when life hands you lemons

I know of three common readings for “lemon.” One is an indication of smut in a story (see tvtropes or fanlore). Another is a car or other mechanical device that fails unexpectedly soon. A third is the pre-internet saying of making lemonade from lemons: turning something sour into something enjoyable, more useful, and/or sweeter. I mean that last one (though preserved lemons, not sweet at all, are also great as actual food).

Theme: when a lemon intrudes, tracing multiple possible reasons as a reflexive distancing response can build resilience. NGL, this is an extended navel-gazing session; the post encodes itself somewhat.

Here’s minimal starting context. On Twitter, I said (slightly hydrated here),

TFW acquaintance elsenet asks what you like about making things, what’s surprised you about raising a child, how you relax, music you like, + basis of that context’s nym–perfectly banal for meme (older sense), yet acute, again. So: TFW you realize fences = good reflex, not only habit

Thinking through it w/ abrupt earworm of “Lincoln Portrait” yielded very different post (also the requested one, put up delib incomplete, plus I can’t link it here: fences and fences). Mind’s cores mostly online now, I think. I’ve only one post like this in me

This is the “very different” post, which has resisted being split, though each section is post-length by itself. #sorrynotsorry It needed enough words to make sense outside my head (says the former English-comp instructor, who marked down a partial grade if I could guess what a student meant to assert and it wasn’t on the page). As a result, the post has more than one thesis, depending upon a reader’s perspectives. There are section headings, at least?

“Where do we go from here”

The year I was sixteen, an orchestra I was in (Orange County High School of the Arts) performed Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait.” I asked our AP US History teacher, a 60ish white man, to be the voice. During a school lunchtime a few days after the concert, he took me aside to whisper his thanks: the “Portrait” performance had been emotionally moving and he was glad he’d been part of it—and then he kissed me on the cheek. 🙁 I was—predictably—so surprised that I didn’t react. I knew that the teacher didn’t mean it sensually; I also knew that he knew the transgression would be unreportable. He was being selfish, deliberately. I didn’t even tell my two closest friends, one of whom was in the same orchestra.

There’s a risk in setting up the anecdote like this. Some may say, “It’s awful that we require girls and women to think like men, empathize with their attackers, while requiring nothing of men.” Or, perhaps, “Whatever, he didn’t paw you or anything.” Neither is what I mean here (though both are also true at times; the “Portrait” memory was nudged up by the nigh-illegible thorny thought that I couldn’t articulate several months ago re: blurry consent, time-bound behavioral expectations, and “supposed to”). Such occurrences aren’t necessarily deliberately selfish, either. Some things are unreportable and aren’t set up that way on purpose. As a friend two decades older is fond of saying, it’s always more complicated.

Back to the useful result: having already (before 16) formed a habit of thinking through multiple potential reasons for something while holding it one or more fences away, I was able to see a cluster of potential motivations and consequences around the teacher’s action. Eventually, I was able to see another such cluster around my reluctance to speak up. Pondering clusters has helped me because they’re manifold, not singular; it matters that there was no single thing to have done differently or to have anticipated. And, heh, I gleaned “We cannot escape history” from Copland’s (really Lincoln’s) text as a metadata tag of sorts, a shorthand marker with which to categorize subsequent experiences. That it’s also a complex pun for 2018 is … extra.

It May Be All in Your Head

Here’s a second example. Someone in the family I married into (you never marry an individual unless they’re a hermit: their relatives and friends come with, for better or worse) is convinced that I’m borderline autistic and that it’d have negative effects upon how I raise my child. (Not “Hmm, you may not be neurotypical” but “You lack empathy and will inflict harm.” FTR, I have no diagnosis and no real indicators.) It’s not my responsibility to resolve that one. Indeed, it was kind of left as an unhandled exception, but that’s not relevant.

Trying to think carefully about why she “wants” me to be autistic was productive for me, not only for deciding how I could interact with her sustainably but for understanding the roots of her obstinacy. I can see how it’s been easier for her to deem me flawed (given that she considers autism a flaw) than for her to be even a tiny bit introspective. I guess I’ve done that work for both her and me. I’ve tried to be cordial, without constructing a fake face to show her. Construction would’ve damaged me too much—would, perhaps, have proven her point a different way.

Also, well, those lemons. Earlier, when I was mid-twenties, a former friend who wanted to date me was frustrated enough by my “nope, just friends” response to explain to my face, at some length, why he thought I’m autistic. He’d been clear, he thought! No, I could see perfectly well what he wanted; I didn’t want him, and he hadn’t earned explanatory context from me. Meanwhile, my ex’s relative has been handed context on a plate and can’t reason through it. These are not so different, in the end: seeing only what they want to see.

The courtesy of a disclaimer, for curious readers sturdy enough to struggle through this long post: my ex knew about this section’s content long ago, though perhaps not this perspective upon it. The post is for me, not a revelatory attempt.

Nothing Is Intended As Advice

There aren’t lessons or recommendations to offer, except to myself. Too much of an effective coping mechanism is bad, first of all. When 2018 overburdened me, a surfeit of reflexive, multi-threaded “y tho” from multiple topics nearly broke me and caused trouble for others. I still regret that I couldn’t contain the breakage better, cause less trouble. Second, having been drenched by lemons seems more often to make people clinically depressed. I have no information about why I’ve learned another mode, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend being unseen or mis-seen repeatedly since tiny childhood. Neither insult people nor suffer it yourself, regardless of the insights it may bring. Just—no.

Third, most positive effects of such processing are best left invisible, for oneself. Even when incisive analyses are accurate: you’re not cleverer than other people and—most of the time—you probably don’t want to say you’ve been thinking that hard about them. It’s for trying to make sense of the world and to see how to avoid or lessen some kinds of pain preemptively another time, whether for yourself or (very rarely, if you’re absolutely sure) for others. Though this post is a bit much, I have sat upon so many things for so long that a bare few of them have decided to creep into light of day. The two sections above aren’t the hard stuff. 😀

Last but not least, it’s necessary to direct the thinking-through blade upon oneself periodically. I lost sight of that fact while trying to lend stability to other things. Don’t try only to see others’ perspectives, though it matters to see thus; give the same patient attention to your own potential motivations, needs, wants, consequences. Now that I’ve retraced with a clearer mind every strand of 2018 known to me, I’m sure: what I didn’t make time to understand until recently is myself.

There Had to Be an Irrelevant-sounding Footnote in a Post of Such Length

…and then it grew into its own section.
Okay, yes, “Where do we go from here” is from Buffy S6.07, “Once More, with Feeling.” I’m not quite a fan—seen each episode exactly once as it aired, a function of having gathered with then-friends to watch it and Angel because several of us had no TV—but I know that ep’s soundtrack (YouTube, Spotify).

To circle back upon “Lincoln Portrait”: Buffy‘s construction of high school reminds me of my youth, since the show has mainstreamed aspects of my childhood dialect. (Totally. I mean, actually like partially and with loss of nuance? As if.) It’s also linked to feeling conscious of time’s arrow: shortly after “Once More, with Feeling” aired, I tried citing its provision of two different opposites of conventional oxidant combustion as a teaching example: “I touch the fire, and it freezes me; I look into it and it’s black.” My students stared blankly, and finally one said, “We … mostly were probably too young to be allowed to watch it at first? So we never started?” Perspective, again. I was an ancient 26-year-old that semester; a few of them were 22yo graduating seniors.

The ep’s Wikipedia article is quite long. Today, its analysis of the sung narrative ends, “Spike wants to feel love from Buffy, while she simply wants to feel.” Is that true? I’m not sure. From what I remember, Buffy doesn’t know what to do with her love for Spike—but, however much they care about each other, “happily ever after” has the odds stacked well against it (always already, as another teacher of mine said habitually) because their situations are so disparate. Plus, like, Hellmouth. And Joss.

Though the episode is clear-eyed about the arcs assigned to the characters within the show’s narrative (“everything is turning out so dark”), one thing strikes me as interesting now—didn’t see it twentyish years ago. Buffy pleads for someone to give her something to sing about; Spike replies that the pain she feels “only can heal by living.” True, but in the show, everyone’s all, “Work harder, Buffy!” No one reminds her that she could choose for herself what to sing about sometimes. No one holds space for her to recover. Those things matter.