Indefinite sentence

Let me tell you a story.

A couple of years ago, I described to a friend what therapy was for me, week by week. I replied "interpersonal stuff," which is reasonably correct. At the time I was having deep difficulty with someone (described on "The rebound") and it felt like every social interaction was a struggle. That was reasonably correct as well.

The thing about interpersonal as an umbrella term is that it is purely descriptive. What to do actually with a situationship, several situationships, hypomanic insensitivity, and realizing I'm spending time with people I don't like, those all have quite distinct answers. To the extent that they have any underlying feature, it's ambiguity. Ambiguity is the struggle behind social interaction. Working on my own feelings and thoughts is exhausting, but finite. Factoring in other people that I have a very partial understanding of? No end to that riptide.

The idea of permanently unresolved matters is a source of deep anxiety. I have a lot of influence and control over finishing this post- even if the platform goes down I can finish on another app or on paper. I also can prod Ghost.io and they might resolve things- they have a certain degree of obligation to help me.

There is so much in life that other people are required to resolve. 2024 has been a year of psychoanalyzing other people, derivation upon derivation. That might be interesting, this sort of work could lead to insight. From the perspective of resolving things I do not know the answers to, it's silt and sludge piling ever higher.

It's the inflection point of something darker- the more the ambiguity weighs, the more the urge to resolve it. That can be escalation, not respecting other people's space. Obsession grows if not properly checked.

Currently, I occupy middle ground. My responses to ambiguity are not maladaptive, but I also can't really heal much when the spectrum of what silence and the absence of communication could mean, plausibly. Change is very difficult for me, but worse is the question of what precisely has changed, if anything. Change can be a known quantity, it can be planned around. It's not as likely to lead me into obsession, however I might fear and try to avoid the change.

The last part of 2024 has challenged me. My default nature is that things happen for a reason, these reasons matter, and that analysis should be as exhaustive and rich as possible. This isn't so much what I learned from seven years of studying sociology, as much as sociology was where people who have this mindset do best. The thing is, going back through causes and relationships is exhaustive. Nuance is not an inherent good, it does not necessarily improve things. Kieran Healy's "Fuck Nuance" (2017) states to consider more, evermore, run into a lot of very tangible obstacles. As details and variables and factors are added to theory, the more cumbersome and slow it becomes. That's really not good when you're a human brain trying to parse a world going ten thousand miles an hour.

So I did the hardest thing for someone with that as default to do, and I asserted a few things as true with no evidence for them. Instead of the ambiguity of whether my deepest feelings of love are in the past or yet to come, I stated that they were in the future. I don't feel dread in the same way about love anymore. I also have more patience - that to try to get out of the psychoanalyzing game means to stop taking every small detail as deeply meaningful.

Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn't. And if it's not good, I'm not dead yet, there are future days and future ways.

Artemis