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A confluence of things is sort of crashing around in my head at the moment, between reading a few bloggy threads and some of the IP work I'm doing and some other stuff but.
I'm feeling very struck with the whole "I'm thirty-three years old and I'm finally starting to get a handle on what I want to do when I grow up." Which is generally the sort of thing that a lot of people want to have sorted out before they have the two-year-old kid, but what the hell, hey?
A while back, when I was pregnant, I commented that I finally had enough of my shit together to begin, and a few folks who were mothers laughed at me and said "Just you wait", but no, I was actually fucking right there, damnit. I wasn't talking about parenting, I was talking about me. I'm finally able to begin me.
Fuck of a thing to start doing at thirty.
For one reason or another, I grew up in an amazing perspective shortage. Broken sense of self, has a lot of things I can do, but not much of a sense of wanting. I still remember quite keenly being referred to as "science girl" back in high school, and having a sense of pride in my ability to accomplish teen-level scientific comprehension, but that carried with it a weight of assumption that I cared about science per se, that I would pursue it, that I had theories.
I stink at theories. That's one of the things that I had to learn the hard way, because doing science isn't really about systematisation of knowledge, filing, connection of bibs and bobs in shiny ways, not at core, it's about having an idea about how the world might work and going forth to see if that idea holds up. I'm a taxonomical thinker, not a scientific one. I don't care whether it can be tested, I care whether it's a functional system that does interesting things. (And that system can be "physics" or it can be "Western astrology", and that doesn't actually matter to me. I think the closest I could come to doing actual science is something like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kaifu's History of Science work, and, again: history accrues at one year per year no matter how innovative the historians are.)
See also: I have 'cladistics' on my livejournal interests list.
And I don't have that kind of ideas. But learning that I don't have that kind of ideas - that my ideas are more fundamentally conservative than science can be, because they are about the stuff that's already in the system and how it wiggles when poked, rather than expanding the depth or breadth of the system - left me with nothing, because what can I do if everything everyone thought I was made to do is wrong?
I tried to be Science Girl, because I was good at the intro stuff that really is the taxonomic sorting of knowledge, and rapidly hit the point at which the stuff I was sorting didn't matter to me. And while that didn't cause my breakdown, it certainly didn't help it, because not only was the breakdown a confluence of major depression and massive post-IB burnout, it was identity-dissolving confrontation with Science. (And also with Politics, that whole thing where I was A Girl Who Was Good At Science And Math And The World Needs Those.)
Identity started out shaky, too much borrowing from what Others See, and it took me a long time to reassemble it.
And one of the things that I actually constructed around was this place of being Mama. Because - regardless of the social pressures around this sort of thing - that was something that I was always clear that I wanted. Science was something I was supposed to want. College was something I was supposed to want. A career was something I was supposed to want. A perfectly clean house, also something I was supposed to want, and that's a whole other barrel of fuckups, but hey.
Pregnancy was the hardest damn thing I have ever done in my life, and I include confronting Science and being defeated and getting kicked out of college in a self-annihilatory heap among "things I have done". But I knew that it was for something - which college wasn't, hadn't been. Because when I got to college, I had no fucking clue what I wanted other than "to write", and college was kind of peripheral to that goal. Can't make progress on building a life when I don't know what life I want to build.
It's taken way too much flailing to get to the beginning, is what I want to say. And I was thinking over some things, as I'm trying to comb out my knots, and the things I come up with are things like "I don't want to be your teacher. I will accept helping you figure out what you want to learn." Or "I will not write your ceremony for you, but I will help you work through what ritual you want to do." Reminded of whatloveandpower said about being the midwife, not the person having the baby. Tired of people who want me to be their mommy and have them as my baby, rather than learn as adults and respect me as an adult. Recognising the old scars, too, of a childhood spent wondering how old I would have to be before I could reliably expect anyone to listen to me.
I have a gift for theology. For systematics. Which is another way of talking about cladistics, just in a spiritual framework. I do that; that's my Work. I'm mama, which doesn't mean having my child's life, but it means helping her figure out how to have her own. Like climbing the slide.
I will not climb your slide. But hand under foot, all the way up, we can do it. I am the Master of Challenges, the consultant for the ritual, but the fire is yours to walk through. This is theology; this is motherhood; this is who I am coming to be and how I am doing it.
I have my own fires to walk.
You can get on with your search, baby, and I can get on with mine -
And maybe someday we will find that it wasn't really wasted time.
I'm feeling very struck with the whole "I'm thirty-three years old and I'm finally starting to get a handle on what I want to do when I grow up." Which is generally the sort of thing that a lot of people want to have sorted out before they have the two-year-old kid, but what the hell, hey?
A while back, when I was pregnant, I commented that I finally had enough of my shit together to begin, and a few folks who were mothers laughed at me and said "Just you wait", but no, I was actually fucking right there, damnit. I wasn't talking about parenting, I was talking about me. I'm finally able to begin me.
Fuck of a thing to start doing at thirty.
For one reason or another, I grew up in an amazing perspective shortage. Broken sense of self, has a lot of things I can do, but not much of a sense of wanting. I still remember quite keenly being referred to as "science girl" back in high school, and having a sense of pride in my ability to accomplish teen-level scientific comprehension, but that carried with it a weight of assumption that I cared about science per se, that I would pursue it, that I had theories.
I stink at theories. That's one of the things that I had to learn the hard way, because doing science isn't really about systematisation of knowledge, filing, connection of bibs and bobs in shiny ways, not at core, it's about having an idea about how the world might work and going forth to see if that idea holds up. I'm a taxonomical thinker, not a scientific one. I don't care whether it can be tested, I care whether it's a functional system that does interesting things. (And that system can be "physics" or it can be "Western astrology", and that doesn't actually matter to me. I think the closest I could come to doing actual science is something like
kaifu's History of Science work, and, again: history accrues at one year per year no matter how innovative the historians are.)See also: I have 'cladistics' on my livejournal interests list.
And I don't have that kind of ideas. But learning that I don't have that kind of ideas - that my ideas are more fundamentally conservative than science can be, because they are about the stuff that's already in the system and how it wiggles when poked, rather than expanding the depth or breadth of the system - left me with nothing, because what can I do if everything everyone thought I was made to do is wrong?
I tried to be Science Girl, because I was good at the intro stuff that really is the taxonomic sorting of knowledge, and rapidly hit the point at which the stuff I was sorting didn't matter to me. And while that didn't cause my breakdown, it certainly didn't help it, because not only was the breakdown a confluence of major depression and massive post-IB burnout, it was identity-dissolving confrontation with Science. (And also with Politics, that whole thing where I was A Girl Who Was Good At Science And Math And The World Needs Those.)
Identity started out shaky, too much borrowing from what Others See, and it took me a long time to reassemble it.
And one of the things that I actually constructed around was this place of being Mama. Because - regardless of the social pressures around this sort of thing - that was something that I was always clear that I wanted. Science was something I was supposed to want. College was something I was supposed to want. A career was something I was supposed to want. A perfectly clean house, also something I was supposed to want, and that's a whole other barrel of fuckups, but hey.
Pregnancy was the hardest damn thing I have ever done in my life, and I include confronting Science and being defeated and getting kicked out of college in a self-annihilatory heap among "things I have done". But I knew that it was for something - which college wasn't, hadn't been. Because when I got to college, I had no fucking clue what I wanted other than "to write", and college was kind of peripheral to that goal. Can't make progress on building a life when I don't know what life I want to build.
It's taken way too much flailing to get to the beginning, is what I want to say. And I was thinking over some things, as I'm trying to comb out my knots, and the things I come up with are things like "I don't want to be your teacher. I will accept helping you figure out what you want to learn." Or "I will not write your ceremony for you, but I will help you work through what ritual you want to do." Reminded of what
loveandpower said about being the midwife, not the person having the baby. Tired of people who want me to be their mommy and have them as my baby, rather than learn as adults and respect me as an adult. Recognising the old scars, too, of a childhood spent wondering how old I would have to be before I could reliably expect anyone to listen to me.I have a gift for theology. For systematics. Which is another way of talking about cladistics, just in a spiritual framework. I do that; that's my Work. I'm mama, which doesn't mean having my child's life, but it means helping her figure out how to have her own. Like climbing the slide.
I will not climb your slide. But hand under foot, all the way up, we can do it. I am the Master of Challenges, the consultant for the ritual, but the fire is yours to walk through. This is theology; this is motherhood; this is who I am coming to be and how I am doing it.
I have my own fires to walk.
You can get on with your search, baby, and I can get on with mine -
And maybe someday we will find that it wasn't really wasted time.
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From:
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That's a particularly fascinating take on science to me, because to a large extent I would seem to have leveraged having strengths mostly at the taxonomist level into having a nominally scientific career and some part of me still feels like that is getting away with something. (Mind you, I am solidly enough rooted in caring about the people I love and the stories I have to tell that not having a huge degree of focused caring about The Science I Do, as opposed to a sort of general Asimovian pro-scienceness, is not problematic to me; I can live perfectly well construing it as a day job that enables the things I do care about.) It certainly seems that molecular biology, at the moment, is a discipline in dire need of taxonomists, and will be for the foreseeable future because the analysis tools aren't catching up on the volume of raw data any time soon.
(Trying to be more proactive in comments, as work time permits, because one anxiety I can counter the source of fairly easily is the feeling of sitting here nodding and not actually saying anything; that's one I've been feeling for a while here.)
*hugs* if apt.
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Nice to see you around here. :} Comments are a goodness, as are hugs.
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You have a way of showing people the way. Thanks.
Lightbulbs, I haz them.
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TELL me about it. *hugs*
Welcome to you. (: Welcome to your new road, wherever it takes you.
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I was always the Science Girl, in part because I have Science Parents. I was good at math and science, so I was expected to do them. And college. I don't regret going to college and my dropping out had less to do with an extreme lack of what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life and much much more with poor personal life choices, but it was still there, lurking.
I like basic science. All of them. I like balancing equations and looking at animals and searching for rocks. But I don't care how they got there. I don't care why, just what.
Of course, I'm still doing science now, and I still don't like theory. I like facts. I really should have changed my major to IT when I had the chance, but now I just need to go forward. And when I finish (yes, when, dammit!) I will have finished that part of my life and it will be closed.
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