M.L. Humphrey

A lot of random thoughts going on since this is a big transitional time for me where I’m trying not to start new things.

I just finished reading a book called The Body Keeps the Score that I’d seen recommended somewhere or other a couple times. It was a really interesting book for me as a writer because it talks a lot about how people deal with trauma or what symptoms of someone having trauma might be. And it also talks about therapeutic approaches to trauma which was helpful for one book idea I’ve had percolating for a few years. I don’t want to write a world that would cause harm if implemented in real life.

But it also made me think that maybe some people who get diagnosed with something like ADHD really need to dig deeper and look at whether they’re treating a symptom of trauma when they take ADHD meds. Maybe it’s my biased Twitter sample but almost everyone I see on there that talks about their severe ADHD has also mentioned a sexual assault or being no contact with family or something else that would be considered trauma. If so, EMDR or neurofeedback or something like that might be a more permanent treatment.

I’m not a psychologist though, so absolutely no one should take that opinion as more than the idle thought it is. Just something to consider or discuss with a professional.

I’ve also been thinking this week about relationship repair. Why is it that some relationships end and others survive setbacks. My own family is one that’s had more than one period of heavy relationship drama over the years and yet eventually in most cases the parties have set aside their differences and come back together. (Although the weight of all of those prior conflicts are still there just waiting to rear their ugly heads. We are not a family who solves our issues, we just bury them.)

I used to hate the idea that some guy I was dating would mess up and his solution would be, “here are some flowers, sorry” because it was such a kneejerk reaction to the situation that didn’t consider what I personally value or care about. (I’m not big on flowers, especially after my dad died and everyone on the frickin’ planet sent them.)

And I often look at people saying “I love you” with a bit of side-eye because I know that I usually say that to people either out of routine (like at the end of a phone call with my family) or while I’m actively doing something that other won’t like (when I’d tell my dog I loved her as I trimmed her toenails). It’s also a phrase that’s sometimes used to impose obligation on the other, “But I love you, how could you…”

But if I step back from my own personal reaction, I see that both are a good relationship repair or maintenance tool.

They’re either someone taking a first step and saying, “Look, I care enough about the relationship we have to express the fact that I’m sorry” or a way to say, “I still want this relationship to continue.”

And then of course to repair the relationship the other party has to reach back. It has to be a mutual situation where one person reaches out and the other reaches back. And then they continue to do that back and forth.

Usually relationships end when one person stops responding. They fade when both people stop reaching out at about the same time. Sometimes relationships end with a bang and sometimes they just drift to an end. For me personally they’re more likely to drift to a close.

Which is why over the years, being the weirdo I am, I will occasionally think of a situation that went wrong and reach out to that person with the equivalent of “hey, sorry,” because in almost every relationship both sides have contributed to the outcome. None of us are perfect.

Sometimes my doing so is ignored or never seen. Sometimes my doing so results in a “oh, thanks for saying that” comment and then absolute silence. (Which is often all I actually wanted to accomplish.)

On rare occasions it results in a “thanks for saying that and I’m sorry about my part in things, too.” (Although not too often because people suck at admitting their mistakes or failures and also maybe it feels like I was only saying sorry so they’d also say sorry. IDK.)

And then very, very rarely it actually results in being able to rebuild a relationship.

All of which are perfectly acceptable responses. There are people in my past who if they showed up today and were like, “Hey, sorry” I’d be like, “Cool, thanks” and then hope they never reached out to me again. Because some people are simply not compatible, some friendships/relationships worked for a period of time and then fade, and some people have done such harm that sorry is good, but not enough to risk letting them back into your life ever again.

Interestingly enough I find that I reach out that way far more than the people I’ve known do.

And I don’t think it’s because I’ve been that much worse of a person in my relationships than others have. I think it’s because my role in my family has always been the one of mending and emotional regulation. I’m the one that sees that X person is starting to get upset with Y person so steers Y person to do something to fix that before things boil over. Or the one that mediates between X and Y person to get them to repair things. Or the one that puts myself between X and Y and takes the emotional hit so that they can continue their relationship while either X or Y hates me for a bit.

I also just have more free time on my hands to process things and think about them and look at them from different angles so that sometimes I see that my initial characterization of something (that person hates me) was wrong (no, they were actually lashing out in hurt due to things they experienced long before they ever knew you existed).

Most of my friends at this age (mid-40’s) are so buried in work and kids and some probably also have health and addiction issues of their own or someone else’s to deal with that they can barely take a moment to breathe let alone analyze their pasts.

That’s why I’m kind of looking forward to the new job. I need less thinking time. And I need less time to spend seeing the dramas of others on the internet. Especially because when I get too bored I sometimes find my way to pages or sites that are there to amplify the outrage.

As an example, there is one Twitter page I occasionally go to that is there to specifically share some of the horrible, awful things that men will say in dating situations or do in relationships. And it’s meant to be a WTF sort of page or a “see how hard it is out there” sort of page.

But what it really does is highlights that very very small minority of men that really are absolute shits and makes it seem like that’s all men out there. In reality very few guys are like that. Most single guys are not hanging around using weird lingo for women and talking about a woman’s body count and whether she’s used. They just want to find someone who they can spend time with who won’t make them feel like shit or use them. And they may make the occasional, “huh?” sort of comment, but they aren’t women-hating psychos.

I wouldn’t know that though if all the time I spent was online. Because, “Hey, I had an awkward, very boring interaction with a guy who really isn’t interesting to me” doesn’t get shared.

It’s like the news, right? They lead with outrage because outrage drives viewership and so if you were to listen to the news and then rank what you think your actual risks in life are you’d be completely wrong. (You are far more likely to be seriously injured or killed in a car accident than to be abducted and killed by a stranger, but guess which one will be covered on the news and which is so common it’s barely a blip on the radar.)

They’ve done psychology studies to show this sort of bias we develop and that was long before the internet amplified it to such an extreme it’s almost painful.

Anyway. My random thoughts for the day thanks to family drama over a stupid phone.

I now need to force myself to take a walk/hike since I don’t have a sad-eyed dog to drag me outside anymore. Sigh. (For the record, if I had to choose either dogs or humanity, I’d choose dogs.)

You’re going to have to bear with me on this one, because these are thoughts I’ve had for a while but never tried to organize into any sort of coherence.

So, one of those thoughts: For a society to be healthy and continue to function you need a certain fairly high percentage of the population to live the status quo. You need people who are happy to live in one place and be garbage collectors and fast-food and retail workers or lawyers or doctors or consultants or whatever your society is built upon. And for our society now that also includes people who marry and have kids and raise them to be that next generation to conform.

Another thought: For a society to be healthy it also needs to change and evolve over time. That comes from the fringes. From the minorities and the outcasts and the ones that don’t live by the status quo. The ones who think that “this” is not enough. The ones who can see a different choice. Or who make a different choice for themselves.

A third thought: Often change first appears through creative outlets such as music, art, TV, movies, plays, and writing.

A fourth thought: But there is a hostility from the core of a society who are comfortable with how things are or who even want to go back a bit to those who are pushing the boundaries of society. Hence bans on certain types of expression that threaten the core status quo and a general disdain for many creatives and their choices.

A fifth thought: AI is a way to flood the field with the status quo at the expense of future change. (I saw a tweet yesterday where an AI advocate said that AI doesn’t have to make better content than humans, they just need to make so much content that it drowns out the human-created content.)

A sixth thought: There is an intense motivation by those who benefit the most from the current system to try to keep it from changing. So there is a direct motivation for them to not compensate creatives fairly and make it as hard as they can for creatives to make a living (see the WGA strike right now) so that they can exert those pressures towards the status quo either by only having the privileged create or by being able to exercise control over what is created.

A seventh thought: Everyone talks about how hard it is for disadvantaged communities to participate in our organized creative enterprises, but that’s because those communities are the ones that are most likely to bring change that the money people at the top don’t support. So of course it’s in the money people’s interests to discourage that to the extent they can get away with it.

An eighth thought: Many of our societal problems come from inequalities and insufficient resources in our poorer communities. This could easily be fixed by taxation or other policies that eliminate the billionaire class and redistribute that wealth to create a healthier society.

A subthought: (Too often the changes that are proposed are things like “pay people’s rent” when rents are seen to be too high as opposed to “tax the shit out of excessive rents” or “impose a hefty tax on those who own more than one property in X area”. The changes we often propose actually just feed into that subclass becoming wealthier off of the backs of that community, one they often aren’t even a part of instead of stopping or reversing their actions to acquire more wealth.)

A ninth thought: There is an extremely strong pressure to glorify excessive wealth to help support the status quo especially when most of the communication sources (the news, TV, movies) are controlled by the wealthy.

A tenth thought: Climate change is going to be bad. And there is a subset of wealthy individuals who see the warnings about climate change and have decided it’s time to take the gloves off and suck as many resources as possible up for themselves while they still have time to do so.

An eleventh thought: That strategy will work in the short-term while things are still stumbling along (even though it accelerates things), but not in the long-term because most of what these people are sucking up won’t continue to have value in a failed society (currency, gold, etc.) and what they do have that has value (land, supplies) will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of people desperate to survive. You can’t control eight properties around the world in an unstable society.

(I should note this is one I’m thinking is true, but could be disproven by history.)

A twelfth thought: Religion and societal norms are forms of control over the populace. I think there’s a reason, for example, that suicide is so taboo. Because if you abuse workers to the point they don’t see the point in continuing and they actually remove themselves from the labor force (or from life) you lose the benefit of leveraging their work, so religious and social norms are there to force them to continue despite their instincts that make them want to escape.

A thirteenth thought: No one at the top of the wealth scale is there from their own effort. Yes, they may have had an idea that propelled them to that level and they even may have started the company to implement that idea, but it was usually the work of thousands or hundreds of thousands that was funneled up to them to give them that wealth.

A fourteenth thought: They make attending a top university and qualifying as a lawyer or doctor or consultant or whatever and then working as one hard so that people in those positions believe they are where they are because they earned it. The absolute top of the wealth scale are too few to protect themselves. They depend on the upper middle class and upper class to see themselves as hard workers who deserve their rewards in order to protect them.

A fifteenth thought: Most of that system (top law firms, top consulting firms, medical practice) don’t care if they chew up and spit out a certain percentage of the people who get there because (a) they get the benefit of that labor while they’re doing so for five or ten or fifteen or twenty years and (b) it makes those who survive the gauntlet and achieve that upper class level of wealth support it even more strongly.

A sixteenth thought: And they make those professions put in so much of their time (60-100 hours a week) and isolate them among their peers so that they never stop to question any of it. So they don’t see that others work just as hard at their jobs (teacher, farmworker, etc) but don’t receive those same financial rewards. Animosity to the “uneducated” or poor or “manual workers” is central to the continuation of that system.

A final thought: Knowing this doesn’t change anything or make life better in any way, but it does make it harder to be a part of that system and be rewarded by it. (Assuming you have a conscience, of course, which not all people do. Although I think far more people are simply oblivious because they’re struggling to live in a system that’s deliberately designed to be a struggle at almost all levels.)