Our perfection comes as much from the pain of suffering as it does from the joy of living.
Emotional momentum is precious. Reality is found in relationship.
Emotional momentum is precious. Reality is found in relationship.
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Reality aesthetic and the art of living
Science is the conscientious process for discerning Truth. Ethics are a qualitative science for discerning what is good. We seek to discern what is truly good, yet the process of discovery goes beyond understanding, it is also lived. When we do good, life can be beautiful. I strive to find beauty through experiencing, recognizing, re-presenting and creating reality in its truest forms.
Engaging experiences in the arts and amid the built and natural environment can elicit a tremendous curiosity. "The sense of wonder", a phrase coined by Rachel Carson, captures this phenomenal experience well. It awakens a timeless reverence for beauty that is inspirational, simple, and mysterious at the same time. To contextualize the significance of this phenomenon, I'll refer to the wisdom of a quote from Baba Dioum:
Engaging experiences--the arts, outdoors, courageous conversation, etc.--compel us to relate with the world through our sense of wonder, present a nexus between living and deeper learning. For that reason, I champion pedagogical methods that foster deep learning through exploration, mutual inquiry, reciprocity, and re-integrating our connectivity for a better understanding of the world and one's abilities to purposefully live with it.
When the insight of an individual or community can discern and constructively elicit beauty from parts of life that were once mundane, they've discovered what I call the reality aesthetic. It's how people find profound inspiration, dignity, and meaning in their work. It's the art of living and shines brightest when our basic needs are met with love.
Engaging experiences in the arts and amid the built and natural environment can elicit a tremendous curiosity. "The sense of wonder", a phrase coined by Rachel Carson, captures this phenomenal experience well. It awakens a timeless reverence for beauty that is inspirational, simple, and mysterious at the same time. To contextualize the significance of this phenomenon, I'll refer to the wisdom of a quote from Baba Dioum:
"In the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught."We can surmise that we'll best learn when our interests are ignited for discovery through exploratory inquiry. Discovering these facets of creativity and inquiry through the sense of wonder, I believe, is key to authentic learning and appreciation for the people and world we live with alike.
Engaging experiences--the arts, outdoors, courageous conversation, etc.--compel us to relate with the world through our sense of wonder, present a nexus between living and deeper learning. For that reason, I champion pedagogical methods that foster deep learning through exploration, mutual inquiry, reciprocity, and re-integrating our connectivity for a better understanding of the world and one's abilities to purposefully live with it.
When the insight of an individual or community can discern and constructively elicit beauty from parts of life that were once mundane, they've discovered what I call the reality aesthetic. It's how people find profound inspiration, dignity, and meaning in their work. It's the art of living and shines brightest when our basic needs are met with love.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Proactivity & Humanitas as Ethos
To enact sustainability and viability, I hold an ethos of proactivity and humanitas in high esteem: Creative, solutions-oriented initiative with clear outcomes envisioned for the near and long term. The notion of empowerment and the idea that everyone can humanely make a difference in the world create the core of my understanding of "humanitas".
I find my bearings in that process of difference making through a spiraling cycle of humane education, empowerment, and engagement which I attempt to integrate into my presence at every event I attend or create. More specifically, I seek to inform, educate, empower myself and others to take relevant and significant action in the world and repeat with evaluation (which enters the next level of the spiral by informing and educating myself and others about what I've learned from the most recent action).
Our personal values and worldviews are fostered by what we learn. These values ultimately inform the kinds of information, problems, and solutions we tend to consider and pursue. In this regard, respecting and cultivating the dignity of others to learn and act through compassion make them crucial habits for social sustainability.
Social sustainability ultimately shapes our capacity to understand and act toward comprehensive sustainability. Social sustainability concerns everything from how we communicate with art, non-violence, education, compassion, love, peace, just governance, and democracy with a backbone in living the humane ethics we aspire to understand and share as individuals and collectively. In essence, when focusing on social sustainability, one strives to cultivate lasting and fulfilling relationships.
Trust, security, confidence in other people, in the land we live with, and any other beings we share the planet with are necessary for taking prudent action. To me, prudent action is the essence of economics.
For resolving complex socio-economic challenges and wicked processes like "the tragedy of the commons", people require trust before they can manifest quality collaboration across a diversity of stakeholders. I'll share the Russian phrase "doveryai, no proveryai", "Trust, but verify." I'll also add that love, even in a fairly definitive non-romantic sense, has its role in conservation (conservation in the environmental and economic sense toward sustainability).
To ensure tangible change, we must look to how our environment--social, economic, and physical changes in a result of our heartfully intended actions.
I find my bearings in that process of difference making through a spiraling cycle of humane education, empowerment, and engagement which I attempt to integrate into my presence at every event I attend or create. More specifically, I seek to inform, educate, empower myself and others to take relevant and significant action in the world and repeat with evaluation (which enters the next level of the spiral by informing and educating myself and others about what I've learned from the most recent action).
"In the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught." -Baba Dioum
Our personal values and worldviews are fostered by what we learn. These values ultimately inform the kinds of information, problems, and solutions we tend to consider and pursue. In this regard, respecting and cultivating the dignity of others to learn and act through compassion make them crucial habits for social sustainability.
Social sustainability ultimately shapes our capacity to understand and act toward comprehensive sustainability. Social sustainability concerns everything from how we communicate with art, non-violence, education, compassion, love, peace, just governance, and democracy with a backbone in living the humane ethics we aspire to understand and share as individuals and collectively. In essence, when focusing on social sustainability, one strives to cultivate lasting and fulfilling relationships.
Trust, security, confidence in other people, in the land we live with, and any other beings we share the planet with are necessary for taking prudent action. To me, prudent action is the essence of economics.
For resolving complex socio-economic challenges and wicked processes like "the tragedy of the commons", people require trust before they can manifest quality collaboration across a diversity of stakeholders. I'll share the Russian phrase "doveryai, no proveryai", "Trust, but verify." I'll also add that love, even in a fairly definitive non-romantic sense, has its role in conservation (conservation in the environmental and economic sense toward sustainability).
To ensure tangible change, we must look to how our environment--social, economic, and physical changes in a result of our heartfully intended actions.
"Fair isn't an option in your life. You'll have no choice but to go forward."
Two quotes burning in my mind today:
"Choose to take care of yourself, or else you won't have a choice." ~paraphrasing Minda Zetlin
(I'm overcoming some health challenges at the moment too)
"Fair isn't an option in your life. You'll have no choice but to go forward." -a grandmother
This quote stuck with me today as it captures how I used to, and likely still look at a lot of social and environmental justice issues. It's why I don't see much productive in protests on their own aside from its fleeting public presence and media attention, nor do I share news that's devoid of or taxes my ability to find actionable next steps to change what's going on around us. I'd call that attitude proactivism: make the solutions that don't yet exist. Yes, if you need to talk it out to process what's going on, that's fine and important to heed stories too, just don't get stuck.
It normally isn't an issue or something I think too much about. Today's a bit different, here's how it knocked me in the gut:
I heard it from--here come the labels--a black female entrepreneur who cited her grandmother's advice for resilience. Hard wisdom from the oppressed. I say oppressed because the quote says a lot about a status quo that denies the dignity of choice to a certain degree.
I think it resonated so much because I realized that's where my perspective comes from--a lot of us are still on the ground or digging ourselves out of a hole of problems made by someone else's legacy of hatred, apathy, neglect, or unknowing. A core part of my worldview still comes from reacting to what's a painful reality for a lot of people in the world.
This evening, in the same day, I sat down for soup a restaurant in "America's most educated city" where a woman asked me where I was from. When I answered "Michigan" she tried correcting by saying "no, where is your family from"--this line of questioning normally entails that a person thinks I'm from another country, usually China, sometimes Korea. Today, she thought I was Chinese and then Korean. When I got up to pay my bill, my waitress cashed me out and asked if I was a professor and then with certainty claimed I was an engineer "because I looked like one".
To be clear, I don't view being Chinese, or Korean, or an Engineer as wrong, or bad--I have friends who truly are of those nationalities, one of them is among the most brilliant people I know. For many people, their nationality isn't an item of choice. As a profession, engineers tend to strive to create and improve things.
The issue is this: Starting a conversation with "where are you from" creates a narrow set of assumptions when asking that to a person who looks like they come from a different ethnic background. The assumption being that their identity can be simplified--even stigmatized--into a specific set of characteristics, values, and behaviors. It's a question set up to impose an identity and denies the person being asked an opportunity to represent or fully create the reality of who they are.
Choice is fundamental to dignity. Your choices become very limited when you're asked to represent something you had little to no control over choosing.
By the way, I honored the first woman's curiosity by answering the question. After I ate and was willing to put up with conversation, I politely shared that some people can find that question offensive and culturally insensitive.
Sometimes the only solution to oblivion and apathy is empathy.
Empathy and patience for education take a lot of energy to educate someone who could have cared less about what they do or say. It's an odd paradox--more work for the people who need to be heard and heeded than the people who make the problem.
Yet it's your responsibility to tell them else it keeps happening.
Fair isn't an option in your life. You'll have no choice but to go forward. Hopefully, you're quick enough to create it as an option for others before choking on your own soup.
Fairness isn't an option in your life. Eliminate it as an option and you can adjust faster, hope to create it for others.
Fairness isn't an option in your life. Eliminate it from your expectations and you can move forward faster.
It hurts a bit to realize the insight comes from a place of oppression. It's good to know it was embraced by personal choice and from a creative stance. There's a subtle and equally important difference between being told to accept a reality versus choosing one for yourself.
Fairness is an option in our lives. Embody it in our intentions as we move forward. Will you choose that?
"Choose to take care of yourself, or else you won't have a choice." ~paraphrasing Minda Zetlin
(I'm overcoming some health challenges at the moment too)
"Fair isn't an option in your life. You'll have no choice but to go forward." -a grandmother
This quote stuck with me today as it captures how I used to, and likely still look at a lot of social and environmental justice issues. It's why I don't see much productive in protests on their own aside from its fleeting public presence and media attention, nor do I share news that's devoid of or taxes my ability to find actionable next steps to change what's going on around us. I'd call that attitude proactivism: make the solutions that don't yet exist. Yes, if you need to talk it out to process what's going on, that's fine and important to heed stories too, just don't get stuck.
It normally isn't an issue or something I think too much about. Today's a bit different, here's how it knocked me in the gut:
I heard it from--here come the labels--a black female entrepreneur who cited her grandmother's advice for resilience. Hard wisdom from the oppressed. I say oppressed because the quote says a lot about a status quo that denies the dignity of choice to a certain degree.
I think it resonated so much because I realized that's where my perspective comes from--a lot of us are still on the ground or digging ourselves out of a hole of problems made by someone else's legacy of hatred, apathy, neglect, or unknowing. A core part of my worldview still comes from reacting to what's a painful reality for a lot of people in the world.
This evening, in the same day, I sat down for soup a restaurant in "America's most educated city" where a woman asked me where I was from. When I answered "Michigan" she tried correcting by saying "no, where is your family from"--this line of questioning normally entails that a person thinks I'm from another country, usually China, sometimes Korea. Today, she thought I was Chinese and then Korean. When I got up to pay my bill, my waitress cashed me out and asked if I was a professor and then with certainty claimed I was an engineer "because I looked like one".
To be clear, I don't view being Chinese, or Korean, or an Engineer as wrong, or bad--I have friends who truly are of those nationalities, one of them is among the most brilliant people I know. For many people, their nationality isn't an item of choice. As a profession, engineers tend to strive to create and improve things.
The issue is this: Starting a conversation with "where are you from" creates a narrow set of assumptions when asking that to a person who looks like they come from a different ethnic background. The assumption being that their identity can be simplified--even stigmatized--into a specific set of characteristics, values, and behaviors. It's a question set up to impose an identity and denies the person being asked an opportunity to represent or fully create the reality of who they are.
Choice is fundamental to dignity. Your choices become very limited when you're asked to represent something you had little to no control over choosing.
By the way, I honored the first woman's curiosity by answering the question. After I ate and was willing to put up with conversation, I politely shared that some people can find that question offensive and culturally insensitive.
Sometimes the only solution to oblivion and apathy is empathy.
Empathy and patience for education take a lot of energy to educate someone who could have cared less about what they do or say. It's an odd paradox--more work for the people who need to be heard and heeded than the people who make the problem.
Yet it's your responsibility to tell them else it keeps happening.
 |
| This quote didn't cross my mind today until I started writing, but since the arc of the universe needs some bending, and since the content's just as timely and topical, I figured I'd throw this picture off Martin Niemoeller's quote from the Boston Holocaust Memorial. |
Fairness isn't an option in your life. Eliminate it as an option and you can adjust faster, hope to create it for others.
Fairness isn't an option in your life. Eliminate it from your expectations and you can move forward faster.
It hurts a bit to realize the insight comes from a place of oppression. It's good to know it was embraced by personal choice and from a creative stance. There's a subtle and equally important difference between being told to accept a reality versus choosing one for yourself.
Fairness is an option in our lives. Embody it in our intentions as we move forward. Will you choose that?
Friday, October 10, 2014
Beyond Sustainability, Viability
Viability
In 2012, I met a grisly Detroiter in a coffee shop named Ivan who told me: "I can sustain a patient with life support, or I can help them foster their own resilience to a point that they can help others in need do the same. Which one is sustainability? Which is viability?"
I now see sustainability like security--it's the basis for surviving to the next day, but without the possibility of peace, it's not necessarily something that people thrive with and look forward to waking up to.
Since sustainability continues to gain traction in major circles of policy, community, business, and academia, I still use the term. Also, most of the challenges I tend to find still benefit from enacting principles of sustainability to begin with. Again, it's akin to security or survival: necessary for our existence. From a strategic perspective however, I believe we all want to move toward something better.
I want to understand the world to a point of emancipated personal and shared resillience. A world where we can live freely and fully confident that our genuine presence happens without creating negative expense to others. Viability goes beyond sustainability and protection. Viability focuses on the responsible cultivation and promotion to flourish life's processes.
In that sense, a desirable life becomes a creative endeavor, hence the final point I use to characterize sustainability as we tend to hear it:
3. Creativity
Life, our choices for living it, and the legacy of their consequences are dynamic; foster the integrity, stability, and beauty of the human, biotic, and abiotic community.
In 2012, I met a grisly Detroiter in a coffee shop named Ivan who told me: "I can sustain a patient with life support, or I can help them foster their own resilience to a point that they can help others in need do the same. Which one is sustainability? Which is viability?"
I now see sustainability like security--it's the basis for surviving to the next day, but without the possibility of peace, it's not necessarily something that people thrive with and look forward to waking up to.
Since sustainability continues to gain traction in major circles of policy, community, business, and academia, I still use the term. Also, most of the challenges I tend to find still benefit from enacting principles of sustainability to begin with. Again, it's akin to security or survival: necessary for our existence. From a strategic perspective however, I believe we all want to move toward something better.
I want to understand the world to a point of emancipated personal and shared resillience. A world where we can live freely and fully confident that our genuine presence happens without creating negative expense to others. Viability goes beyond sustainability and protection. Viability focuses on the responsible cultivation and promotion to flourish life's processes.
In that sense, a desirable life becomes a creative endeavor, hence the final point I use to characterize sustainability as we tend to hear it:
3. Creativity
Life, our choices for living it, and the legacy of their consequences are dynamic; foster the integrity, stability, and beauty of the human, biotic, and abiotic community.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Characterizing Sustainability
Some concepts cannot be defined in absolute terms, they can however be characterized: Sustainability is one of them, ethics too. Much of my academic, co-curricular, and career endeavors are/were vested in understanding, exploring, and enacting concepts of sustainability. My senior capstone project focused on sustainability as a "fuzzy concept" and "wicked problem" (more accurately to me, a wicked process since satisfying solutions beyond prevention don't always exist) and how we can influence higher education institutions to lead the notion of sustainability to tangible and significant outcomes as individuals and organizations. Beyond understanding its implications from academic literature, theoretical and applied science for sustainability, I interpret sustainability as an existential ethos of three characteristics:
1. Continuity
Realize, create, and maintain conditions under which humans and everything we live with can exist in productive harmony.
2. Comprehensiveness
Strive to comprehensively fulfill needs with consideration for social, economic, and environmental dimensions of life.
3. Creativity
Life, our choices for living it, and the legacy of their consequences are dynamic; foster the integrity, stability, and beauty of the human, biotic, and abiotic community.
The above synthesizes articulations between the US EPA , 1987 WCED Brundtland Commission definitions, the "Sustainability Triad"/"Three Pillars"/"Triple Bottom Line", the "Quadruple Bottom Line", Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic [also read the full essay], and life.
Please know that there's an element of discovery and dialogue to understanding a fuzzy concept like sustainability [1]. Also note that theoretical research suggests that the "triple bottom line" concept is misleading in its label and use for Corporate Sustainability Reporting, but has valid and useful origins in what several scholars call "the sustainability triad"--the interconnecting domains of environment, society, and economy remain important and useful nonetheless. The sources I've listed are a good place to start, but you're welcome to reach me too!
[1] scholars/anyone with access to academic journals, read: Ratner, B. 2004. “’Sustainability’ as a Dialogue of Values: Challenges to the Sociology of Development” Sociological Inquiry, vol. 74, No. 1 50-69
The first and last characteristics of sustainability (Comprehensive, Creative) brought me to suspect that when most people say "we want a more sustainable future" with hope in their voice, they actually seek a different word: Viability.
1. Continuity
Realize, create, and maintain conditions under which humans and everything we live with can exist in productive harmony.
2. Comprehensiveness
Strive to comprehensively fulfill needs with consideration for social, economic, and environmental dimensions of life.
3. Creativity
Life, our choices for living it, and the legacy of their consequences are dynamic; foster the integrity, stability, and beauty of the human, biotic, and abiotic community.
The above synthesizes articulations between the US EPA , 1987 WCED Brundtland Commission definitions, the "Sustainability Triad"/"Three Pillars"/"Triple Bottom Line", the "Quadruple Bottom Line", Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic [also read the full essay], and life.
Please know that there's an element of discovery and dialogue to understanding a fuzzy concept like sustainability [1]. Also note that theoretical research suggests that the "triple bottom line" concept is misleading in its label and use for Corporate Sustainability Reporting, but has valid and useful origins in what several scholars call "the sustainability triad"--the interconnecting domains of environment, society, and economy remain important and useful nonetheless. The sources I've listed are a good place to start, but you're welcome to reach me too!
[1] scholars/anyone with access to academic journals, read: Ratner, B. 2004. “’Sustainability’ as a Dialogue of Values: Challenges to the Sociology of Development” Sociological Inquiry, vol. 74, No. 1 50-69
The first and last characteristics of sustainability (Comprehensive, Creative) brought me to suspect that when most people say "we want a more sustainable future" with hope in their voice, they actually seek a different word: Viability.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
EXTRAordinary & Inward Empathy
Extraordinary people inspire empathy. Intuition brings our attention to what astonishes us first, then what distinguishes an extraordinary individual from everyone else. By most merits, that's how we often interpret it. Yet when we look beyond all bedazzlement, something deeper calls us to the extraordinary.
Art is a special form of communication. Art compels us to heed that calling, to explore with a sense of wonder and seek to understand. We identify our own aspirations in relation to the extraordinary, whether we strive to live them in modesty or overtly as exemplars in our ordinary lives.
In that sense, extraordinary feats, works, people and places elicit deep empathy from their presence and actions. A trick for making your own life extraordinary?
Whenever you encounter the extraordinary, use the encounter as a reminder for who you are. Remember to look into yourself, as there's more to the ordinary found within that can inspire others us to bridge the gap between remarkable and mundane.
By doing so, chances are you'll find something about yourself worth cultivating and sharing as well. Your wisdom for discerning the extraordinary originates from bridging life's experience with inward learning.
When living life fully and honestly, even in making your own mistakes, your life becomes too extraordinary for anyone to reproduce. That's perfection for heartful humans, an irreplaceable art of living.
. . .
The Detroit Institute of the Arts has an exhibit on ordinary people by extraordinary artists. Check it out, the typecast for the exhibit sparked the above thought. Whomever the graphic artist was has my appreciation--I hadn't parsed "extra" and "ordinary" until looking at the pamphlet for the exhibition.
As displayed, it made me think (ineloquently): "what if extraordinary people are remarkable because they make something MORE ordinary, more identifiable for those who encounter them?" thus, it makes us think of the more ordinary and inspires us to bridge the gap between remarkable and mundane.
"To me, perfection is honesty--live your life as honestly as possible, even your mistakes. That's perfection."
- Danny Perez (paraphrased?)
"Study you. After you've studied everything in the world, I want you to study you." -Stuart Mitchell (transient man in Lansing, MI)
Editing note:
I initially wrote: "Your wisdom for discerning the extraordinary originates from bridging life with learning." and realized I was pulling nice sounding words from thin air without really thinking about what it means. Still sounds like a nice line, but it doesn't really register.
Art is a special form of communication. Art compels us to heed that calling, to explore with a sense of wonder and seek to understand. We identify our own aspirations in relation to the extraordinary, whether we strive to live them in modesty or overtly as exemplars in our ordinary lives.
In that sense, extraordinary feats, works, people and places elicit deep empathy from their presence and actions. A trick for making your own life extraordinary?
Whenever you encounter the extraordinary, use the encounter as a reminder for who you are. Remember to look into yourself, as there's more to the ordinary found within that can inspire others us to bridge the gap between remarkable and mundane.
By doing so, chances are you'll find something about yourself worth cultivating and sharing as well. Your wisdom for discerning the extraordinary originates from bridging life's experience with inward learning.
When living life fully and honestly, even in making your own mistakes, your life becomes too extraordinary for anyone to reproduce. That's perfection for heartful humans, an irreplaceable art of living.
 |
| Photo credit to Margaret __ in Ann Arbor, MI |
. . .
The Detroit Institute of the Arts has an exhibit on ordinary people by extraordinary artists. Check it out, the typecast for the exhibit sparked the above thought. Whomever the graphic artist was has my appreciation--I hadn't parsed "extra" and "ordinary" until looking at the pamphlet for the exhibition.
As displayed, it made me think (ineloquently): "what if extraordinary people are remarkable because they make something MORE ordinary, more identifiable for those who encounter them?" thus, it makes us think of the more ordinary and inspires us to bridge the gap between remarkable and mundane.
"To me, perfection is honesty--live your life as honestly as possible, even your mistakes. That's perfection."
- Danny Perez (paraphrased?)
"Study you. After you've studied everything in the world, I want you to study you." -Stuart Mitchell (transient man in Lansing, MI)
Editing note:
I initially wrote: "Your wisdom for discerning the extraordinary originates from bridging life with learning." and realized I was pulling nice sounding words from thin air without really thinking about what it means. Still sounds like a nice line, but it doesn't really register.
Monday, October 6, 2014
Alexithymia
I'm still figuring out how to look at it in a way that doesn't weigh me down. I definitely felt like a victim of statistics a few weeks ago when reading about it. I do have a few things that help and have shared that here too.
Saw this Saturday, which led me to find the term "Alexithymia." Though I don't drink coffee, I'm glad to know that's what some people would call it. Hopefully it's a useful resource to you/people you know.
Looking at it with strategic clarity in a way that's not condemning remains an open endeavor. I've given a few days to look at it with different eyes. What's helped:
I hope it helps someone, thanks for letting me share with all of you.
Saw this Saturday, which led me to find the term "Alexithymia." Though I don't drink coffee, I'm glad to know that's what some people would call it. Hopefully it's a useful resource to you/people you know.
Looking at it with strategic clarity in a way that's not condemning remains an open endeavor. I've given a few days to look at it with different eyes. What's helped:
1) Every behavior has a benefit from the an evolutionary biology perspective. In my life, I know from a lot of reflection times where I benefited from it and probably why it came about.
2) There's a spectrum of behaviors that most human beings encounter, this is a blip on it and doesn't represent the entirety of someone's personality, and "Your tendency need not be your destiny." - quote on the walls of Macomb County correctional facility
3) "Tranquility's something everyone seeks, but only you yourself can find." - homeless gentleman in Lansing
Some descriptions:
"you don't live, you just exist. You don't feel, you just function." I'd describe it as being emotionally hollow, inert, or emotionally blocked/stagnant. It often blends with depression and ASD/PTSD. This tune was the closest I got to articulate what it's like to deal with that state a few years ago--stuck, mentally trying to work it off, but not really getting anywhere.
In 2012 I started to realize absence of feeling/emotion was a problem while at a friend's apartment. Later during a class reflection activity at Ryan Correctional facility, we were asked to share how we felt. I didn't know what to do and didn't have anything to say. I realized when everyone started laughing that I was the only one who was genuinely confused among university classmates and people who spent most of their lives in prison alike. In some parts of my life it's been helpful, but it's also been destructive, detrimental, and frustrating in other aspects.
"you don't live, you just exist. You don't feel, you just function." I'd describe it as being emotionally hollow, inert, or emotionally blocked/stagnant. It often blends with depression and ASD/PTSD. This tune was the closest I got to articulate what it's like to deal with that state a few years ago--stuck, mentally trying to work it off, but not really getting anywhere.
In 2012 I started to realize absence of feeling/emotion was a problem while at a friend's apartment. Later during a class reflection activity at Ryan Correctional facility, we were asked to share how we felt. I didn't know what to do and didn't have anything to say. I realized when everyone started laughing that I was the only one who was genuinely confused among university classmates and people who spent most of their lives in prison alike. In some parts of my life it's been helpful, but it's also been destructive, detrimental, and frustrating in other aspects.
A few resources exist, one in its early stages with a test, most of the posts (often lengthy) are from people discovering, trying to cope, grieving (many heavy stories), or describing their experience as someone with Alexithymia/being with someone with it. The online community remains fragmented.
As far as I can tell, few carry focus on solution/resolution
I've been practicing some solutions for myself. At the least, ways to prevent it, minimize it, or open up when it does happen--I've mentioned running in advance of my day, play, and dancing to open up my capacity to feel. I'm starting to manage how I engage and give space to process situations to find emotion differently.
I hope it helps someone, thanks for letting me share with all of you.
Ian D. Tran
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