Pretty fragmented

[adrienmundi]

It struck me today that I don't like the way I move most of the time. It feels artless, restrained, and all about getting from point A to point B efficiently. To me, it feels lacking in style and grace, much less personality. Later in the evening, I caught myself focusing on how characters I like in TV shows move, and how it seems an extension of personality. That left me feeling that if my movement style reflects my personality, I'm in bad shape, or that I hide my personality in my body movements. In either case, I'm not happy with that being so.

I think I communicate poorly. At least, with too many important people, about too many important things, I think I communicate poorly. Something invariably gets twisted in the flow from intent to implementation to reception. Unfortunately, I only have limited control on two of those areas, so I tend to assume it's my fault, because effectively, it may as well be.

Dinner with my family (extended, post divorce and remarraige, nuclear) last night: as usual, it leaves me wondering how on earth I came from that environment, and ended up so different. They're a pretty shallow, unreflective lot who seem to take great comfort in imposing and reinforcing sexism. It seems particularly bad now that my stepbrother is a teenager, as if they're raising the frequency in an unconscious attempt to make sure he gets the 'correct' messages. At least three times, I went far enough to feel like I was being rude, calling overt (and not just by my standards) attention to this sexism, to no avail. It was weird; I know they heard me, but everyone just pretended it didn't happen. Either that, or maybe they just couldn't comprehend what I was saying.

Comments

[becket.livejournal.com]

Dinner with my family ...leaves me wondering how on earth I came from that environment, and ended up so different. They're a pretty shallow, unreflective lot who seem to take great comfort in imposing and reinforcing sexism.

Replace 'sexism' with 'materialism' and you have my family. The same thing happens when I talk about Disney being evil or SUVs being the Chariots of Lucifer.

Incapable of dealing with issues abstractly, these people ASSUME I am making an ad hominem comment of some kind. The typical response to this is to just ignore it. 'Turn the other cheek' as it were.

For them, it's not possible that I hold my beliefs independent of theirs... it's an either or. Either I agree with the family or I am expressing my desire not to be part of the family.

For me to have different ideas, and express them, they believe I must be saying that I think they're stupid, or at best am just being arbitrarily combative. Rather than respond to what they see as bait, they either play off my comment as a joke or ignore it entirely.

I think my frustration with this comes from reading too many books. In a book, when someone expresses a viewpoint that goes against the norm, it's generally because the author wants to explore that idea in dialogue. Other characters respond to this challenge of their opinions not because it's the typical reaction, but because the author needs them to respond to it in order for his dialogue to occur.

I need to get in touch with whoever is writing my life and give him a list of dialogue topics for my yet-to-be-written chapters.

[adrienmundi]

Families are just weird. For the longest time, I only seemed to know people who meshed well with their's; thankfully, that's no longer the case.