#articol

14 LUCRURI PENTRU O STARE POZITIVA:

Culorile adolescenței

Stiu ca daca mi s-ar oferi sansa sa ma mai intorc acolo o data, as zice politicoasa si fara sa stau prea mult pe ganduri: "Multumesc, dar nu-mi doresc."

And I worry I’ve traded the best possible version of myself, all that glittering possibility, for vague shadows of affection. I’m still that needy, anxious kid going over the “Haha,” hoping it means something — except now it’s all the more sad because I know it doesn’t mean anything.

When you’re lonely and desperate and someone intriguing leans in and brushes your arm with theirs, when you look at them and they look at you and they say something that feels true about you, or they just talk to you in a way that singles you out from the whole big world, you feel that you owe them something. Everything they say holds this charge. Even if it’s vague. Especially if it’s vague.

KM: Something that came up all across the course of this past semester is the trope of the failures of language in encapsulating human experience and emotion. We saw it everywhere from Jack Gilbert’s poetry to Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I’m interested in why this trope came up so much in the readings in this course, how they were engaging with emotion, and how that kind of engagement with the failure of language can be seen as a pushback against sentimentality. LJ: Some of why it can be comforting, or humanizing, or generative to me to see articulations of the failures of language, or the difficult fit between language and experience, is that it really connects to the part of writing that involves writing into what you don’t understand yet, or don’t yet know quite how to say. I found over and over again that my best writing comes from some experience of leaning into uncertainty. It’s such a necessary and enabling part of that process to think about the ways in which so many other voices have been confronted with what they couldn’t quite figure out how to say. I’m really interested in understanding that as part of the process rather than necessarily fetishizing the unsayable or concluding with some assertion of the unsayable. There can be a kind of alibi in the assertion of the unsayable. I’m interested in unsayability as a kind of gauntlet that gets thrown down, rather than as an excuse that gets given. But then I also think unsayability really can attach to the fear of sentimentality. I think that a certain elliptical mode can come out of this sense that you can’t ever really say it right, or you can’t say it fully—certain kinds of emotion just can’t ever exist in language, so I’ll seek the white space, where we can fill in the blank of some kind of complexity there. I’m really interested in trying to reckon with what can be said imperfectly rather than taking the difficulty, or the fear, of saying it wrong, or the fear of saying it too simply, as a crutch.

...the act of thinking about ourselves isn’t necessarily correlated with knowing ourselves. And, in a few cases, they’ve even found the opposite: the more time the participants spend in introspection, the less self-knowledge they have. In other words, we can spend endless amounts of time in self-reflection but emerge with no more self-insight than when we started. In truth, introspection can cloud our self-perceptions and unleash a host of unintended consequences. Sometimes it may surface unproductive and upsetting emotions that can swamp us and impede positive action. Introspection might also lull us into a false sense of certainty that we’ve identified the real issue.  The problem with introspection isn’t that it’s categorically ineffective, but that we don’t always do it right. When we examine the causes of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors — which we often do by asking ourselves Why? questions — we tend to search for the easiest and most plausible answers At times, asking what instead of why can force us to name our emotions, a process that a strong body of research has shown to be effective. Evidence shows the simple act of translating our emotions into language — versus simply experiencing them — can stop our brains from activating our amygdala, the fight-or-flight command center. This, in turn, seems to help us stay in control.