ianwillplaythepiano

[ianwillplaythepiano]

Just a tiny helping of whipped cream on top of a sh^% milkshake🙈

[ianwillplaythepiano]

Blog No. 9

WELCOME to the ultimate, long-awaited, concluding entry of the Blog of a Conflicted Soul!

After all of the late nights, through peaks and valleys of anxiety and deprecating self-talk,  I have made it to the end.  I can’t say this strongly enough – my longstanding fears of and emotionally twisted approach to writing for school made this class hard.  While I’m acutely aware that writing a page and a half every weekend should be a breeze, as yourself and most of our class would say, I go through a whole cycle of debilitative emotions on my way to completing each post.  Naturally, the emotional labor on its own is likely good practice on the way to eliminating my fears, but shit. Many of my peers told me they’ve completed each blog post in under an hour. Concerns about time-quality relationship for those peers’ blogs aside, the fact that it’s taken me at least half of a day to complete each post illustrates that writing is, but hopefully won’t always be, an unusually challenging thing for me.  At the very beginning of this course, I swear to god that the prospect of writing almost two pages every week (what feels the same as any other essay to me) generated almost enough fear to make me decide to drop the class and choose something else.  Yet, I’ve made it.  I’m still harboring some apprehension as we still have one even lengthier reflection still to write by Thursday, but thankfully I’d say that this one should be an easier experience, if not just because it won’t be all about myself.  I’m just trying to remind myself that it’s not anything like the terrifying ten-page research papers I worked though regularly at my last school…

Seven more weeks of blog-writing later, I can’t say that the waves of anxiety I get, each and every time, when I contemplate upcoming writing assignments have gone anywhere.  I can declare that my conflicted soul is still thoroughly conflicted, albeit somewhat more focused.  Not stunningly, simply writing about my tough feelings with new vocabulary words to use every week wasn’t enough to take my mental wellbeing from “depressed” to “anxious” to “emotionally healthy” in a single academic term. But that said, despite my historical tendency to dismiss small moments of progress simply because they aren’t grand enough to fit some mental ideal of “progress”, this interpersonal course and these writing assignments have helped me.  I don’t know if I’d give specific credit to any in-person part of the class itself, but if nothing, having built-in and unavoidable time to sit down and think through my shit was good for me.  With the blog projects, once a week I was forced to hone in and not just consider my feelings and life events, but analyze them to a point that I felt it was honest to put them into concrete words.  In an intriguing way, seeing my own words on the page instead of hearing them aloud in company of my therapist (or any other listener) made me repeated confirm the validity and accuracy of how I said I was feeling.  I know that I have brought this up in my entries before, but it bears repeating. Because I often fear that I could be lying about the way I’m feeling, to my self and/or to whoever’s listening at the time, the higher permanence of writing allowed me an extra opportunity to emotionally factcheck before considering a sentence finished.  And, even if the ideas didn’t make it into the published draft, consciously reconsidering the accuracy and importance of certain thoughts and emotions has been healthy.  Now, on top of committing to not losing sight of clarity brought by these introspections, I need to commit to pairing the thoughts and feelings I’ve analyzed with permanent action. I can let myself too easily get away with spending a week or two seriously considering how to make positive changes in my life, but then not letting it take root into my regular lifestyle.  If nothing, when trying to implement changes so far, I’ve realized that my habits and routines are much less malleable that I’ve always thought. Considering myself a flexible person in relationships, as right as I think that evaluation might be, I see now that that might not be able to carry over to personal flexibility and change.  For right now, this month and this week, I just need start with something inarguably doable– like maybe meditating for thirty uninterrupted minutes every morning with my girlfriend?  Something.  I’m working on it. 

Evaluating my experience in Interpersonal Comm. this term overall, I would easily say that the blogs and the reading were my primary connection to the course materials.  I do think that, in the end, the terms and social-science concepts brought up in the book are the most important take-aways from the class, so I’m glad that the blogs were a built-in way to reappraise the material every week.  Going forward into other communications classes, and my life overall, I have undoubtedly gained some tangible and impactful knowledge. That said, while I’m not sure if it would’ve been better to incorporate in class or with homework, I feel like our class needed more multi-media review and specific talk about the vocabulary and concepts– as they might be on a test or another communications class.  Particularly during chapters that were entirely professor-lecture based, without the student presentations’ wide-ranging styles of examples, I experienced a bit of a disconnect that made understanding the information difficult at times.   Even though lecturing straight from the book made sure that we “covered” all the material (especially for my peers who may have whiffed on reading their textbooks entirely), the time spent on each book page was far too equal. After reading through the whole book myself, because very clearly some topics are more common-sense than others, I feel like my peers and I would’ve really benefitted from a powerpoint or some other visual that could have further reinforced the ideas.  With the specific models, lists of conflict styles, and other vocabulary words, I believe we needed much more repetition over multiple days to really understand– especially if we hoped to use them long-term in our future lives. The time restriction of a two-meetings/week course set up in a ten-week term, no less with all of our days off taken into account, are not lost on me, needless to say! Regardless, if I had to give any significant feedback about the course:  One, taking accurate notes and absorbing information from the lectures as given was very, very difficult. Without a visual guide to increase fidelity of the messages, nor extra repetition throughout the weeks, some of the most interesting and need-to-know concepts were skimmed over, it felt like. Lastly, not for myself but for the good of my peers, I have one last suggestion! It’s stupid, frankly, that college students couldn’t accurately divide a page in half for each entry of their blogs, and it killed me how often I had to hear about page length in a college course… However! In order to bring harmony and clarity to the whole issue: as with nearly any other course I’ve taken, using a word count range to evaluate length of writing would have left so many of my peers passing this course, with a much more appropriate grade.  I can’t imagine how nice it’d be to eliminate the effort that you had to put in, no less the significantly slashed grades from my peers! All that aside though, I really enjoyed what I learned in this course, and I’m excited to continue on in the department and experience what else there is to learn.  Thank you for your expertise and a great class!  I hope you have an excellent summer!

[ianwillplaythepiano]

Blog No. 8

Welcome to the penultimate edition of the Blog of a Conflicted Soul!

Over the last seven weeks, while each week boasted a somewhat different topic, what these blog entries have consistently evoked in me is a curiosity toward being better than I am.  Whether 

I was reflecting on how I tell non-truths to affirm my depressive self-concept, or examining the ways I “manage” conflict at work and home, letting my thoughts materialize on paper has largely opened up more questions than it’s answered.  But in a general sense, even though the self-improving work I’ve still to do feels practically insurmountable from a first-person point of view, taking these hours to concisely (more or less) organize my thoughts has helped identify exactly which areas of my thoughts and behavior stand in my way.  With these fresh understandings of myself in mind, I’ve been considering how I’ll be able to actually put them to use.  Motivation itself being one of the most difficult things for me to muster in the last few years, making not just verifiable but long-lasting change in my habitual behavior is going to be a heck of a project, it seems.  Already, in my closest relationships, being hyperaware of how I act in ways that don’t live up to our relational commitment has been eye-opening, and is undeniably a little scary. 

I’m somebody who allocates a lot of blame on themselves, taking too much responsibility for the thoughts and actions that can contribute to relational turning points, and too little responsibility for making sure they don’t happen again.  Accordingly then, devoting even more attention than usual to how I uphold relational commitments between by girlfriend and I, and between members of my family, has evoked mixed and largely uncomfortable emotions.  I’ve been working hard to decide what kind of person I want to be, and then be that person in action. But as I’ve begun trying to change specific behaviors in close relationships that run contrary to who I want myself to be, I’ve realized that who I am is more than the behaviors I consciously decide to do.  I perform actions and say things all the time spontaneously, without thinking, and for years I’ve been feeling like that’s how to be true to myself, but after the fact I regret those actions and consider them “not who I really am”.  I know now it’s not necessarily just about being true to myself, because frankly, I haven’t always acted in accordance to the moral compass I might tell my friends I have.  Staying true to yourself seems almost useless unless you’re so sure of your self-concept that everything you say and do is consistent with who you want yourself to be.  I mean to say, it seems that even by identifying and adjusting concrete behaviors, I might not be actually changing myself at heart.  Therefore, if my internal aspirations and morals are genuine– being kind to all others, spreading positivity, serving other people generously– but aren’t always expressed in my actions, how harshly do I judge what kind of person I am? If I don’t adhere to them one-hundred percent of the time, are these ideals even a real internal moral compass, or a lame façade? Then, do I evaluate who I am based on an arguably outdated self-concept, or do I separate my intentions from my actions and accept that my personal habits define me? 

No contest, the hardest part for me in asking myself all these questions– as I said at the beginning of the last paragraph– is that they very often launch me into a hyper-anxious, self-doubting, and “life isn’t worth it and I’d literally prefer to be dead” sort of headspace.  To say it straight: When I think for very long about my failures or mistakes in intimate relationships– with FWB’s, girlfriends, and with family– I often come to the conclusion that the world would be better off if I could transfer my privilege and good qualities to another person, let that person use them to their potential, and simply killed myself off.  As discouraging as it is, that scenario frequently feels like an easier alternative than actually working to really change myself, because of the depressive and anxiety-attack type of emotions that self-change can bring up.  In fact, I partially regret incorporating this topic in this week’s entry, amidst the already building stress about the other two projects for this class etc., because now I’ve spent almost four hours sitting at my computer trying to write a one and a half page blog– floundering to objectively, if at all, articulate the complicated emotions I’m going through.  Because I take questions like those above very seriously, and I let thoughts of regrets and past failures toxify my mood and stonewall optimism, it’s taken a lot emotional labor to effectively complete this entry.  No less, whether it’s research essays or short reflections, the writing process on its own is an emotionally exhausting activity largely because of experiences I had at the school I dropped out of.  

Combining two individually stress-response-inducing activities, writing and thinking heavily about who I really am, was not the healthiest decision for this particular Monday evening.  But naturally if these were easy life questions to explore, and the parts of myself I dislike were simple to change, I would have figured myself out already.   In order to change how I am, day in and day out, I need to confront some brutal shortcomings in my personality and not just take responsibility for them, but actually be accountable if I actually don’t follow my own prescriptions.  Building that accountability is deeply necessary for me, in my quest to be a better person and in the rest of my life, because I come from a family that was not at all conformity oriented, and never truly punished me for not doing exactly as I was expected.  Undoubtedly, I’ve let a whole host of goals and hopes slide because in the end, what did they really matter? In a conversation oriented family, we could just talk out my mistakes, search for understanding and move on and still love each other.  Even more so, the times that I hadn’t met my goals, the consequences incurred never really made any lasting impact on my life– at least not in a way I was aware of then.  If I’d really held myself accountable to all the little unachieved goals set over the years, not answering to anybody else but to my own deadlines, maybe managing my life would be easier today.  Regardless of how I got here though, the greatest remaining challenge now is making sure I don’t improve myself for anybody but myself.  As difficult as it’s been for me historically, changing my mindset to include real self-accountability at the same time that I incorporate changes in my behavior is going to be invaluable and necessary going forward.  Here we go!

[ianwillplaythepiano]

Blog No. 7

Welcome back! I hope you enjoy yet another edition of the Blog of a Conflicted Soul.

Yet again, I have both faced and again powered through another emotionally tumultuous week. I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on mistakes that have harmed relationships, recent and from the past, in the context of examining a corrosive habit I have of questioning the validity of my current relationships.  Because this habit is almost always accompanied by self-talk focusing on a range of deep-cutting personal flaws (whether I recognize those flaws objectively or though a negatively-biased lens is very debatable), I can put myself directly under a great deal of pressure simply by trying to reevaluate and improve my quality of life.  Naturally, while normally it’s a healthy practice to put oneself at bird’s eye view and consider how to get better, I allow my brain too much free reign when trying to reconfirm the quality and validity of my interpersonal connections. It happens with coworkers and platonic friends as well, but especially when reviewing my own emotions, motivations, and satisfaction in romantic relationships, I can unintentionally introduce truly unneeded amounts of doubt into our partnership.  

With my depressive-anxious tendencies in full force, I often start to flip that doubt on myself.  Not only can questioning the inherent quality of a connection with someone harm any otherwise positive relationship, but I’m consequently led to ask, “what the hell’s wrong with me for not being able to enjoy what I have?”.  If I’m dating somebody who I’m quite sure I care about, but deep down I have feelings of relational dissatisfaction, is it an unforgivable transgression to continue being with them if I can’t say I’d ever want to spend the rest of my life with them?  Is it a flaw in me that I’m unable to relax my anxious brain and focus on their positive traits, which are satisfying to me in a lot of ways?  Or worse, if I can be so unsure of my feelings for somebody I claim to love, are any my non-romantic interpersonal relationships marred with disingenuous emotion and behavior too?  At the point of even mild stagnation in any relationship, even though I may maintain that connection hoping that my feelings might eventually change for the better, it’s hit me pretty hard this week that I tend to become so preoccupied by that stagnation that I become a chief reason that the relationship diminishes and terminates.  Unintentionally, but seemingly with enough consistency to create a pattern, my own internal striving to be spontaneous and genuine in my relationships undermines my own emotional wellbeing– and maybe the relationship itself.  

For me, having such pessimistic and nihilistic views of life in general, that doubt in relationships and myself too often festers and evolves into a shit-tinted outlook that only results in more negative emotions and behavior.  Whether it leads to undeniably brutal mistakes like participating in cheating because I feel lost and unfulfilled, or passive mistakes like failing to be there for my S.O in their time of need because I’ve withdrawn into my depression: Many instances where I’ve acted most regretfully have been at the culmination of a self-doubting emotional spiral.  To put it another way, from one angle of my wide perspective, I’ve inflicted a lot of the unhappiness I’ve experienced on myself.  Naïve or not, intentional or not, emotions and thought-paths that I lock into at my lowest points have been the primary reason for a large part of the real life impacts of those internal machinations.  Overall, I definitely still (stupidly maybe) allocate most of the blame onto myself for my past actions and emotional insecurities, especially for how they’ve hurt innocent people.  Admittedly, I suspect that the very self-blame which I’d hope would motivate me to never repeat my mistakes is one of the same toxic emotions that starts the cycle of dissatisfaction that perpetuates it.  

On that point, this week has been especially tough because I’ve been actively striving to avoid repeating those very mistakes, but I feel as if the threat of recurrence is there.  And with that threat, I’m terrified of continuing to be a much lesser version of myself.  After eight wonderful and quickly-passing months with my girlfriend Malorie, I’ve realized so much about myself, but most importantly I know that what I’m most scared of losing is the feeling that this relationship is the best thing for me, if not the best thing I’ve ever had.  On a conscious level, I know this and remind myself of it on a daily basis.  But as always, underlying and involuntary doubt of both my emotional sincerity and my connection with even Malorie has been a recurring internal issue from shortly after the start.  I’ve shared my fears with her, truly without very much filter, and used that avenue of full mutual disclosure to try and build a bridge between us– strong enough that no matter my struggles we can come back together.

What my mind keeps returning to, in spite of all my efforts to be happy and confident in that happiness, is my almost foundational stance that life is so damn full of suffering and painful emotions that joy in its purest form literally isn’t possible, because that joy should be unadulterated. In my mind, I resign myself to feeling unhappy because I have such a high standard of happiness– consistent, continuous, undoubted– it feels almost disloyal to that ideal of joy to consider a smattering small positive moments “being happy”. But even typing that out, I realize it sounds crazy to perpetuate my sad and depressed feelings simply because being happy sometimes and not all the time “isn’t good enough”. With that as my starting point, I am working to get myself out of this years-long loop of dissatisfaction with life overall. In fact, because a factor in the potency of my depressive emotions is feeling alone in grappling for actual happiness, one of the examples the textbook provides is something I’ve thought a good deal about– because it reaffirms that I’m not alone in my experience of intimate relationships.  The idea that cycling through phases of relational fidelity is not only dramatically common, but a part of literally everybody’s relationship is oddly comforting.  Specifically, I hope that ruminating about Richard Conville’s helical depiction of relationship progression, by which much of the emotional pining throughout stages of my relationship is validated and normalized.  While cycling through disintegration, alienation and resynthesis has been mostly only felt internally be me, and not as a shared experience, I feel as if the model still holds. If nothing else, I’m simply tired of feeling like actual happiness is unavoidable.  I can only hope, that by starting to view happiness as a sum of a much, much larger process, I may begin to approach peace in my relationship, and in my life.  

[ianwillplaythepiano]

Blog No. 6

Welcome back to the blog of a conflicted soul!

Coming off of a full two weeks having a rather singular focus on nonverbal communication, I feel a mix of excitement and anxiety.  With mainly dedication and concern about our group project in mind, which of course focused on types of nonverbal communication, last week I honestly didn’t spend very much time just reflecting on how significantly nonverbal communication is an important part of my life.  This week however, I’ve been paying particular attention to how I use the tone of my voice, physical posture, physical closeness, touch, and some unique paralanguage to communicate with the people in my life.  As a highly empathetic, observant individual– two traits that only intensify when I’m giving them specific attention– I would confidently assert that I am generally aware of how I come off to other people.  The reason I say that spending two weeks focused on nonverbal communication raises anxiety along with excitement, while I truly do enjoy the examination, is that I am not satisfied with my level of nonverbal self-control.

The more I consider how I interact with my family, girlfriend, musician-friends, peers, and the public at work, the more I realize that while I’m aware of how my nonverbal behavior affects all of those relationships, I exercise painfully little control over the execution of those behavior.  I have no idea whether to chock up that tendency to internal laziness, my spontaneous and “real” personality (which people seem to appreciate), or simply to lack of practice.  What I do know for sure: The way I act, from not responding to friend’s text messages, to showing up late, to interrupting with a verbalized pause before the other person has finished, all has the capacity to impact them and I more negatively than I would give it credit for.  Especially when it comes to interrupting others, which I do mostly for fear that they don’t understand because I didn’t articulate myself clearly enough, I have been painfully unaware of how much that affects the other communicator. I will often make small sounds or gestures to indicate that I am both unsure if I agree with what the other person is saying, and that I would like to interject a correction before they continue articulating their ideas. For example, as I now recognize that I do this all the time, I will rotate my hands outward to face palm-up from being thumb-up, fingertips pointing in front of me, when I believe I have understood the other speaker enough to respond with a some disputing comment, but not enough to hear all of what they have to say.  Needless to say, not everyone would respond all too positively to such an interruption– regardless of what I wanted to say in that moment. Clearly, managing my urge to interrupt, and simultaneously reexamining the fidelity of how I listen to others, is a long-overdue exercise for me.  At work, at home, and in the rest of my life, I’m curious to see how just a little shutting up might change the dynamic of my interactions.

On a very different note, nonverbal communication has not just been a facet, but a foundational part of the great relationship between my girlfriend, Malorie, and I.  We have been together, hanging out and dating together, for more than eight months now!  Another downtown Naperville ‘resident worker’ like I am, Malorie (Mal) is an incredible barista at the Starbucks Reserve store less than a block from my Apple Store.  For the first little while of her being there, distracted by my own internal noise and the usual rush to get back from my break, I confess that I hadn’t had eyes for her out of all there is to pay attention to in Naperville.  If nothing, while I am always friendly and make joking small-talk with my baristas, I could easily say that nonverbal communication was the start of our relationship.  One day, she would make eye contact with me and smile, and I would wave.  The next, I would make eye contact with her, and she would smile back, and so on.  At first, taking months to even learn her name and commit it to memory, we didn’t even know exactly who each other were.  Well, to be more accurate, I didn’t know who we were– she had the advantage of seeing my name on an order of four espresso shots on ice with soy every other day.  There was definitely an unspoken connection, as friends, acquaintances or more I wasn’t sure, that would never fail to make me smile when it happened. Slowly, over weeks of intermittent “visits” with each other from across the room at Starbucks– whether I was just picking up a mobile order or placing my order with her– we started physically gravitating toward each other when I would come into the store. “Hey how are you,” gestures from across the room became small talk, small talk transitioned into conversation, and eventually, on a rainy day, all of our nonverbal exchanges up until that point came to a climax.  Already outside on a break myself, standing with an umbrella under an awning to avoid the terrible downpour, I noticed Mal come out of the Starbucks back door pulling two huge trash bins!  Naturally, I couldn’t ever let a kind, cool person like that get wet while I was dry.  I walked straight up to her with my umbrella and indicated that I either I got to walk back and forth with her, or she take the umbrella for herself. I don’t remember what I said to her. Whatever verbal exchange we had in that moment, words themselves ended up being the least important aspect of that moment.  The nonverbal message, that I cared about her enough to walk into the rain without hesitation to help– was what Malorie’s told me really sealed the deal for her. From that moment on, intuitive and light-hearted non-verbal exchanges between us have  been the most amazing, undeniably awesome, and unique highlights of our relationship.  Whether we realize we both feel the same way about a situation in public by silently making eye contact, pick up quickly on the other’s body posture that somethings off, or understand idea behind each other’s jumbled paralanguage, we’re always communicating without real words. I can point to a general area in the room and she’ll know exactly what I want from that area, and why, without me needing to say a word– or vice versa.  Largely, because these moments of nonverbal connection happen privately, with almost no way that an outside party could “hear” exactly what we were “saying”, they some of our absolute favorites.  Even more, because of how deeply personal those interactions are– relying on a gigantic amount of context for the communication to be accurate– every one of those interactions has the chance to contribute as much or more to our relationship some long, detail oriented conversation.

[ianwillplaythepiano]

Blog No. 5

Welcome back to the blog of a conflicted soul!

Having spent last week reflecting on how I react to and navigate conflict with my father, I’ve now been thinking a lot about my role and responsibilities during conflicts that arise in the rest of life as well.  Specifically, I’ve been trying to recognize moments of conflict that’ve happened at work and school– including the ones that came up over mediated communication– and how effectively I listen and participate in their resolution. Recently during class, I tried as best as I could to write down conflicts that had come up in in-person conversations, but had a very hard time recalling or identifying specific episodes. When trying to transcribe these moments of conflict, I could only think of the most recent time I’d reacted in a way I regretted, which was with my dad (the situation I described in last week’s blog).  That led me to wonder: While I’d usually consider myself a very observant person, have I historically been much less cognizant of how I communicate, and listen, than I’ve thought?  For example, might have I been attending but not really remembering brief moments recently when I’ve received constructive feedback from coworkers and then reacted dismissively, or defensively perhaps?  In retrospect, naturally, I think I would’ve tried to enhance listening fidelity between us as peers, committed their comments to memory, and at last responded with more receptivity and kindness.  But in the moment, I quickly passed up important details of their critique– regrettably.  If nothing else, I wish in hindsight that I’d taken more time to patiently, and in silence, hear them out entirely before reacting at all.  

After taking this week to observe myself, I’ve noticed that while no “mutually-acknowledged” conflicts have come up in person to be figured out, mini-episodes with school administration both over mediated/email dialogue and in person have arisen.  In fact, I’ve been particularly aware this week of how important “listening” is during mediated communication, not just face-to-face communication.  Especially when the same conversation is likely or certain to carry over from channel to channel, it has been clear this week that effective listening (or reading for that matter) is extra critical– there are simply more opportunities to miss or misinterpret details.  Such has been my experience this week when emailing, and consequently interacting in person with, my academic advisor and the chair of the music department.  

For context: I’m one of fewer than ten Jazz Studies majors at NCC, and a transfer student with about two years worth of credit in music and academics from Kalamazoo College in Michigan.  I was there as a music and psychology major up until I became so depressed I decided to drop out– I was supposed to have graduated college with a B.A. by 2018, if I’d stayed on track.  At this point, even my younger sister is slated to have her bachelor’s degree completed two years before me.  While on principle I don’t feel strongly about who in my family finishes what when, whether that’s finishing school or getting married, overall I sometimes have the feeling my life is lagging behind where I want it to be.  It is because of this emotion, this internal noise, that almost any serious conversation about school and my future, especially around registration and the logistics of it for some reason, comes with a heightened sense of anxiety, and fight or flight. In fact, I’ve remarked to my family more than once that talk of school makes my heart race  and I feel as if a “wet, heavy, uncomfortably hot comforter was being pulled over my body” if school comes up and I’m not ready to go there.  

So, when it comes to effectively receiving communication from school administration even– over email, or one on one– I have come to understand that  sometimes I listen pretty ineffectively.  Heightened emotions in tow, I can forget that one small interaction is not a representation of all of my anxiety and fears about school, but even possibly one of many chances to redirect those fears and create a more comfortable and fulfilling future.  In the moment, I will either withdraw enough that I never really confront the problem until it’s facing me head on, or I use insulated listening to only attend to the details that won’t provoke those painful emotional reactions.  Because of my emotional history with college, a conversation about school can make me feel as if I am part of some larger conflict more than a productive dialogue, regardless of the other party’s intent.  Knowing this, I am acutely and actively aware that I behave differently when school is brought up in general, and try to adjust accordingly.  That simple knowledge is a start, but I wouldn’t ever normally be aware of how those emotions affect how well I listen to and receive messages from those talking to me about college.  

In the peak of registration season for next year, the inundation of communications from my advisor has been unreal– not surprisingly.  Of course, I would normally expect so much information coming from my advisor, and would know that attending and understanding her messages are paramount for my own success.  But in the context of quickly-building stress about class requirements, anxiety about upcoming projects, and concern for my sick girlfriend– all on top of my pre-existing disposition towards college– fully attending and remembering the content of my advisor’s emails was clouded by heavy internal noise.  So it was that when my phone reminded me of my upcoming registration slot, weeks having passed since seeing my advisor’s email, that I decided to finally participate in that conversation.  I felt good that I was finally replying and getting it done, but it was clear some time afterward I had not fully received and understood her previous emails.  Having “listened” to her messages with a mind overloaded by heavy details, while also very preoccupied by the homework that I had due at the time, when it came to finally responding I couldn’t hope to form an ideal response.  Regrettably, after following registration steps laid out in her email and encountering a problem, I finally replied with a written tone of concern, surprise, and exasperation– this is something I thought we had cleared up before at some time in the past.  Thus, while I thought I was bringing up a signifiant issue for the first time, a scheduling deal that would’ve understandably caused a negative reaction otherwise, she had already addressed the issue in the emails in part. 

Soon after, I emailed back and forth with my advisor and the chair of the music department, trying to reach a resolution on my registration for next term. However, whether because I still wasn’t “listening” effectively or they weren’t articulating their thoughts as such, it seemed like the issue was not going to be resolved in a way I would have hoped.  The next day, the morning right before our Interpersonal Com. Midterm, I decided that I would have my only chance to address my concerns in person.  I was stressed about the upcoming test, anxious about my registration and graduation plan, and very conscious that I had a lot to try and resolve in the fifteen minutes between my 9-9:45am piano lesson.  No less, the two people I was hoping to meet with didn’t know I was coming in then!  As one could guess, while my hope had been to meet with them, get across my concerns, and absorb how they said I needed to address them, the in-person carry-over of our exchanges didn’t pan out how I hoped. The fact that I may have missed pertinent information when listening to their messages in the past, compounded by the heavy internal and external noise of that morning made for in-person interactions that were harried, probably didn’t give the ideal impression of me, and didn’t result in exactly what I wanted.  Luckily for me, I was interacting with two excellent listeners (my advisor and the department chair), and they were able to paraphrase my concerns effectively, probe further to clarify my actual needs going forward, and boil the whole string of communications down to advice and next steps.  The lesson? I need some work on my listening skills…But I think I’ve got this. 

[ianwillplaythepiano]

Blog No. 4

Welcome back!  Once again, you’ve made it to the blog of a conflicted soul.

One of the most potent and deeply personal relationship climates in my life exists between my father and I. For decades worth of reasons, some even kept so close that I wouldn’t plan to share them here, my dad is one of the one of the most emotionally impactful people I know.  As for many people, some having lived with their fathers longer than almost anyone else, I mean “emotionally impactful” to say he has the ability to change or impact my mood significantly more than anyone else– on a dime. Whether due to non-verbal cues that may remind me of past interactions, tones of voice that might remind me of specific conversations through the years, or simply from raising certain topics: many conversations I have with my father are underlined by an emotional context that could turn a talk about the dishes or a new TV into heart-racing, testy exchange.  Specifically, there were at least two moments this week when brief chats about dishes and a 4K TV (separate topics and different issues) evolved in an instant from bearing little emotional significance to leaving me with head-pounding frustration and feelings of exasperation. In addition to exploring important background about our relationship, these two moments are what I’ll reflect on in this week’s blog. 

Overall, outside of moments of buildup, my father and I have a positive, goofy, loving and mutually supportive relationship.  These days, most conversations and interactions between my father and I are brief– we’ve lived together my whole life, but our mismatched schedules don’t allow for too many long conversations lately– but they’re full of light-hearted humor, calm checking-in about life and news, and silly banter. Especially when my girlfriend, Malorie, is staying over and hanging around with my dad and I, we rarely have very serious conversations because there’s just so much fun to have. All three of us have very similar senses of humor, are great at picking up on tiny non-verbal cues, can quickly channel empathy if we bring up a hard day at work, and we love making punny jokes about anything we’re talking about. My dad is also constantly ready to help me when I need it, whether he generously makes espresso for me in the morning if I’m going to be running late, asks to read over stressfully-composed writing of mine so he can provide critical feedback, or offers to help with relationship worries.  We both behave in ways that are largely absent of conflict, but that’s partly because we agree on topics that many family members might disagree about.  Most of the serious subjects my parents and I talk about usually involve team problem solving, and so can’t always be brought up during the small chunks of free time we might have during the week. So, my mom and dad generally manage to schedule out times for us to talk about big-life topics like finances and college, topics that I have strong feelings about, and offer enough heads up that I can gather my thoughts and feelings ahead of time. Scheduling out times to get on the same page about significant areas has minimized stressful emotions during those conversations, and because we’ve made progress in those moments, it’s allowed us to pretty rarely stumble into conflicts with potential to expand into escalatory spirals. 

Unsurprisingly though, because it’s not impossible to plan ahead and be one-hundred percent mindful during every single interaction we have, conflict still finds ways to work itself into our close relationship. For my dad and I, the worst conflicts that arise in the moment seem to always be ones when we “miss each other” during the conversation, as we call it. While I’d be hard pressed to concisely describe an example of this conflict ritual, as most of the worst-escalated ones happened a long time ago and we’ve learned from them, “missing each other” is when my father and I are arguing about something we agree about overall, but keep coming at each other with strong words and feelings because we’ve failed to communicate that underlying agreement properly.  In those scenarios, my dad would usually bring up some life topic that I have strong feelings about, unsuccessfully try to communicate that he understands where I’m coming from, because of that miscommunication I feel like he’s criticizing my perspective, I would then react to that by feeling defensive, inaccurately articulate what I assume his intent it, he would react defensively, and then we would circle around and around until we could chill out enough to realize, “oh wait, we do actually totally understand each other after all?”  Luckily, these “missing each other” situations have happened less and less as we’ve matured in our relationship together, and in most moments we are both mindful enough to nip escalating conflicts in the bud. However, while the bigger buildups are pretty rare these days, I realize that we have quite a lot of work to do if I plan on addressing the smaller episodes of conflict– the episodes that are undesirable just because they feel bad, even if they wouldn’t impact anything very negatively in the short term.  

That leads me, finally, to the incidents about the dishes and the 4K TV from this week.  Regarding the dish situation, which happened Monday last week: I had been at home working on my last blog all day, my girlfriend keeping me company, and we’d been cooking for ourselves on an off as to avoid ordering out for food.  I had been keeping up on dishes the entire day, highly aware that my dad gets frustrated when their not done when he gets home, but was on a roll writing my blog after our last meal.  Of course, I chose my homework over dishes so I could finish the dishes once I was done.  But then he got home, while I was upstairs working, and he did the dishes and cleaned up the space without telling me.  Regardless of the nice gesture of doing the dishes for us, as it meant I couldn’t complete the task for myself, when I came downstairs and he confronted me about them not being done, I immediately became frustrated. No less, I was frantically rushing back upstairs to try and finish my blog that still wasn’t done yet. I unconsciously picked up commonalities to similar times where he’d talked at me about the dishes, especially because I really don’t have the patience to stop and talk when I’m writing, and so felt the same frustration in this situation as the other.  Thus, I reacted accordingly before I could stop myself. I didn’t even respond out loud in any corrosive fashion, but once the interaction was over, I knew that my tone of voice and non-verbal reactions conveyed that I was uncomfortable and bothered.  No less, my heart started racing after the conversation was over, and I felt distracted and angry, when only moments ago I had been happy and joking around.  Very similar to the dishes scenario, hours after I moved my girlfriend’s fancy 4K TV into my room without thinking to ask my dad, my dad kept me downstairs (while my girlfriend was upstairs waiting for me) to talk and share that he was unhappy I hadn’t asked his permission to “move around furniture”.  In that moment, because I had recently experienced him holding me up to share his critical thoughts, I was pretty unreceptive to his concerns.  More specifically, I wasn’t inclined to sit and listen to complaints that I didn’t see as valid while we were both aware he was making Malorie wait upstairs for me. Whether that was his goal or not, or whether I’d be receptive to his concerns in any event, our recent communication climate and conflict rituals made it very hard for us to communicate effectively there. While, in my father’s defense, he brought up the subjects of un-done dishes and the surprise appearance of a new TV in the only moments he could find for us to talk, it made me very conscious of how much our context affects how we perceive conflict and how we react to it. I can only hope that the next time I feel like I’m too rushed to address his concerns, I can use my awareness to consciously slow us down and actually address the problems in the moment.  I hate having to feel angry when I know it’s not how I. really feel.  We shall see...

[ianwillplaythepiano]

Blog No. 3

Welcome back to the blog of a conflicted soul! This week, in part with hopes of keeping my philosophical rumination to a minimum, I have decided to apply my introspective energy to a different area of my life– . No doubt the logo would be familiar to most people, so familiar to a point where many (myself included) might read that symbol out loud as, “Apple”, without thinking. Apple-made technologies are an insanely integrated part of what we see around us every day, from kids standing around a bus-stop playing Pokémon Go on iPhone, students and businesspeople alike typing away on their MacBooks, to grandmas slowly but surely scrolling through their iPad to find just the right picture to share on their grandkid’s Facebook page, it’s almost impossible to walk though an American town without finding evidence of the tech giant’s footprint. For most, these devices are great tools for facilitating the logistics of daily life, but are only a means to an end. For me, Apple has been an invaluable source of personal growth, but also the impetus for a whole host of complicated social habits, tendencies, and debilitative emotions that I have yet to master control of. In two days from now, on April 17th, I will have worked as a technician for Apple’s Genius Bar for a full four years of my life! This week especially, so close to what we call my “Appleversary”, and also coinciding with the quarterly review I had last Friday, I’ve been thinking a whole lot about my experience so far, and how I feel and act while I’m at work…Since 2015, I’ve gone through one hell of a personal transformation. I hadn’t quite gotten out of my college dropout spiral yet, and was still pretty depressed and hopeless generally, but starting out at Apple encouraged feelings of significant excitement, responsibility and a confidence that I could do a great job. My self-talk began to become more positive and encouraging, reminding me that I was a capable and talented person, contrary to the internal commentary that was usually plagued by self-defeating overgeneralization and fallacious helplessness. Seeing that I could help people in a job, and help them effectively, allowed me to gain just enough momentum to work at developing facilitative emotions to help me out of my depression. However, as I had never held a “real job” apart from teaching piano lessons out of my house and selling chocolate at a local shop, I soon discovered that I didn’t have as many pieces of the puzzle together as I thought. As a genuinely empathetic person, or a least someone who enjoys helping and caring for others, all I thought I had to do at Apple was deliver what I considered was the best customer service I had to offer. I believed I had a high enough level of emotional intelligence– an ability to read people and their moods, to lift people to the same level of optimism as me by coming to their level first– to get by and succeed on talent alone. I honestly thought that they had hired me specifically to interact with customers that way. Back when I was a customer, I’d been on the receiving end of multiple above-and-beyond experiences at Apple stores, and so had it in my head when I got hired that my priorities were not only aligned with everyone else, but the expectation. I was focused on the people in front of face, and not nearly aware enough of what the business actually expected of me. I thought that if a customer was unhappy, the best way to care for them was to spend time making them feel better, and campaign on their behalf, even if it meant asking managers for regular exceptions to preserve the experience. What I came to understand over time, all too slowly, is that I had a subpar understanding of how exactly to have every interaction be good enough to say we did what was expected of us, even if there are still some customers who may have gotten much less than they really needed. At the time I wasn’t aware of it, but there is a dramatic amount of emotional labor required to perform my role effectively. I need to be able to assume a role that conveys not only that I care for the priorities of the customer, but that I genuinely represent the priorities of Apple. Taking my own emotions out of the equation, not just my opinions, but the anxieties about my own behavior that might affect my behavior. Also, part of the hardest and most stressful aspect of my job is the emotional contagion that happens all the time. If I come into work with extra self-doubt and perform poorly, which is noticed and reacted to by my team members (or vice versa), it’s possible for that negativity to build up and cause actual issues. This is a reality so much that we sometimes call our repair room “toxic” when emotions build off of each other enough. There are so, so many moving parts at Apple, an internal social landscape that changes all the time, and there is a consumer demand that is so constant that the things to know and get better at are endless. As a new and inexperienced member of the workforce (and as somebody already prone to debilitative self-talk), when I originally realized there was fallibility in the renewed confidence and positive self-concept I had developed over a year or so working there, it was a setback. I thought that I’d finally gotten over most of my depression, and could allow myself to feel excited about my life again. But after three years of working for Apple, while admittedly there is still stress anxiety there because of my belief that I should be able to perform perfectly, just as well as the best of those around me, I know how I need to approach work to do the best I can. Now at least, I realize how much of an impact my own self-talk has on how I perform...how much what I put in is what I get out. My hopes for now, and into the future, are to more consciously than ever manage my self-talk and practice getting out of my own way- turning my historically debilitative- into facilitative-emotions.

[ianwillplaythepiano]

Blog No. 2

Welcome back to the blog of a conflicted soul!

Reading over my monologue from last week just now, I’m feeling highly aware that while my words and thoughts still ring all too true, even my own perception of them has changed significantly from what it was while writing. With only a week to reflect on Blog No. 1’s articulation of my recent internal struggles, during which time one’d assume not much had changed, I feel differently about them now than I did at the time.  Even by simply having transmuted my thoughts and placed them on paper, no less by having had these sort of pre-processed thoughts at the front of my mind all week, I perceive both my writing and my feelings differently. In general, I now see the struggles I laid out as more possible to navigate than before, and I now have a marginally more objective view of the emotions that were incorporated into writing about them. Even my perception of my own perceptions has changed, arguably just as a result of writing intentionally and reflecting on it this week, I haven’t felt as much of the familiar hopelessness and stress that regularly pervades my moments of introspection. 

With regard to Blog No. 1, the change it evoked in my thoughts and perspective has been beneficial so far, and the writing process was healthy overall.  However, with each of us made up of a vast network of thoughts, feelings, habits and history, there are countless ways that perception of the process could have changed the outcome. Last week as well as now, I was processing my thoughts through an academic lens– with a wide array of terms, concepts, and validating textbook descriptions of human behavior at my back.  This context allowed for a logical, patient, and constructive arena in which I could explore my thoughts and feelings.  If I had written only about my darkest thoughts while in a low spot, meandering helplessly through the most painful parts of my self-concept, it is likely that I would have come away feeling much less optimistic than I am now. If I had written about the very same topic one year ago today, a time when I had much less interest in my future’s wellbeing, I may have discussed a few similar topics but with none of the optimism and absent of any positive carry-over. Further, if a whole other person who lives with the same doubts and worries as I do tried to write a similar blog post, but unlike me they never experienced psychotherapy and never had a qualified support system, they would potentially communicate their feelings in a way that would only serve to put them down further. In any case, perspective, context, and the resulting perception of a subject are paramount to determining experience of it and any overall lasting outcome. Whether that be the self-perception of how I wrote a blog post for a class, or being too distracted by one’s phone to recognize a loved-ones need for support, being conscious of and working to manage our perceptions is quite important for quality of life.  In some scenarios, we may not be able to actually change the elements that affect our perception of reality (such as right now where I’m struggling to communicate my jumbled thoughts while I have a pounding headache), but we certainly can aim to learn from the experience to overcome future instances of clouded perception.

Following my first blog experience, I have also been more actively aware of the small lies and semi-manufactured truths I tell, to both myself and to others, and so am processing my own processing with a new eye for instances of unconsciously reinforcing unwanted parts of my own self-concept. Whether it be elements of my depression, habits I’m ashamed of, or a spread of thoughts and acts that serve to confirm my not-a-great-person self-concept– there are plenty of examples of where I create a faux-truth aimed at providing brief comfort despite hurting me overall.  The little lies I have been telling myself all along, as well as spontaneously lies that happen in the moment, seem dramatically more sour and obvious when looking out for them.  Interacting with my girlfriend for example, I’ve been noticing more if I tell her I’m okay when I’m not, noticing when I portray myself as maybe more low than I actually am to get away with being despondent…I feel like one of the best ways I can refresh the combat with my own thoughts is by reinforcing truthfulness not just between others and I, but between myself and I.  I’ve always understood on the surface that truth is an ideal I believe in, but I think I’ve been largely taking it for granted. I put forth this image of a depressed person with great potential but who has struggle preventing his success, but maybe one of the biggest reasons I reinforce that image is because I’m too terrified to confront my own behaviors.  Maybe I lie to myself and others simply to avoid the truth that a large factor in why I haven’t flourished is that I keep my potential locked up in a box where a “depressed person” would fit?  Hm.  That’s a question.  What even is my depression?

[ianwillplaythepiano]

Blog No. 1

Welcome to the blog of a conflicted soul!  

As a backdrop to whatever monologue I launch here over the coming weeks, examining and reflecting on some of the most basic aspects of interpersonal communication, there is some context that I should quickly explain. Contradictory to my publicly social, upbeat, and positive personality is this persistent aspect of my self-concept that clouds many moment of my days: the fact that I am, or view myself as, a very depressed person.  Following a subjectively minor but dramatic medical episode– involving a blood clot, a week in the ICU, and the removal of my right first rib– my first and second years of college started me on a hell of a snowball’s path down a mountain during a very formative time in my life.  With a minimal social support system, a dramatic absence of motivation, and a rapidly growing sense that the most effective way to deal with my pain was to definitively end it, I crashed out of college halfway through my second year.  I ended with a powerful feeling that life truly is a sea of troubles, not even at all bound by a shore, but one that crashes down from all directions without mercy.  And in this horrifying sea, I neither knew how to swim, nor did I think it’d ever be worth it to learn how.  

This background is important because during this last year, against what I ever thought could happen, I met somebody who brought about a hope in me that maybe, only maybe, I could figure out a way to stay happily above water. For right now, I won’t even start talking about our relationship in detail: I don’t need to write out my critical thinking about that relationship right in this moment, given critical thinking is about all I’ve done since it began.  All I’ll say is she’s kind, calm, an astoundingly intuitive communicator, and she’s the first person I have ever thought genuinely about living (opposed to literally not living much longer at all) the rest of my life with. 

The thought of being able to live a life without all of the crippling anxieties, self-loathing, and fear of the future that I struggle with now is great.  The thought of having somebody by my side who motivates me to repair my relationship with life is even greater.  But over the last six months or so, it’s been…quite a thing…to start reconciling this alien idea of future happiness, though incredibly desirable, with a self-concept that I’ve not only held onto since I’ve even been conscious of my own self-concept, but one that’s almost mutually exclusive to it. I started in an optimistic place, which spanned a literal week or two when I thought, “Damn. So this is how I need to live to be happy? Easy.”  I began mentally contemplating exciting prospects, finishing school, moving into a more appropriate living situation, being carefree and enjoying my time with this new great girl… The positivity of my perspective, even in those few weeks, begot more positive thinking. Alas, only for a few weeks. Quickly, however, I came to realize that the deeply rooted mental pathways that’d evolved out of my habitual negative and self-defeating thinking were more than heavy enough to make my upward transition difficult.  No less, this sort of a transition isn’t easy to begin with– moving from a life which’d seemed so terrifying and heartbreaking that I thought I should die to escape it, to a life where I’m in the middle of the same sea of anxieties and doubts but I’ve declared myself a willing participant who won’t take that same way out. 

It’s so hard. 

With those thoughts swirling around my mind, I found myself struck while reading the concise explanations of the connection between self-concept, self-esteem and how we go about communicating to the outside world. Even though I had read similar descriptions before, as I was absent a real and present need to consider them, I don’t think I’ve ever considered them with remotely the same gravity.  Faced with such a stark description of the power of self-concept, and and a clear statement about how even toxic self-concepts are very difficult to let go of, I found my thought-processing equally clarified and re-complicated.  I began to wonder how I present myself, both in how I communicate with the world around me as a depressed and low person, but more so about how that presentation reinforces the unhealthy parts of my self-concept.  

On the one hand, I feel some small bit of relief that what I hope to confront isn’t an actual inability to live happily, but rather a challengeable self-concept. I’m glad to know that the thing to fight isn’t quite my literal self per se, but merely my idea of who I am. But, this said, while thinking about modifying my self-concept feels more accomplishable that trying to change who I am, I feel keenly aware that these can easily feel like one and the same sometimes.  Physical inability or not, literal impossibility or not, taking steps toward improving my self-esteem and changing my most basic negative views is a task a depressed and critical brain is highly qualified to quash.  My brain is so damn practiced at reframing any ideas of a happy future so they appear as insurmountable and complicated as possible, even with a newfangled feeling of positive invigoration…I fear that even if I am physically capable of following through, the very thought pathways that have supported my self-concept thus far will keep any progress so slow that I lose the patience.  I feel like I’m signing up to try and repaint the interior of my house, only from the outside through the windows while the front door’s locked…but dang, it sure could be a beautiful house inside and out if I manage to figure out how to do this thing.