Old Rustlings in the Attic
This began as an attempt at a casual "what's-been-on-my-mind" blog post but it may have taken on a life of its own.
One metric of personal growth that I feel is lost on many of us in self-analysis is a shift in values. More specifically, I mean a shift in values as it pertains to our connections, our communities, and how we engage with and perceive others. I may be alone in this, but I often don’t allow myself to feel as though I’ve grown and changed unless I feel physically as though I am in a different season of my life. That is, my external world has to provide evidence that I am a better version of myself in order for me to feel validated in my growth. I usually have a keen eye on my own internal shifts, but it rarely feels like enough for me to simply register their presence. Sometimes, after I’ve been through a great deal, or experienced a great loss, I can feel like I am right back at square one once the storm blows over. Maybe I had to lose a friend, or I had to leave a job, and sitting with that empty space can be difficult. Without the external validation of a social life or a paycheck or what have you, I often get caught up in the messaging of that emptiness, and I let it affect my understanding of myself and where I’m at in life. I let the perceived lack of the situation become a perceived poorness in my quality of life and self. I forget that what I’ve been through has changed me for the better. And I forget that not every season is one for blooming.
I’m a sophomore in college now. When I think about the ways in which these one-and-a-half years have changed me (which is so, so many), the primary discovery I find myself referencing is the way in which my values have changed. I value vastly different things in friends and partners than I previously did or than I could have even imagined myself valuing. I value - and consequently, I seek - different things in my external world, my communities, friend groups, pursuits. Even though I’m still working to implement that change into my world in tangible ways, I am comforted by knowing that shift exists.
What I’m trying to say is that my strongest value at the moment is kindness. For a good chunk of time, kindness wasn’t really on my radar in the way that it is today. Sure, I appreciated the occasional kind gesture, but I didn’t pay attention to how blatantly kindness defines character, how clearly necessary kindness is, as an act and a state of being. For a long time, I had the idea that it was always going to be me and. one other person against the world. That everyone sucked, except for my soulmate, and one day I would meet that person and we would stare on down at all the suckers. Of course, there’s a lot of reasons why I no longer believe this. It was a childish belief, one I clung to throughout a difficult, largely lonely adolescence. But even entering into college, I glommed onto friends who considered themselves to be “haters”. I found solace in the dramatic, unnecessary judgement of others who were simply living their authentic lives, and I revered those who looked and acted in “cool” ways. It shouldn’t come as a shock that those very people who claimed to be against the world with me were in fact locked and loaded to position themselves against me as well. Because I was never really going to achieve that mythical companionship I was seeking in my tower of superiority and judgement. The only thing that perspective would lead to was bitterness and betrayal. And that’s because, of course, it wasn’t about me. It was about how my “friends” felt about their own shit.
In the middle of my freshman year, I started realizing that I was admiring different people than I usually did. The people who drew my attention were primarily people who were incredibly, deeply kind, people who went out of their way to help others consistently, people who were a light in an otherwise dim room. I really paid attention to this, because I knew it felt different. I was no longer drawn to the person who postured themselves well, even the person who spoke eloquently or dressed well. I was drawn to people who were awkward, childlike, strange, authentic, and whole, but most of all, kind. In fact, their kindness almost seemed to be a natural consequence of their profound authenticity, as though they were living in some advanced yet primordial state of being and as a result of their true earnestness, kindness simply leaked out of them.
I was in a wonderful dance piece the first semester of my freshman year with two people. Let’s call one of these people A. I expressed many of these sentiments to A, but I still don’t know if they will ever understand the degree to which they changed my life. Besides their incredible talent as a performer, I always felt soothed when A walked into a room. Their presence itself was a warmth. If you’ve ever been blessed enough to be in the presence of one of these people, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I’ve felt scrutinized my entire life by both internal and external forces, and I never felt judged once when I was in A’s presence. They made me feel welcome, whole, seen, and worthy simply by existing. They weren’t throwing out positive affirmations left and right. They weren’t doing the most. But they also never expressed judgement once. They simply existed as this sheer, almost mythical force of benevolence. I was so profoundly moved by the earnestness with which A moved through life, with which they tackled everything, and their joy, how freely they extended it to others. I felt a very similar way about someone else who I was fortunate enough to dance with that same year. Kind, brilliant, warm, creative souls. To be fully honest, I’ve been trying to model myself after both of these people ever since I realized how deeply I admired them.
And the act of admiration itself, too, lent me a certain new perspective. It gave me a lens on my changing self that I might be able to remove and scrutinize. When I realized how deeply I admired these people, how much I looked up to them, I realized what that meant about my own values, who I wanted to become and connect with. It was through knowing this kindness, this sheer joy, that I became changed. It held up a mirror to the parts of myself that had been lost through time and turmoil, that I wanted to recover. But it was also through knowing this brilliance that I was able to witness my own change in action. I grew aware, through my admiration, of the fact that I had already changed, that I was already ready to see the warmth within myself again. When I gushed many of these sentiments out to A following a performance of ours, they, in keeping with their nature, replied “you have that same light within you.”
My negative experiences, too, informed this change. For example, the fair-weather friends from above. I also briefly dated someone who was incredibly emotionally unprepared for any sort of romancing and essentially incapable of self-expression of any sort, much less the affectionate kind. The fact that I held onto this connection for as long as I did was equally as much of a mirror as A’s kindness. It showed me the ways in which I, too, might have feared affection, self-expression, and, at essence, expressions of kindness. Granted, I was the more emotionally open one in the brief courtship, and I offered my feelings where she could not. Nonetheless, these expressions were few and far between, and my own actions in the situation were as much of a signifier of how I felt as were her own. I tolerated her poor behavior because I was too afraid to seek more - to seek something that would truly allow me to express vulnerability. I’m not in the habit of speaking poorly about failed flames, but I cannot quite emphasize the degree to which this person feared vulnerability. It seems to me that she feared the very concept of being human. Her entire existence was so carefully cultivated - her intelligence, her appearance, her words - so as to appear flawless in nature. All of which is, of course, a recipe for disaster (which was particularly evident as I attempted unsuccessfully to get closer to her). We can’t connect with others in meaningful ways if we don’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable. And if we aren’t seen and heard by others, it’s very hard to experience joy. And when I say vulnerability, I don’t mean just around close friends or late at night after a few drinks. I mean frequently, earnestly, proudly, and profoundly. But I would never have come to these life-changing conclusions had I not met this individual. It was precisely through seeing my fears exaggerated and magnified in another person that I was able to see the ways in which they might have been continuing to affect my life.
That first year was life-changing for me precisely because of all the ways in which people appeared to show me mirrors to my truest self, my truest desires, my fears as well as my strengths. But had I not recognized those internal shifts as the profound growth that they were (which I often forget to do), I might feel like I was still stuck somewhere I’m not. For example, I now know that another one of my values is community. I don’t know where the world is going, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next as shit continues to hit the fan. But I know that I have every interest in building community and creating tangible, loving spaces where people can provide for one another in material ways. I know that I don’t want anyone to feel unloved, unseen, unheard, or unprovided for. I know that I want to build worlds - and if not worlds, then spaces - where I can cast as wide a net of material and social resources, love, and joy as possible. And I know that in order to do that, I have a lot of fears that I am going to need to conquer. I have always been an anxious person. I was a strange, anxious, precocious child, but I was also a joyful and a loving one. Even as I regard the world with love and joy, socializing and forming bonds has never felt like second nature to me. And yet, as I continue to recognize how deeply I value bonds with other people and how deeply inherent community is to my political visions, I am continuing to realize that my desires for change, when reified into action, are going to push me outside of my comfort zone. Because I don’t want to be against the world anymore. I want to connect with others and I want to be earnest and vulnerable. Both for my own sake and others’.
I’ve made some brief Instagram story posts about the fears of community building and organizing as someone with social anxiety, but I’ll touch on it here again. Ultimately I feel as though judgement and fear and all of these avoidant tactics come from a place of devaluing the self. They come from a place of not understanding that in this perpetual journey towards a better world, our voices are needed, our hands are needed, and our good faith is needed. That power is not only desired but necessary. And it is so easy to forget that when you have built a worldview, for some reason or other, that is predicated on your own devaluation. It is going to be difficult for myself and people who feel a similar way to start learning to approach the world in a different way - to start seeing ourselves as valued, to start realizing that we need to make these connections, we need to be open and loud and tender, if we are going to create the change we’re looking for. And that scares me, because I know it will be out of my comfort zone and it won’t feel natural. But it scares me more to think that my truest desires for profound socio-political change and depth of connection with others could go unrealized because I didn’t want to risk being seen. Others are, wittingly or not, counting on me - counting on us - to raise our voices, seek out a means of change, and be leaders in whatever way possible.
A thought that’s spiraled in my head a few times recently is that kindness may be the antidote to social anxiety. I don’t mean it’s a cure-all, but I mean that kindness is always a safe choice and it always is going to expand the warmth of your experience (provided, first and foremost, that one feels safe to exist in a given environment). If you feel as though you’re being judged, you can be kind. If you feel as though you don’t know anyone, you can be kind. A simple word or phrase or smile can open up a room. I never put myself under the foolish impression that the people I admired, with their earnestness and joy and kindness, had it easy. I never once thought that it was easy for them, or that it came naturally to them, or that it always had, anyway. There was a part of me that fundamentally understood that to live in such an authentic manner is a choice, and it’s often a choice one makes because their back is up against a wall. It’s often a choice one makes because the other choice is far darker. Kindness, authenticity, earnestness, tenderness, and all of these approaches that have now become my values are all a sort of survival strategy. I believe that even in my most terrified moments I can always prioritize kindness and authenticity. Sometimes, I just want to burst out in the middle of conversation with a new friend - “I’m sorry! I’m so scared!” - and maybe one day, I’ll start doing it. Frankly, it’s enough for me to understand that that’s my goal. That even if I miss the mark, if I can’t say my piece, it’s enough for me to know that I’m no longer approaching my communal realm with the predication of pessimism or judgement. I’m no longer interested in holding up these shields that my fear has built for me. It’s enough for me, for now, on this day, to look at my internal world and see what I value and who I admire. It’s enough for me to know how far I’ve come.