My gender-fuckery and reality testing
Jun. 26th, 2021 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingswordThe world is big and confusing, and you know what? That's probably for the best. If the world were small enough for one human mind to experience and understand everything, well, it wouldn't be the vast, diverse playground that it is, would it? I don't believe in making things ideologically simpler for people to understand if I am sacrificing their ability to actually understand that thing. Especially if that "thing" is me. I don't believe that boiling my nature down to just a couple of elements is going to be useful to their ability to predict my behaviour or plan ahead for me. So if I just let people jump into the deep end of constructing gender: so? (And if people want to attack me or my community for their inability to understand us? Well I have a baseball bat and a bone to pick with them.)
Which brings us to reality testing.
It is healthy to know when your beliefs about the world are steering you wrong so that you can change them, yes? But first you have to figure out which things are beliefs or judgment calls and which things are observances of fact. And that is harder to do than you think it is. From the inside, beliefs don't look like beliefs; they look like facts.
So first you have to notice when you are confused. Look for questions like, “why isn’t this working?”, “why am I like this?”, or, “why do people gotta do that?” Then, instead of answering the question, look instead at your understanding of the situation. Make a list of your beliefs, value judgments, the facts as you understand them, and anything that someone might reasonably disagree with you on. Then you go down the list and ask yourself what the problem would look like if your understanding of that thing were incorrect. It helps, sometimes, to ask if the opposite of what you think is true could be a valid interpretation or what the problem would look like if it were the opposite of what you think. Sometimes you get really novel thoughts that way. Sometimes you discover penicillin.
It takes maybe five to ten minutes to do it, so for some problems it is not a big enough deal to be worth reality testing. But for recurring problems that have to do with your value judgments, on which rely a lot of your decision making? It can be invaluable. Especially those questions you have about your own self.
And in a society that is built on propaganda, misinformation, and bad science that hasn't been caught yet, this is a skill that is in increasing demand for the most basic decisions. Q Anon bullshit, conspiracy theories, and our own anxious thoughts have this in common: they often are not based in observable facts about the universe. And belief in anxieties and conspiratorial/magical/wishful thinking can be very widespread, so it helps to be able to question whether we are being gas-lighted by popular narratives or our own fears.
Which brings us to reality testing.
It is healthy to know when your beliefs about the world are steering you wrong so that you can change them, yes? But first you have to figure out which things are beliefs or judgment calls and which things are observances of fact. And that is harder to do than you think it is. From the inside, beliefs don't look like beliefs; they look like facts.
So first you have to notice when you are confused. Look for questions like, “why isn’t this working?”, “why am I like this?”, or, “why do people gotta do that?” Then, instead of answering the question, look instead at your understanding of the situation. Make a list of your beliefs, value judgments, the facts as you understand them, and anything that someone might reasonably disagree with you on. Then you go down the list and ask yourself what the problem would look like if your understanding of that thing were incorrect. It helps, sometimes, to ask if the opposite of what you think is true could be a valid interpretation or what the problem would look like if it were the opposite of what you think. Sometimes you get really novel thoughts that way. Sometimes you discover penicillin.
It takes maybe five to ten minutes to do it, so for some problems it is not a big enough deal to be worth reality testing. But for recurring problems that have to do with your value judgments, on which rely a lot of your decision making? It can be invaluable. Especially those questions you have about your own self.
And in a society that is built on propaganda, misinformation, and bad science that hasn't been caught yet, this is a skill that is in increasing demand for the most basic decisions. Q Anon bullshit, conspiracy theories, and our own anxious thoughts have this in common: they often are not based in observable facts about the universe. And belief in anxieties and conspiratorial/magical/wishful thinking can be very widespread, so it helps to be able to question whether we are being gas-lighted by popular narratives or our own fears.