hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

Hank Green was wondering about his relentless drive to be productive / his fears about being unproductive in the Nerdfighter newsletter. (https://werehere.beehiiv.com/p/mini-newsletter-does-anyone-else-feel-like-this)

I have some Thoughts, so here they are:

So a lot of the therapy-adjacent Nerdfighters are probably twitching right now, and writing you a set of reasonably similar letters. So I’m going to go in a weirder direction, to make sure that we have explored as much space of the idea-space as we can reach.

To me there’s a question of internal or external locus of control (what efficacy do you have, and how do you decide whether you are the captain of your own soul? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control ) versus what I would call an internal or external locus of _identity_ (what value do you have and who decides that?). So you kind of have a Johari Window of four options: internal control & internal identity, internal control & external identity, external control & internal identity, and external control & external identity. (I wish I could draw in my email app, but sadly it’s not to be.)

If your locus of control is internal but your locus of identity is external, then you would be part of the subset of people who believes that we shape the world through our decisions but simultaneously believes that we don’t get to decide what those decisions and efforts _mean about us_. We don’t get to decide our own value, so we’re constantly racing the clock trying to make accomplishments and be productive according to some idea we have of other’s expectations and judgments about us. I felt that way about my life for a long time; it was not fun.

A Native American acquaintance of mine says that outlook on the world is a very white Westerner thing, and that her culture believes that people and animals exist to exist - that we exist for our own purposes (we’re here because we’re here) and we decide what that means. That sounds like an internal locus of identity and internal control to me. It makes me wonder where other cultures and people fall into this heuristic, whether Calvinist predestination is as externally a locus of identity as it has an external locus of control, since they would be relying on the supposed judgments of god for both their worth and as the only form of efficacy in the world.

It’s something to think about anyway. Y’all have a good night!

I have some thoughts on Sick Woman Theory and some things implied by it. I agree that sickness intensifies the invisibility of the individual, and that sickness feminizes masculine-identified people. But I think the author doesn't go far enough. Sickness adds a degree of invisibility to women and nonbinary people because we are already supposed to be invisible. "Women's work" is unpaid and thankless because it is supposed to be invisible. We are all expected to be blind to the gears that keep the world turning.

When was the last time you saw a grown man told he was "making a scene"? I have never seen it, personally. It has always been weilded against women and children, always weilded by the party with more power against the one with less. It basically translates to "stop calling attention to my unacceptable behaviour/stop undermining this power imbalance/stop asking for attention". It says "you are embarrassing me and I will punish you for it". When are men ever punished for those things? When are a man's actions seen as a reflection on those he has privilege or power over?

When have you heard a man described as "doing it for the attention"? Women are said this of frequently, because the unspoken assumption is that *women never deserve attention* for their actions. Only for their appeal to the male gaze are women seen as deserving attention. And nonbinary people are never acknowledged at all. Our very existence undermines the binary dynamic of the abusive, gendered power imbalance endemic to most societies.

The future is nonbinary.