Responses
I have been bad. Folks have been emailing me and I have not been responding. I’m sorry.
One person responded to my last post on responsibility detailing a phenomenon I ought to have taken into consideration: gatekeeping. To shorten a long excursus into sociology—some people, typically women, very possibly including me, shut other people out of particular tasks and then complain about lack of help. (There’s a flawed but interesting book out there about gatekeeping and childrearing. I can’t remember its name or author at the moment. Rhoda or Rhonda something, maybe? Thing wanted always buried. Sigh.)
I hope I’m not too guilty of this particular mode of behavior. I’ll be watching myself for it. I do know that I have to ignore guilt-twinges, sometimes even stop myself from taking over, when I see David doing household tasks that he isn’t specifically responsible for. Which is silly; we both have a general responsibility to the household, and why shouldn’t he pick up or vacuum?
Another person responded to Courage and Necessity yesterday, perhaps a bit angrily, to point out that honesty about mental illness can create real losses—of jobs, of mentoring, of educational aspirations.
Yes. It can. If I seemed to deny or minimize that, I’m sorry. All in all, though, I still believe I’ve lost a lot more by denying the depression. Others’ mileage may vary.
In the long run, I’d like to help build a society that acknowledges, even values, human imperfections rather than forcing humans to try to hide them. I don’t know how to start doing that except by forthright, even brutal, honesty about my own flaws. I don’t do it for self-flagellation because I hate myself. Indeed, I find it something of a miracle that I don’t hate myself. Nor do I do it to attract prurient interest; my flaws aren’t generally the prurient-interest type anyway.
I do it (and this is another hit at “courage”) out of the utterly selfish desire to carve out space in the world for myself and others like me. The only way I know to do that is to break through blindness and ignorance and cruelty and denial, and the only way I know to do that is to write, and take my lumps for it.
Someone else wrote to praise yesterday’s translation. Thanks! On rereading, I am tempted to replace the third line’s “let the poor men live” with “let a poor man live.” This is a harder question than it first seems. There’s a lot of very old cultural miasma around various combinations of “pobre” with “hombre” in Spanish, and I’m frankly not sure what Unamuno was aiming at here.
Still. I haven’t done this in over a decade. It was fun.