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[unixronin]

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[anda.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I still don't do "perky", nor am likely to in the future.

Re: This comment needs no answer.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Wasn't suggesting you did. :) It's just ... well, I really don't have a good answer. "Fake it until you make it" (in whatever context) has never worked for me, and it's a concept I just don't understand, and often don't seem to be able to get across to people why I don't understand it. If I could do it, I would be, and if I can't do it, how the heck am I supposed to fake it? It's sort of like being asked to fake having three legs or being six inches shorter.

Maybe that's just that I never saw any point in learning to fake anything. If it's worth doing, just do it; and if you can't learn to do it, there's no point in faking it, because if you pretend you can do something that you really can't, you end up screwing both yourself and the people you misled into depending on you to do it.

As for the rest ... well, yeah, there's a lot I see that makes me angry. If it didn't make me angry, I wouldn't be the same person. I'm not sure I'd like the person I'd have to be for it not to make me angry. There's a lot that frustrates me. I'm trying to work on what I can out of that set and improve it. And there's a fair bit that makes me unhappy, and I'm trying to work on what I can, but a lot of it is beyond my control. (Chronic pain, for instance.) Sometimes it seems like the bad outweighs the good. I'm hoping that'll improve. But I can't just snap my fingers and make it improve.

Re: This comment needs no answer.

[anda.livejournal.com]

I agree that neither you nor any of us can snap our fingers and magically improve anything immediately. Hell, that's exactly the kind of magical thinking that I fight in myself all the time. ("If I can just do X, suddenly everything will be better!")

There are lots of contexts in which you can't really fake it - I wouldn't recommend faking being a doctor or lawyer or programmer or paramedic.

In an emotional context, it can work, because we're all emotional feedback machines, and we can fool ourselves, reframe our worlds, through the power of thinking. It's like the whole thing about smiling while you greet someone on the phone - when you smile, you sound happier. It's making myself concentrate on things that are good or accomplishments I have had (instead of the ones I don't).

It ain't a rose garden, it ain't all bunnies and rainbows, but it also ain't quite so many anger headaches and lost nights of sleep.

There's an awful lot out there that would make me angry, if I wasn't busy with living the rest of my life and hadn't realized that a) I can't really do much about them and b) in order to do even a little bit about them, I would have to quit doing the other things that I am doing. It's not just the angry things - I could go get myself an MBA to further my career, but I'd have to quit doing the SCA and I consider the SCA more important right now.

Anyway - feel free to email me if you'd rather not continue this by LJ comment in a completely unrelated post, since I suspect you're a "can't let a response go unresponded to" person, like me.