Conferences, Resilience, Perseverance

Wuff! Exhausting conference day.

When I tell non-academics I'm going to a conference, I think they sometimes assume I'm going on vacation. I hear some of the medical professions actually structure conferences this way; it's assumed the event is mostly play and only a little work.

There's some play involved in traveling and seeing friends that you only see at conferences. But work ("the work") pervades the event: listening to papers, responding to papers, gathering and updating your sense of where the field is, watching out for prospective material or people to introduce to students, shopping book or article proposals to editors, and the endless process of explaining what it is you do or what you're working on currently to people (and engaging what they're working on).

And on top of that you're trying to keep up with your regular work. In my case, that's grading and editing. I did editing duties last night. I ducked out of a reception to grade more. Well--I exercised (ran 5K on the treadmill) and then ran down to get some food. This hotel and this part of Arlington are a bit light on readily available eats. I ate some fine Ethiopian food for lunch, and I stole some good pepperoni flatbread from the reception. But man could I use some greens and grains. I miss cereal.

And I'm writing this, my morning pages, write-something-anything blog that I mostly hope people don't read (but welcome and hello if you are reading this!).

My brain, I must say, is mainly done with hard thinking. It's run a 5K of sorts just listening intently to panels and ideas. My socialization batteries, never champions at endurance events, are pretty drained.

People ask how I've been, how it's going. I'm not sure what to say? I've been in much, much darker, rougher places (two weeks ago was a snippet of what that time was like all the time). But the trials and tribulations of some student issues over the last six months have been an unusual drain to life energy.

It also bothers me anew that I'm so prone to really morbid, suicidal ideation. It bothers me, of course, in that I shouldn't be thinking that; no one should. But it bothers me also that it seems such a first world white guy way of being. Reddit is full of only-half-joking memes of suicidal fantasies. The normalization/romanticization of clinical depression is both shocking and annoying. Saying I often feel low-grade anhedonia is a bit like grumbling about how I'll never find a girlfriend. It sucks, but it's not a life-threatening illness. When PA says it's been a rough year, I suspect he means he almost died due to health issues. I have not almost died due to health issues. Many things are going well. It's fine.

PA told me things had been really rough. I touched his arm. "It's OK," he said. "I'm pretty resilient." That started me thinking about how resilience is one of the new watch-words for our students. We worry because this crop of students just seems overall less resilient than past ones.

I'm not sure I'm that resilient. What's gotten me through rough times is more like a grim, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other persistence. I don't need to be happy or love life. Those things are lagniappe. All that is required is that I continue. It's like Zen, but without the peace. Who needs peace? All that's required is that you continue.

And, eventually, some peace and happiness occasionally show up. Ethiopian food with M was lovely. The working group I saw was stimulating. Seeing friends and students is uplifting.

And finishing my writing for today so that I can play a little Zelda (I brought my new Switch) and turn in is good, too.

The Preconditions for Hope

Roundtable-planning for my proposal about the affective drives for performance continues apace. I've sent out invitations; I'm waiting on yeses or noes. Love and outrage are onboard. We'll see about joy, patriotism (or nostalgia), devotion, and whatever LF wants to do (if she says yes)/

And I'm delaying committing to hope or nihilism.

I should do hope. What gets me out of my doom spirals, I told my therapist yesterday, is teaching. When I'm teaching students, I cannot project pessimism and nihilism to them. I may loathe myself for my white male Americanness, but I cannot stand self-loathing in my students. It's Fred Rogers all the way: There's no one else in the whole world like you, and you are capable of loving and being loved just as you are.

There are few things I hold for certain. When I say that Rogers message to students, though, I deliver it with as much certainty and conviction as I can muster. There's no room for hedging. There's no room for doubt or exceptions.

I once asked my sister (wisest person I know, mental health counselor) about the ethics of assuring small children that everything's going to be all right. It's literally not true. She allowed that, of course, bad things happen to everyone, children included. Of course, telling children that nothing unpleasant will ever touch them their whole life long would be a recipe for dysfunction. But when a parent tells a frightened child that they'll be OK--most of the time--it's not a literal prediction of the future. It's a promise: I love you. I am with you. I will do my best to stay with you and protect you.

She reminded me of a snippet from Won't You Be My Neighbor (the excellent documentary on Mr. Rogers). Mr. Rogers (very young in this clip) tells of one of his first encounters with a group of small children. One of the kids shows him a stuffed animal, telling him that its arm came off in the wash. This was a test, Mr. Rogers reflected. They waited to see how Mr. Rogers would respond. Would he swoop in and save them from their fear? (But your mommy fixed it, didn't she? It's all better now!) Instead, he asked a question: Our arms don't fall off when we wash them, do they? The kids, delighted that someone pinpointed their real fears here, responded enthusiastically.

The point, my sister said, isn't the factual status of Mr. Rogers's statement. Sometimes, indeed, children do lose limbs. But what the kids are asking isn't Do bad things ever happen? but Can I trust you to love me? Children need a foundation of trust and consistent care in order to thrive.

So do my students need something other than the yawning nihilism of my own pathologies. They have troubles aplenty. They're stressed, busy, going into debt, and terrified of the future. They're struggling to discover who they are apart from the family patterns they've learned throughout their childhood.

They aren't children. They know bad things happen. But they can all use a bit of Mr. Rogers certainty, the thing that is true by virtue of its affirmation: You are precious. You are loved. You can love just as you are.

There's a hope in that, or at least the preconditions for hope.

Caught between Hope and Nihilism

Every year around this time I wake up and realize that the deadline for proposals to the Big Summer Conference is November 1. And every year around this time I brainstorm madly for some kind of session that matches the Conference's yearly theme ("Drive" this time, since it's in Detroit).

After today's wake-up and brainstorm, it looks like I'm going to be pulling together a roundtable about the deep, enduring emotions (affects) that drive social movements in performance. My idea is to have each roundtable participant write/present something about a particular emotion. I have a friend who's researching fear. Another writes about outrage (a favored topic of mine in the past). Someone else is doing love.

Eventually I need to decide what to do myself. I'm caught between hope and nihilism.

Just put that on my tombstone: "I'm caught between hope and nihilism."

Actually, I don't want a tombstone. Or a funeral, really. I'd prefer to leave no trace and disappear from human memory as quickly as possible. Nihilism FTW! Except--I feel guilty thinking that. Can nihilism ever be anything other than a mental pathology? (There's my paper, probably.)

There's already a go-to performance scholar for hope: Jill Dolan. Hm. I should ask her. She's a super-star, of course, and likely already engaged. But it's worth a shot. I hope she says yes! LOL.

Nihilism and pessimism aren't safe topics for me, really. They're fascinating in the way that unhealthy-for-me things often are, like chocolate fudge ice cream sundaes from Baskin-Robbins. Or chocolate pudding. Or chocolate anything. I can get into really, really bad spots thinking too much about pessimism.

I have a pessimistic bent and a tendency to depression. This is both a neutral fact of my brain/personality and a complication for me as a Christian. The second fruit of the Spirit, we're told, is joy. It's right after love. Christians should be joyful, hopeful, cheerful. I'm not by nature a cheerful person.

I strive for pragmatism tempered by humble gratitude. The more I can recognize my kneejerk pessimistic thoughts as reactivity, the better. But even after that, it is often hard for me to discern reason for hope (as my recent posts have illustrated). When obliged to be a leader or a teacher, I can shift into an optimistic gear. It's a fake-it-til-you-make-it kind of gesture. Sometimes it works to get me out of a spiral.

But we'll see.