly deny, that makes everything worthwhile, is exactly what I described between Inna and I at the beginning of this entry: understanding.
What I need, more than anything else, is for someone to know me. Not just in a surface sense, but to really know everything about me, fully and deeply, and understand who I am, what I've seen, and where I want to go. Someone to share my pains with, to appreciate my fiction, to understand why I think DargonZine is an honorable life's work, to know what polyamory means to me as well as my negative opinions of marriage, to share the spiritual appreciation I feel of nature, to understand my philosophy and why I live the way I do, to know when to push me and when it's best to leave me alone, and to occasionally surprise me when they understand me even better than I know myself. And I want to be able to know them as thoroughly as they know me, and know the new experiences and ideas that they can bring me.
And, of course, I want them to understand the difficulty I have with feeling, expressing, and acting upon my own emotions, and help me to overcome it, rather than condemn me for this area of weakness.