fuuuuck i just realized that the future idealized version of myself cant exist without current me being the catalyst for change and doing hard things. has anybody heard about this
I see this post all the time and I’m so confused. Most people throughout history were busier than your average resident of a developed country is now. My primary reaction to reading about the past since I was a child has been “I’m glad I don’t live then, I’m too weak for that, I could not do that much work all the time.”
In the past things took longer to do but they often required a waiting period. You had to chop wood, put it in your stove, and light it, but it took a few hours for it to get hot enough for baking and then another hour for the bread to fully cook. History books will say things like “It took 4 hours to make a loaf of bread” but they don’t mention that you only had to do actual work for a fraction of that time and the rest could be devoted to other tasks or relaxing for a while
Employee workload has doubled or tripled because of modern technology. It makes things faster but also creates less downtime which employers have filled with more responsibilities. You can do more work in a 10 minute period if all the files are on the computer but in the olden days you got to take a short walk to the filing cabinet and let your mind wander while you thumbed through folders, which means a modern 10 minutes of work is more mentally exhausting. The amount of work one employee has to do today used to be split between 2 or 3 people. We lost those moments of downtime we used to get by having to do things the slow way
If y'all are anything like me, this time of year is triggering AF. Here are some small, very easy grounding exercises that I was taught by my therapist, basically in order of how much I like them for this rage-inducing season. You make like them in a different order, depending on your rage-to-despair ratio.
Push a wall: literally go up to a wall and try to push it over. Really try. I promise you won’t push it over, but give it your best shot. Try to hold it as long as you can, and then take a breather and assess whether you need to repeat. Why it works: This is a quick, physical expulsion of the fight-or-flight feeling. It’s a bit like punching a wall, but without the potential to hurt yourself/look scary/damage things. You can even do it in front of people and say you’re stretching, they’ll never know (unless the wall actually falls down, but this will not happen, I assure you).
Shake like a dog: Animals shake to release stress, and you are also an animal. Setting aside time to just shake it out, as vigorously as you can, arms and legs, face, stick your tongue out, pretend you’re shaking like a wet dog. You can dance instead, if that feels better, and you can do this to music, but basically the more unhinged you can be, the better. If you are in a place you can scream, scream too! Why it works: like the above, this is a release of pent-up stress and anxiety. Especially if your rage-to-woe ratio is high, some kind of physical exertion is often the best way to burn through the cortisol and adrenaline you’re building up.
Bilateral Tapping: Cross your arms over your chest so that your fingertips are at your shoulders, and slowly tap, one hand at a time, back and forth, for about a minute. Breathe slowly. Why it works: This is weird as hell, but because this engages both sides of your brain, it helps override the activity of the amygdala, which is the part of your brain that Makes The Fear. If you’re being literally triggered in a situation, i.e. you’re having a trauma response, or reliving some family trauma, this is a good one.
Box Breathing: From a comfortable position (can really be seated, laying down or standing), inhale slowly for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, then repeat. You can do it for shorter counts or longer counts, but if you vary the counts make sure the exhale is longer than the inhale. You can close your eyes or leave them open. Why it works: This exercise helps you move from a sympathetic (activated) nervous system response to a parasympathetic (balanced) response. I do this one every day, and it’s a good gateway to meditation. Especially helpful in anxious or tense situations, but I find if I’m very triggered I need one of the other ones first, or it can make anxiety worse. Breathwork is amazing but not usually as a first exercise if you’re very activated, or have been activated a long time.
Ice: Lots of ways to do this one – hands in cold water for 30 seconds, ice pack on the back of your neck, dip your entire face into a bowl of ice water (this one’s the most effective). Why it works: I kinda think this is hilarious, but this activates your mammalian dive reflex. It immediately slows your heart-rate, so if you are feeling your blood pressure and heart rate rising, this one is very good. The only reason this one’s at the bottom of my list is because I hate being cold.
I wish you all a very get-through-the-holidays-without-hurting-yourself. Take time alone if you need it.
Remember that even good changes can make us feel depressed, because, as creatures of habit, we’re resistant to change. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t the right choice.
that one study that was talking about how the “gay voice” can be viewed as just what post-testosterone based puberty voices sound like when not trained into culturally masculine modes of inflection and intonation. I think that’s a great masculinity based example of the same phenomenon as discussed in my previous post. Like the reason speaking in that way is gender nonconforming is likely because it reveals the effort and practice that goes into “natural” adult masculinity. it draws attention to the fact that the narrow allowable masculinity is constructed and necessarily learned in order to be perfected.
interesting flipside, feminine inflections are probably learned and constructed too. i have some feminine cis female coworkers who have very “boyish” voices who would probably read very masculine if their voices are deeper. i distinctly recall, as a teenager, realizing that the way i talked was different than my female classmates and starting to inflect more to “fit in”. so the real default is probably a wide variation that gets shoved into these different boxes by a lot of pressure
Bringing the citation onto the main post: Gaudio, Rudolf P. “Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men” American Speech, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 30-57
to be clear (cause in a few different threads of this post I am realizing it’s spread beyond the context of other posts I envisioned it as a continuation of, which give greater context of the overall idea I was trying to express)–
yes, feminine inflections (and all ways of speaking) are learned! speech is a social behavior, and all aspects of speech emerge from these contexts. there’s no “natural” default of vocalization.
and this is not always in a literal (“I’m going to practice making my voice masculine”) way, often the way kids who were assigned male at birth learn these “masculine” inflections is a social process in which they are mocked, laughed at, or bullied for speaking in any other way, so they are incentivized to learn to speak in the very narrow acceptable ways that don’t invite this kind of attention.
similarly, people like me who were assigned female learn to use our voices to avoid negative social repercussions. a lot of “feminine” communication I personally associate with “customer service voice” because it was something I learned to do to deescalate and placate.
tonal inflections also reflect how people navigate other socially constructed categories (e.g. “the white voice” that many people of color perform in predominately white professions).
my central point in the original post isn’t at all that this is unique to masculinity or men! to the contrary, my larger point is the opposite– all gender is active.
we tend to displace our ideas about how active gendered speech patterns (and body language, etc.) are onto specifically marginalized people. gay men, for example, are seen as atypically using their voices and body language to communicate how they exist within gendered structures, but the reality is that straight men are doing the same thing.
we interpret gender nonconformity as uniquely active, when really it’s just that most people like to believe hegemonic patterns of speech and body language are “natural”/default and everything else is “artificial”/deliberate.
from one chronically anxious person to another: the world is not going to go up in flames. What happens will be more slow, more bureaucratic, more boring. There is no catastrophe to end all catastrophes, no rapture, no sudden end. You can’t give into the call of the void, because there is no void. So you just have to do the work to make tomorrow a better place, anyway. Because that’s how it gets better.
All of this! And conversely, there won’t ever be some magical day when everything is fixed all at once! Progress will be slow! Don’t give into doomerism because we can’t fix everything right now, right away. Progress, too, will often be kinda boring and bureaucratic. That doesn’t mean it’s not happening and that it’s not important.
I drew this poster for Jon Acuffand his FINISH book tour. Big thanks to Jon for this collaboration, his book has some great ideas about how to complete creative and life goals.
