SpiderMan -- #Heroism #AboveAndBeyond #Altruism

By Lisabet Sarai

Last week the world witnessed a startling feat of heroism, when Malian immigrant Mamoudou Gassama climbed four stories up the side of an apartment building to rescue a toddler dangling from a balcony.

According to the twenty-two year old young man, he reacted instinctively, scaling the building without stopping to think about the implications. Indeed, if he’d paused to consider the possible consequences, he might not have taken action. Not only did he risk injury and death, but also, because he was residing illegally in Paris, his highly visible activities were guaranteed to alert the authorities to his existence. His story ended happily—the French government (rather hypocritically, considering their general policy toward migrants) gave him immediate citizenship—but it could have had a far different conclusion.

Stories like Gassama’s always make me feel a little bit better about humanity. I wish the media did more to celebrate the everyday heroes who put aside their own best interests to help others. There are more of these people than we realize; they just express their heroism in somewhat less spectacular ways than the guy whom the tabloids have christened “Spiderman”. I’m awed, for instance, by the people who work with Doctors Without Borders, providing medical and humanitarian services in conflict zones where they are as much targets as the individuals they serve. Or for an even quieter type of heroism, consider the millions of people who devote themselves to the health and well-being of the severely disabled—not just professionals (though their day-in, day-out service is also heroic), but ordinary folks whose children, siblings or parents can’t survive without them.

I have a three-year old cousin who was born with SMA (Spinal Muscular Atrophy), a genetic neuromuscular disorder that leads to gradual paralysis and (usually) early death. His parents are my personal heroes. They’ve reorganized their lives to give little D not just the medical support he needs, but also to make his childhood as normal as they can. Last year, the whole family (D has a seven year old brother) took a trip to Disneyland, despite the fact that D is confined to a wheelchair and has to wear an oxygen mask because his lung muscles are too weak to let him breathe.

“That’s family,” you might say. “Everyone takes care of their own blood.” Aside from the fact that there are many dedicated caregivers who work with unrelated individuals, does that make the actions, the dedication, the sacrifice, worth any less? Not to me, at least.

Although sometimes it seems that society has become totally selfish and self-centered (think about the billions of dollars spent on devices to capture and “share” trivial self-portraits), altruism is a fundamental human characteristic, one that is not sufficiently acknowledged. It flows, I believe, from the unconscious knowledge that we are all connected. I don’t think it’s an accident that last week’s Spiderman comes from a traditional culture where family and community are given higher value than in individualistic Western societies. I don’t have any data, but I’d bet that instances of heroism like this are more common in more sparsely populated rural or agricultural areas, where people tend to know their neighbors, than in crowded, anonymous cities.

Superheroes are all the rage these days. Traditional comic book characters are being resurrected and reshaped for the twenty first century. From what I can see, though, these characters are more occupied with egotism and inter-personal conflicts than with truly helping the powerless. In today’s typical superhero film, the so-called heroes have no qualms about destroying vast swathes of public infrastructure in their pursuit of the so-called villains. Civilians become collateral damage in a clash of super-powered titans.

Entertaining? Maybe, but I wouldn’t label that as heroism.

Real heroes aren’t necessarily as flashy. But they’re all around us, if we look. Including when we look in the mirror.

Gratitude and Low Self-Worth ( #Humanity #SelfWorth #Activism #Advocacy #Entitlement )

By Annabeth Leong

While I acknowledge the importance and value of gratitude as a way of putting small problems in perspective, I feel deeply suspicious of gratitude as a way of life, and even more suspicious of gratitude as it’s often played in pop culture self help movements.

People talk a lot about entitlement and expectations, as if these things are completely terrible and should be eradicated from our psyches. (Sample quote, from life coach Adam Smith: “Entitlement is such a cancer, because it is void of gratitude.” Or the popular saying, “Expectations are premeditated resentments.”)

Both of these sentiments can serve as important correctives for a person who has lost perspective. For example, if a student expects and feels entitled to attend Harvard University on a full scholarship, and isn’t capable of accepting any other outcome or acknowledging that lots of other students exist who are also intelligent and talented, it might be time to pull out these sorts of quotes. It might be time to remind the student to be grateful for the opportunities that are available.

On the other hand, I get worried by what I refer to as “be grateful you have feet” syndrome. In self help settings, I’ve observed exhanges where, say, someone talks about their painful plantar fasciitis and how much it is bothering them and how they’re frightened they might need surgery on their feet. In return, someone else points out that not everyone has feet or the means to have surgery on them. And yeah, sure, it’s an even worse scenario if you don’t have access to your needed foot surgery, but I’m super frustrated by this approach as a way of shutting down someone’s honest and valid communication about their feelings of fear and pain. I’m not here for enforced gratitude, in which any negative feeling is criticized and countered with demands for gratitude.

What’s at the bottom of it for me is that expectations and entitlement can also be healthy. They can be an important part of standing up for myself, of asserting my worth as a human being. They can be the source of needed protection.

For example, part of what I see in the Black Lives Matter movement is black people asserting their own value and humanity (indeed, this is a major element of the message in the name of the movement). I see people saying that they’re entitled to better treatment from society at large. They’re entitled to receiving the benefit of the doubt from police in the same way that’s given to white people. I notice how often I’m hearing about black people pulled over for a broken tail light and ultimately killed. Then I notice other stories about white people who actually kill people and stay armed, but are eventually taken alive by compassionate, careful police work. I see that police are capable of that compassion and care, and I think everyone is entitled to receiving it, even if they’re under suspicion of a crime.

So the point here is that I think it’s healthy and important for black advocates to stand up for their worth this way. A sense of entitlement is a key part of that, and it’s good. Human beings should be entitled to live their lives without being constantly under suspicion due to the color of their skin. They should be entitled to survive traffic stops, and many more normal, everyday situations.

And all too often, I see activists getting told to be grateful for the progress that’s already been made in society. There’s a degrading message there, that you ought to be grateful for any scraps thrown to you, that you ought not to value yourself so highly as to think you’re fully equal to everyone else.

That’s a larger political example, and an important one. Then I have a lot of personal examples about ways that the pressure to feel gratitude has sometimes worked out to demands that I lower my sense of self worth. I’m going to give a few, ranging from minor to toxic.

— I thank my male partner profusely for “helping” me with the housework, when he’s done some relatively small thing, like wash a few pots. The gratitude I’m expressing here is concealing a few troubling assumptions: that the housework is my job more than his, though that’s not the agreement our relationship is founded on; that this relatively small contribution is worthy of effusive gratitude, while my much larger contribution goes unnoticed or unappreciated. I’ve also observed that being overly grateful toward male partners in this situation seems to contribute toward misunderstandings about the magnitude of household tasks. The partner in question may respond to my gratitude by feeling he’s done plenty, when that may not be an honest assessment from my perspective.

— I am so grateful to a publisher for recognizing my work and choosing to put it out into the world that I don’t advocate for myself, my work, and my career successfully. I sign poor contracts. I wait for long periods for any response for them, and then put up with sudden demands on my time when they get around to paying attention to me. I turn a blind eye to substandard service, such as poor copy editing or clearly unprofessional communications from the powers that be. I put up with delays in payments and errors in royalty statements, and I write gentle, carefully worded statements asking for the money that’s owed to me. After all, shouldn’t I be grateful that I’m allowed to pursue my creative dreams? Shouldn’t I be glad someone is reading my work and appreciating it? Wouldn’t it be selfish of me to want better for myself or my writing? What good does it do to think my work deserves more readers or better treatment? I should focus on being grateful for what I have.

— I am grateful to the first company to hire me out of graduate school. After all, they saved my ass by giving me a job in the city I was already living in, at a time when I really needed money. In exchange, I let them own me body and soul for the next several years. No demand is too large or small. I work myself into sickness for them. I put up with being passed over for promotion, with not receiving raises, even though other colleagues in similar positions get both. Every time I feel like I ought to find something better for myself, I question the emotions that lead me to that conclusion. Why am I angry and unsatisfied? I ought to be grateful.

— I run away from home as a teenager and live for a while with an older man who takes advantage of me in a variety of ways. I should be grateful, according to him, for the ways he takes care of me. After all, he feeds me, drives me to where I need to go, gives me a place to live. He also starves me when he’s not happy with what I’m doing, coerces me into sexual situations I wouldn’t choose for myself, and expects me to turn over any money I make at work. He tries to stop me from using birth control, and is constantly hiding my pills, trying to prevent me from getting to the pharmacy to pick them up, or putting me in situations where I won’t have enough money to pay for the prescription. I should be grateful, though, because living with him allows me to escape a different abusive situation with my mother’s boyfriend. I should be grateful because he loves me. I should be grateful because he doesn’t judge me for being a slut.

I know that for some people, gratitude is comforting. “At least I have someone to call to drive me away from horrible, abusive boyfriend’s house. At least there’s that.” If it does that for you, then that’s great.

At the same time, gratitude has many times left me unable to demand better for myself, even in situations where I really needed to. I think, as with all things, that there’s a time and a place for gratitude, and it isn’t everywhere. I wish the psychologically corrosive effects of trying to summon gratitude in the face of pain and damage were more widely acknowledged.

Some people may be too entitled, and others may not be entitled enough. There are times when a person should say, “I deserve better.” There are times when you’ve been served slop on the floor while other people are eating foie gras at the table, and instead of being grateful for what you get, it’s right and important to get angry about it and expect better.

Angels and Demons, Strengths and Weaknesses

by Annabeth Leong

Garce gave me the start I needed for this post by referencing that Tennessee Williams quote: “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.” I’m not sure what Williams meant, but I read it as a reference to how demons and angels can so often be one and the same.

When I was younger, I thought I was in the grip of personal demons, and I spent lots of time apologizing for it. I thought I was crazy because I was wounded. I thought I was fucked up because I couldn’t fit into mainstream narratives of who I was supposed to be and become. I thought I was sinful because I was curious.

I don’t accept those things as demons anymore.

I was raised in a sort of thinking that divided things into good and evil, acceptable and unacceptable. At a certain point, the reality I lived in and observed began to strain out of that categorization. I didn’t solve the problem by simply deciding everything is permissible, though.

Now, what I think is that my flaws and strengths are different sides of the same human coin.

Take lustfulness, for example—a classic member of the traditional list of deadly sins. I’ve gotten myself into trouble over lustful urges. By which I mean I have behaved rashly, without sufficient care for myself or others. I’ve been hurt, and I’ve sometimes hurt others. I used to feel terrible about my inability to control myself, my need to experiment, the fact that I couldn’t seem to settle down and be anyone’s proper girlfriend. That later, I couldn’t be someone’s proper wife.

On the other hand, my curiosity and urge toward exploration has led to so much self-knowledge. I strongly believe that my sexual impulses have led the way toward my becoming a more authentic person, a person who is more accepting of myself and others in all our various mixes of feelings, desires, and needs, and in all our various forms.

It is hard in mainstream society to live with the sort of sex life I have. I often hear about how ashamed I should feel. I often hear my identities and practices discussed by people who don’t realize that someone who “would do those things” is sitting right there in the room with them. But that has forced me to learn courage. It’s a sort of courage that goes against my nature, too.

If it were up to me, I would never cause a ripple in the water. I hate making people feel uncomfortable, and I’ve always been willing to twist myself into knots to avoid it. This, too, is an angel and a demon. I am kind. I am aware of the feelings and needs of others. I love that about myself. On the other hand, I am willing sometimes to let others bully me in the name of keeping the peace. I am willing to suppress myself so no one else has to see parts of me they might not like. Sometimes I hurt people through silence because I can’t bear to face them and hurt them through what I may have to say.

I used to feel a sort of darkness at the idea of myself as tormented by personal demons. Sometimes, I liked that and sometimes I feared it. I used to see myself as a battleground—angels versus demons, sane versus crazy, normal versus weird.

I don’t see it that way anymore, though. I like being a person, not a battlefield. I like seeing things in this complicated way that feels more true to me, where strengths are jumbled together with weaknesses and there is sometimes a fierce and fragile beauty within a thing that looks like a flaw, or a streak of ugliness within a thing that might otherwise be a virtue.

It is easier for me to grow as a person when I feel love and compassion for my whole self, rather than trying to excise a “demon” and later realizing it is my own hand.

Achievement Unlocked

by Annabeth Leong

I've been a gamer all my life, and so I'm trained to think of quests in very specific ways.

The way it works these days in video games, I run my character around and explore every nook and cranny of the world that's been designed. Quests are marked on the map with little arrows, or with exclamation points over characters' heads.

I want to think about the character I'm playing and whether he or she would be interested in doing the things that are offered. For example, would my goody-two-shoes mage, who turned his own best friend in during the prologue for breaking the Circle of Magi's prohibitions against forbidden magic, actually agree to help hide bodies for a shady organization based in the capital city? I'm guessing no, but I'm not incentivized to have that much integrity.

If I refuse the quest, I'll miss out on experience points, which I need in order to make my character more powerful. I'll also fail to get the achievement the game offers for helping out these shady people. (It's amazing how much motivation an animated plaque can provide). Besides, I won't get to discover that part of the game. The statistics that mark what percentage of the world I explore will wind up flawed. There will be conversations I didn't have, people I didn't kill.

There's also a great coldness to the way quests work in video games. Your character is assigned to save, say, five slaves from a dungeon. You run in, and the game has provided you with an abundance of slaves. No need to wait around or search too hard—there are plenty to choose from. You save your five, and then you get out, because anything else would be a waste of time. Never mind how weird and inhuman that behavior is if you think about it from a different perspective. (The web comic Penny Arcade famously lampooned this mechanic in the controversial strip, "The Sixth Slave." The core criticism in the comic is spot on, though I do see why there was trouble over the callousness of the humor employed to make the point).

All this, however, represents a twisted version of the true concept of a quest. According to my dictionary, a quest is "a long and arduous search for something." According to what I recall from Arthurian legend, that search may not lead where it was supposed to, it may not end when it's supposed to, and it may not be summed up neatly by progress bars, percentage points, and achievements.

Maybe we're not all heroes, but I think we're all on a long and arduous search to figure out what the hell to do with our lives, or if what we're doing with our lives is meaningful or satisfying or useful or positive in any measurable way. I've played enough video games that I think of this life quest in video game terms, even when that's destructive for me.

Let's talk about grabbing quests, for example. In real life, indiscriminately accepting every opportunity that comes one's way is a great way to waste a lot of time and obliterate one's sense of self. There is a part of me that wants to write for every anthology call I see, but what about the times when that's not right for me? Sometimes, that's because of personal reasons or because of my interest or lack thereof or because of my need to protect my own time. Other times, it's because of my beliefs.

A while ago, a publisher put out a call for an anthology that would sport a cover image of a woman with very serious thigh gap. I've read fairly extensively about body image, including a lot of really disturbing stuff about the current obsession with thigh gap. I was interested in the concept of the anthology and even started a story for it, but I kept feeling uncomfortable about that cover image. I imagined posting it on my blog and talking about how beautiful it was (because I do like cover art a lot, and usually make a habit of doing that). I couldn't stomach the thought. I imagined critiquing the thigh gap issue when I posted the cover, then worried I would be seen as unprofessional. In the end, I decided not to grab that quest. Maybe I gave up some gold (heh) or experience points as a result, but in real life I'm not going to get the 100 percent exploration achievement, and I care more about defining my character and values than I do about reaching arbitrary statistical markers.

It disturbs me how often the desire to grab a quest tempts to me to violate my own values for what is likely to be a very small reward.

I've got to think about who I am, what I really want, and what purpose I've got. I'm not a character in someone else's world. In a game, I'm missing out on opportunities for fun by refusing to do things. In real life, there are plenty of great reasons to refuse things all the time.

Achievements are another twisted thing. In video games, I'm wild for those progress bars and percentage points and little shield icons. I want to level up. I want a high GamerScore. I thrill to the sight of the words, "Achievement unlocked," and when my numbers reach X/X, I feel a real sense of, well, achievement.

As a writer, I've unlocked some achievements, too: Story publication. E-book released. Novel out in print. Story singled out on an anthology's back cover. Invited to contribute. As in games, some of the achievements are negative: Bad contract. Deep disappointment. Cruel review. Laughable sales.

I think, though, that this idea of achievements is what saps a lot of the soul from my writing. If I've achieved this thing, then I should feel this thing. If you've achieved this thing and I haven't, then you're beating me. If you've been struck by a negative achievement that I've managed thus far to avoid, that means I'm somehow cleverer than you.

That's not the person I want to be. I don't want to think that way at all. I don't believe in measuring my life in sound bites and neat, pat phrases. I don't really believe in simplicity, either.

What's been even more poisonous for me than the idea of achievements is the idea of measuring progress the way a video game does. Some writers put progress bars for their novels up on their websites, as if a novel is a file downloading at a speed of, say, 1,667 words per day. (With NaNoWriMo approaching, that example speed seems apt). I've learned from writing to daily word count goals, but at a certain point I learned I needed to let them go. I'm not saying it's okay to fool around and pretend to be working when I'm not. Writing is a lot of hard work, and I believe in putting in the time. I'm not a machine or a program, though, and I've done myself a lot of harm by expecting myself to work as if I am. I've done myself grievous harm by expecting my quests—especially the quests as personal as digging a novel out of the collective unconscious and seasoning it with pieces of my soul—to proceed in neat, measured ways.

So many of my expectations for myself and my quests amount to techno-babble. They're not true to what we really know of story, if we stop to think. They're not true to what our fairy tales tell us.

Writing is a tough act of balance. Me versus you. Fulfilling reader expectations versus delighting and surprising. Listening versus speaking (or reading versus writing). White space covered by black words, which need the space or they won't sing. Working toward goals versus allowing room for exploration and discovery.

I don't want to write for maximum efficiency, because there's no joy in that. I need forward motion, yes, but I don't want to see it as a waste of time if I stop for the sixth slave. A real quest involves a lot of time logged in the wilderness. There are many hours when the compass seems broken and the map seems to have been drawn for another land altogether.

Lately, my writing is changing, and I'm not sure how. I am trying to balance the need to keep working and fulfilling my obligations with the equally important need to let myself develop and search. The only way I know to survive is to keep the older, mythical concept of a quest in mind. The video game concept of a quest can be fun, but it provides so much false comfort, and all too often it reveals how hard it still is for us to simulate the deep truths of the world in which we live.