Values
I'm a rabid omnivore, utterly content with the balance of meat and greens in my life. This allows me to enjoy excellent vegan restaurants and cafes with my youngest sister, who (according to ancient mythology) turned vegetarian on the spot one day in the line of a popular Texas barbecue joint.
I've brought my middle sister--also omnivorous--to Wisdom Vegan Bakery for lunch, coffee, and writing. We are full of our delicious respective lunches--jackfruit "pulled pork" sandwich and spicky "chik'n" sandwich--and a sampling of their cupcake offerings. Our fingers move clickety-clack across the keys in tandem. I sip an oatmilk hazelnut mocha latte, feeling my heart rate climb a bit with the now-rare introduction of caffeine into my system.
I'm not feeling a flow in the current chapter of The Remara Phenomenon yet. The chapter hasn't clicked or slipped into the path it needs to find. So, I turn to something that has been sitting in my inbox for a while. Askfriend's last question in the batch of three that were sent to me was:
What values do you hold? ... by values I meant rules/standards that you hold yourself to. For example, a value that's important for me to live day in day out is kindness, responsibility and others. Do you live them day to day?
The answer to this one has not come as easily as others because my values are not all... helpful... to me. If not kept in check some are actually destructive, but I can't countenance releasing them either.
Values I hold
Responsibility. If you give me a job, I want to do it right. If you give me a portion of a group project, I want it to be excellent. If you hire me to freelance edit a piece, I'll probably go through your piece roughly 25% more thoroughly than you paid me for.
Even so, I struggle with consistency. When a responsibility becomes routine I tend to slip more, but when my slipping standards are addressed I try to bring myself back up to the level I expect from myself. I was better at handling responsibility in fully structured environments, like a workplace or high school. In self-structured environments like home and college, it is/was much more difficult for me to maintain my own ideals regarding responsibility from day to day. I am aided in this by my daily planner and colorful sheets of stickers, but it is still a struggle.
Courtesy. Thank God for my years in customer service. In my opinion, six months working in food service or retail should be mandatory for every American. Just six months, and I think the incidents of I-WANNA-SPEAK-TO-YOUR-MANAGER-ing and HOW-DARE-YOU-RUN-OUT-OF-BREAD-BOWLS-rage would plunge to fractional percentages. I served eight years in three different customer service roles and due (in part) to that, I do my best to remain courteous to those around me. In a given moment, I may be hurting too badly to smile at anyone, but everyone around me deserves, at bare minimum, that I keep my personal problems on a leash and that I don't inflict them on everyone around me. I have to remember that customer service is often front line to management that (in some cases) may not give a damn, and that issues I have with the inventory/the store/the policy are often not the fault of the employee I'm facing (with the caveat that an employee's behavior, attitude, and the area in their care are indeed their own responsibility). I have managed to maintain this value most of the time.
Caretaking. If someone in my life is hurting or in need, I want to drop everything and assuage it. I want to fix the problem, fill any cracks with my own soul, and banish darkness and desperation by my word and deed. I want to provide oases along life's harsh desert road and moments of joy and wonder to help sustain people in difficult times, or just hold their hand and offer tissues as they cry. I want to be there for them.
I want to be there for them so much that sometimes I lose sight of Dusty completely because Dusty doesn't matter in the face of all that need. There is no Dusty in those moments, there is only the vehicle of aid and assistance, and if that vehicle fails in its purpose, then Dusty is useless anyway. And triage demands the need that screams the loudest be addressed. Unfortunately, I am terrible at perceiving those who are quietly bleeding out in the corner, so this tendency of mine is destructive to both myself and people in my life who might actually need care more than those who are loudest.
This has been ruinous to my soul. I have been this way as long as I can remember. I have begun to reteach myself a better way, but even now I still lose myself to others' moments of need. I still prioritize peoples' needs based on my rather faulty perceptions. This has potential to be such a good thing, I know it can be, but it will be a long time before I can trust myself to accurately organize needs and give to them without losing Dusty. She is, I've found over time, also worth my time and effort to save and support.
Loyalty. My formative peer relationships (lol, that's a fancy way of saying my friend groups when I was five) were often one-sided. I had a couple of friends who were like me and liked me, but just as often I made friends with kids who sported with my gullibility and mocked my black-and-white goody-two-shoes nature. The more they mocked me, the harder I tried to be a "good friend." I had to prove I was good enough. Surely, if I tried hard enough, they would stop saying hurtful things. I left church crying almost every week, sometimes twice a week depending on who was there on Tuesday or Wednesday night services. But, you see, I couldn't walk away. I hadn't proved I was worth being friends with, yet. Once I did, of course everything would get better and then I wouldn't NEED to walk away, you see.
Frankly, walking away was not even an option in my mind. It remained that way for the first two decades of my life. I have, since, walked away from some friendships. Sometimes doing so has resulted in a renewed and healed relationship later. Sometimes there is a gaping hole that never goes away, an empty spot on a shelf that permanently defines an entire time period in my life. I still feel every empty space in my life where someone once was who I can no longer speak to, for one reason or another.
Loyalty is not consistency. I am not good at consistency, but if you are my friend and you ever contact me, even years down the road, I will pick up with you like we were just talking yesterday.
I have learned that loyalty is a two-way street. It was a hard-learned lesson that I am often tempted to jettison so I don't have to feel like a bad person or a villain of someone else's story, but I literally cannot bear the weight of one-sided loyalty anymore. That function finally broke.
I have also learned when I give loyal to the wrong people, the people in my life who actually deserve loyalty suffer. This helps me remember not to return to or enter into new situations of one-sided loyalty.
Maintaining this value in a way that is not destructive is hit and miss and I am still learning.
Curiosity. For too long, I quashed my curiosity. I have been afraid of learning things that will 1) upend my understanding of the world or 2) put me in conflict with people that I care about. For a long time, I was the tolerant friend. The person who could befriend everyone and anyone. That one who wouldn't judge you no matter what you told her. I was that way because it garnered the most love for my starved and fearful soul.
I have mentioned the empty spaces in my life from people who I can no longer speak to. At least one of those was not my choice. I was rejected by someone who could not abide my political opinions, once I finally began to formulate them. Admittedly, I could not express them well or clearly, but it was my first try, and I was immediately cut off. My first reaction was, "Of course. I knew this would happen."
But I remind myself of two things. First, that that person had the right to walk away at any time and that I do not somehow own that person just because we were friends. Second, this severing has not been the reaction of everyone in my life. Many of my friends who do not agree with me (and I do not agree with them) have not cut ties. In fact, we can have respectful dialogues. Admittedly, the more I read the more impassioned and animated I become on various topics, so though respect is stable, calmness may fluctuate.
I have a sticker on my computer that says "Be curious." I have since been told that it has a secondary meaning I did not intend, but I have it there to remind myself that it is okay to research answers to controversial topics that I want to better understand. It is okay to chase the truth and come to conclusions that may alienate me from people. It will always hurt if that happens, but it will hurt more to keep myself in ignorance for the sake of preserving relationships. If I do that, if I'm living a half-life in order to keep relationships, am I really offering any person the best of myself? By living that way, I refuse the other party a proper decision regarding the type of person they want as a friend by withholding parts of myself. I look back at my past pursuit of non-controversialness and see how I made myself a vague, waffling, and wretchedly ignorant figure.
No. More.
I struggle with consistency here. I am still afraid of losing people, or of experiencing any conflict with people. However, I am working on confronting this fear. I am engaging with difficult pieces of media on incredibly divisive topics. I am practicing stating my opinion when I feel like it really matters. I will TRY to let people see who I am and allow them enough information to decide whether I am a person they really want to connect with or not. Less than that is desperate dishonesty by ommission.
Standards I hold myself to
Strict rein on the tongue. A wise little Disney rabbit once said, "If you can't say somethin' nice, don't say nuffin' at all." What this means in my life is that, if I am angry at someone who is in front of me, I lockjaw.
I've said many times that being friends with another person is like handing them a bunch of knives and trusting that person to kindly never stick them in my back. Allow me to elaborate.
In my life, many people come up to me and tell me things they say they've never told anyone. They tell me their fears and their hopes and all sorts of intimate things. I love being that person you can come to, but it's a huge responsibility partly because when I am angry, I have all the knives you ever gave me at my disposal. I could, with one sentence, cut you so deep that the relationship would never recover. In that angry moment, I want to stab you in your weakest place and in that moment it would be completely intentional and my words would be true. In the next moment I would be utterly horrified, but that's too late, isn't it? Damage done.
If I have any sense that what I say might be destructive, I try to walk away from the situation. I value relationships, and there is surely a better way to say this that I will figure out later when I am not steaming out my ears. Do I vent to others about my anger when I need to? Absolutely. But if I can possibly find a better way of confronting the person I am upset with, I choose silence first and carefully collected words later.
On the flip side, a bad case of lockjaw means I have difficulty confronting anyone when I am upset. This is something I am slowly learning to address.
Being a good friend/sister/daughter/wife. This is probably the vaguest, most all-encompassing statement, but I have to include it because it alternately makes me who I am in the best way and tyrannizes my life.
Positive: This ideal holds me to the notion that my friends/sisters/parents/husband should have the absolute best from me, and I agree that they deserve this.
Negative: My internal judge deems me an absolute trash heap on fire if I fall remotely short, or am slightly less than supportive, or let myself get a bit lazy. This standard is blind to healthy priorities and boundaries. I very quickly lose Dusty. I have not yet found a way to bring this into a healthy balance, though I am surrounded by people who are trying to help me in that, most often my friends/sisters/parents/husband. No wonder I think they deserve my best.
Values I lack that I would like to have
Courageous honesty. I struggle with honesty, though not in the conventionally understood way. I try not to lie, but I have frequently skirted the truth or hyper-focused on positive truths to the exclusion of negative or confrontational truths. I considered myself extremely honest for most of my life just because I "didn't lie." Now, I consider myself to be in a state of constantly struggling to speak the truth in its fuller sense.
Discipline. I have made some strides in this, but still I tend to drift toward my impulses. I clean for a week. I game for a week. I politely harass contractors to come fix things, then sit in unproductive stress for days until their work is done. I still struggle to write when I don't feel like it. I cycle between projects even when I swore I'd focus on one. I feel like a more whole version of myself would be able to hold myself to a strict set of projects I've decided on until they are complete.
Then again, I go to the gym almost every evening. I wrote 69k words of original fiction this year, and even if I possibly could have done more, that's a good first step. I learned a lot of Japanese vocabulary, grammar, and characters this year. Maybe I'm not as bad at discipline as I think? Maybe I'm just bad at it compared to the ideal in my head?
How important is it for you to uphold your values?
I re-read this blog as I come to the last part of the question. Due to the nature of my brain, I know I haven't recounted all the values that I hold, but it is a reasonable list.
How important is it for me to uphold my values? In my worst, most vulnerable moments, on the bad nights when I'm shaking from anxiety and I can't think my way out of a paper bag, I think that I'll never be as good as I want to be, and because of that I'm worthless and everyone should just find a better person to fill my spot in life.
If I could uphold them perfectly, perhaps I wouldn't need to fear those nights becauase there would be no gap between me and my ideals. However, ideals are, by definition, impossible to reach. Some nights that is a despair-filled thought, but in my more stable moments I know that without my ideals, I'd never strive toward anything better. So, I give you one last value:
Grow and Heal. No matter how many times I fall short and crash to the ground, I pick up the pieces. Reassemble. Stagger on. Along the way, with God and friends and family, therapy and insane amounts of reading, I have found areas in my life that I can change. Stretch. Places in my life that I thought were too broken to ever recover are now areas of great strength. I have the joy of looking forward to more broken areas healing in such a way, and a newfound trust that that will happen. I take opportunities for growth even if it requires drastic change, once I assess the opportunity and find it to be good. I try not to shrink back from the pain of growth and healing, instead coping with it and riding it out for the grand rewards.
Upholding my values is important enough for me to cut away the unhealthy and dysfunctional parts of myself so that I can heal and grow into a person who is just a little bit closer to those values and ideals.