PeopleKeeper 2-A Follow Up

Hey all,

I finally got a half-day off and thought it was time to write down some of the thoughts bouncing around in my mind. The technical term for this is idea saltation. It’s a term that I’ve just made up. ::Eddie Izzard voice:: And I’m backing it up with…this geology license I hope to get.

So here is my view for writing today:

This is actually my reality, I can't believe it sometimes.

 It’s cool and windy and mostly clear out, I’ve got a box of Girl Scout cookies and a lot of sunlight left so buckle up because I’m sure this will be a wild ride.

 

A recent photo of me, ready made for a by-line

In the past seven months (whoosh, that went by right quick) I have been working at a job I love with fascinating people whom I am happy to hang out with for a drink after work. My office works with other offices all over the country so I get to meet folks with very different backgrounds and skill sets than my own. My current work priorities for personal development on the job are:

• ·      Consistent demeanor-keeping the same quality and frequency of communication regardless of what’s happening in my personal or personal-professional life (eg. deadlines).
• ·      Learning how to actually talk to anyone- a misnomer that a lot of my friends have is that I can strike up a conversation with anyone. While this has proved true for most of the circles I have waltzed between in my life, it’s not the case across the board. Specifically: I have been learning how to interact with military personnel better. I have a lot of inherited trauma around military folks, through no fault of the people who passed it on, yet it still remains. It so happens that the branch of military my grandfather (who was an abusive ass) served is the same branch that I work with regularly for my job.
• ·     Communication!- Deadlines, expectations, duration of work, intensity of work, boundaries around topics that I feel OK talking about, boundaries when topics I don’t feel OK talking about.
• ·      Programming-I’m finally learning how to code in Python. Because it just seems like a better idea than doing everything manually. I’ve also become significantly more proficient in Microsoft Excel, which has eased some of my pain. And I mean literal pain, my ergo situation is ever-evolving and not close to being pain-free. Despite being an A+ couch potato, it seems being sedentary is not easy for me.

So that’s what I’m working on. It’s hard. I won’t pretend or assume it’s anything but hard.

In the past 7 months I’ve thought a lot about my relationships and how they are interwoven into my mental health. I work A Lot™, my availability in general has decreased, possibly a hundredfold from my availability when I was unemployed. During my unemployment I focused a lot on building relationships; strengthening, deepening, evaluating, asking a lot, giving back a lot, building my friends up, letting my friends support me.

Between personality and circumstance, I’ve always been in touch with A Lot™ of people. Once my therapist asked me to make a map so she could keep up with all the people I talked about. I got to several hundred people in visual format similar to a force directed diagram before I gave up. This was at least 3 years before Facebook. I remember people’s names, their faces, their stories, their joys, and their pain. Especially when I’m rested and focused like I was during my unemployment. Now that I’m fully employed, I don’t have the bandwidth that I used to and I’m noticing that I’m not as capable of managing all the relationships.

On top of my proving period (about 5 months of nearly back to back travel) being physically and emotionally challenging, I took on another challenge: get the first part of my geology licensure. The department of Professional Geologists in the Golden State are trying to mimic the process the Engineers have laid out. I’m certain it also behooves the geologists because it gets them more money. What this means for me, the SaraBe, is that I can take a $500 test now (3 years out of school) and then take another $500 test in 3 more years so that I can sign legal documents. The only study material available is not only boring: it’s badly written, incorrect more times than is acceptable, out of touch and really poor at explaining how to pivot one’s background in academia into industry. I am going to write a competing study guide and publish it when I have my license in 3-5 years. Testing for competence shouldn’t be an endurance test in masochism.

In order to achieve this goal of studying and taking my exam (which I took this morning) I have shifted around my life a lot. This shifting, as with all my shifts, has led me to evaluate my relationships, and check in with where I was a year(ish) ago when I wrote my PeopleKeeper post. I’m going to break out the types of relationships I’ve seen evolve in the past year, moving from negative to positive. Unsurprisingly, there will be a playlist for these categories so be sure to click on links for music. (In addition to my regular play list for the blog at large.)

Brief content warning: mention of rape and stalking. Click this if you want to skip that.

Contact Severed

Only a couple people from my original list (or people who weren’t on the list but existed regularly in my life) were people who I actively severed contact with.

One of them was accused of being a serial rapist. I was not close with this person, I had no direct involvement in these allegations and I did not follow what/if the resolution on this series of events was. I know this person was an active organizer whose parties I occasionally attended but it wasn’t difficult for me to fade from that scene when I was on the road 70% of the time. The whole affair was triggering for me as I was much more intimately involved in something similar when I was 13 so I noped out pretty hard pretty quick.

The other person was someone whose friendship had always been exhausting for me but over the past couple years it built up to the point where they were stalking me. This is someone who I cannot avoid completely because they attend my synagogue but the leadership of the shul took care of the situation in as much as they could. This was extremely difficult for me because there were weeks where I couldn’t attend services because I just had panic attacks. PartnerPenguin was amazing in taking care of me and making sure I left when I needed to leave and breathed as much as I could. Mega props to the current leadership body for listening to me, taking me seriously and treating the situation with gravity.

The Somebodies I Used To Know

This category is a little less cut and dry from my previous category and it’s probably the category I struggle the most with. These are not people who have acutely wronged me, just more…death by a thousand paper cuts. A lot of my biological relatives are in this category. People who have occasionally made my swear allegiance or loyalty but who have never actually been interested in me as a person.

An illustration of this kind of person was someone whom I hadn’t seen in months and we finally spend much of an evening together. They asked me how I was doing and I spent care and energy into responding how was drowning in work but they were important to me so I carved out an evening to spend with them. Throughout the evening they then asked me three more times how I was doing, closing out the evening with “we should catch up some time.” This was painful, but ultimately it made me realize that listening to me was not a priority for this person and there was nothing I could do about it.

Standard Partiers

I like to grow my friendships in predominately 1:1 settings, often revolving around food, often at my house. My relationship bonds strengthen best during long-ish periods of unstructured or semi-structured time together, so I try to create such spaces. Some people like to maintain their relationships through parties (usually >10 people), touching base periodically and superficially. I am happy to attend these parties but I’ve learned that I’m not going to bank on the friendships I cultivate in these spaces to be deep enough for strong emotional support unless I supplement them with other types of interactions.

Don't get me wrong. I love partying. I just don't expect to do most of my heavy lifting in my friendships in this context. 

Neutral

Several people who I had on my PeopleKeeper list interact with their relationships in a way that I had not understood previous to trying this experiment: their partner performs most of the friendship maintenance. I have seen several pairings of people who do this. The level of emotional labor expected by society, usually on women, to maintain relationships, plan free time and keep house to have friends over shines through when I have tried to maintain friendships with people whose partner does a lot of their emotional labor. I have trouble getting in touch with some of these people. One person appeared randomly back in my life after 3 years of no contact because they were in a relationship and just…didn’t keep in touch with any of their friends. Even with my best friends, I have sometimes given up on being friends with their spouses because they just don’t put any work into being my friend in return and assume their partner will maintain that bond. But usually when I show up in person they listen to me so they are neutral to me.

Everything’s Easy/The Simcha (Joy) Bringers

I have several communities right now that I participate in regularly given the locational availability and energy level.

The first is my weekly gaming group who meet the host’s home, and usually have 10 people or less per event. We have dinner together and there is always SaraSafe food (no nightshades) even if means the host makes a separate meal just for me. Sometimes it’s tacos (we gather on Tuesday, after all) and sometimes it’s sous-vide pork cheek or <three-stroke meat engine> that have cooked for at least 12 hours. Sometimes I participate in games like <Colors, Fucking Colors>, sometimes I don’t. And it’s always OK. Everyone sees each other weekly so we generally know what’s going on in each others lives. It’s friendship on easy mode.

One thing that’s great about this group is that the two people who host recently got married and I got to see for the first time a wedding that reflected something much closer to what I want in a wedding ceremony (we’ll have one someday, I swear). The bridal party was not split by bride and groom because everyone was everyone’s friend. The women wore dresses and the men wore suits and everyone was color matched and lovely in that formality. The vows were said in a “yes, and” fashion: the bridge said one line and the groom responded “I’ll do that and this additional thing”. The officient was a friend and he made no presumption of having God involved (which worked, for this crowd). After the bride and groom exchanged vows, the audience was invited to vow to support the couple. I really liked that.

I was so full of joy and love that I cried the whole night. In fact I cried so much that salt crystals formed on my eyes:

I cried myself some minerals!

Other communities I have in this category are my shul, my other regular gaming groups, and the friends I see rarely but spend time with intensely throughout the year. And of course, my travel buddies. In the past couple years I’ve brought my “states visited” count up to 23. Here are some photos from some of the more recent trips:

The great and powerful Mississippi River

....yes....

American Victoria Falls

Buddy, your soul is supposed to stay inside your body. So's your skeleton.

Crappy quality but I did see the Northern Lights

Just a pup in -10°F being OK with life.

With the national political situation, my job being as intense as it is and interfacing with my own and my friends mental illnesses it feels extraordinarily good to have good friends and celebrate happy events. It reminds me that there is balance and that this past year has been net good.

Found Family

The best thing about being a queer adult is that the concept of Found Family is understood and, while not ubiquitous, is prevalent. My little group of new family are the people whom I can be around, no matter how we’re feeling and it’s OK that we’re not entertaining or happy. We can just be. It’s extremely freeing to have multiple people with whom I can just be my complete self.

I had a lot of negative experiences growing up where I was told that we were having family time and that would mean we would “have fun, damnit.” I think sometimes when I reflect on the nuclear family I had growing up that none of us understood how to be there for each other in the ways we needed to be supported. Instead there was a lot of shame and at time coercion to “act like we liked each other” instead of genuinely liking each other.

The intentionality I’ve brought to my new family folks is that when you’re in my found family you’re in as your whole self. That’s hard and takes a lot of work on all parties involved, so there are only a few people who hold this place in my life. I think one of the most important conversations I ever had was with someone who holds me in found family status and they explained that I had committed a transgression serious enough to cut ties unless I made swift and lasting change to my behavior. Having this conversation allowed me to see that just because this category exists, it doesn’t mean that abuse or bad behavior has to be tolerated.

A surprise for me in this past year is how big of a difference having a found family has made on my spiritual life. I am regularly celebrating smaller Jewish holidays that I’ve never celebrated before because I have the support to do so. We have more conversation around Judaism than I’ve ever had voluntarily in my life. I like the amount of Judaism I’ve worked in and I feel supported to include more if it seems right to do so.

PartnerPenguin

I am happy to announce that PartnerPenguin and I have celebrated our first decade together! 10 whole years of being awesome! The best part about renewing for an 11^th season of this show is that we jumped the shark somewhere in…like…season 2? So there’s nowhere more ridiculous for us to go. We’re still two goofballs with odd senses of humor who make each other laugh every day. We’ve learned to have arguments without putting the foundation of our relationship at stake. We have established that we’re not going anywhere so it’s OK to try new things and get out of our comfort zone. I am proud of us. I was trying to only do two comparison photos but then I did 4. GIANT, PHOTO LADEL BLOG POST FOR ALL!

Casual then-shirts read Feztival (2002) and Vader was Framed

Even our casual now looks like we're about to drop an emo album

Fancy then-Rockin' that Moulin Rouge themed Prom

Yeah, basically still rockin' the same theme with no prompts

I do hope to have some sort of wedding, probably about 3 years from now on the 10^th anniversary of us being married. That seems like enough time to ease into the idea, save, plan and decide what we want the event to be. In the meantime I’ve started wearing a ring that I feel suits me on an everyday basis. I think it looks like it fell out of a mountain and happens to fit my finger. You can decide for youself:

I am really really excited about this

In closing today, I’ll just leave you with Janelle Monae’s “Make Me Feel” or: “I am exactly as bisexual as I thought I was.

PeopleKeeper

My past week has mostly been focused on getting ill then getting better. As this is interesting for NO ONE, myself included, I am going to focus on explaining a bit more about my PeopleKeeper experiment. Most of the week I have looked like this:

Friends who have read this blog for a year or more have probably experienced firsthand that I no longer live in the physical place where I met you.  I grew up in a very small town outside The Big Scrapple for the first 17 years of my life. If things had gone differently, I very well could have become Leslie Knope and stayed in that little town forever.

When I was 17 years old I ran away from home for about two months. This was the first time I’d ever moved in my life, but it would be far from the last. In the past decade I have moved at least ten times in many different situations. Some moves have been across town, multiple have been cross-country.

My personality is such that I have an easy time creating space for deep connection with limited amount of time knowing someone. I have always been good at maintaining relationships without needing immediate proximity.  My best friend from elementary school moved away for middle school and we stayed in close touch through high school.

The flipside is that I have not realized until recently that there are emotional costs of constantly maintaining relationships, particularly long distance ones. A lot of people are either self-proclaimed “bad at keeping in touch” or are just unused to dealing with long distance friendships. Even near-distance relationships can be challenging, especially in big cities because there are so many things one can do with one’s time. I find that I have at least four distinct friend groups locally with modest overlap.

So when I set out to do my PeopleKeeper project this year, a big aspect of the project was to do some serious introspection regarding how I spend my energy. Though I am not currently diagnosed with mental illness or invisible disabilities, I have been diagnosed with Major Depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder in the past. I have been reading a lot of interesting and novel access stuff. I really like the SpoonTheory of discrete energy units that may be become depleted by doing basic chores if one’s invisible disability reigns that day.

At the time of writing this entry, I have 1,077 “friends” on Facebook. I do try to “prune” occasionally but I am much nicer than a lot of people. Horrible as it may sound, I generally “unfriend” people on their birthday because it is the one time of year their name comes across my feed. Before acting, I go to their wall and look at several of their profile pictures to see if I remember meeting them, having conversations with them and what kind of person they are. I check the “see friendship” action and see if they have interacted with me publicly in the past three years. Sometimes, if I’m unsure, I also check our shared messages; but usually we haven’t spoken directly so that’s not an issue. If at any point along this checklist I either don’t remember them at all or there has been zero interaction, I solidify my decision and “unfriend” them. Generally though, if someone shows up with a birthday I go to their timeline and post “BAPPY FIRTHDAY” and leave it at that.

OK. So starting with a number 7 times larger than my target of 150, I decided to go the other way around. When I came up with this idea in January I decided that I chose the number of people before I chose the people themselves. I have noticed at times before that I get exhausted and overwhelmed talking to the same people too frequently so this new approach would hopefully give me insight into what contributed to this type of exhaustion.

Intimate (5/150, daily): The people I put on my “daily” contact list are my best friends. PartnerPenguin is at the top of this list. These are the folks that I share everything with and we have clear boundaries about when we need to stop talking.

Close Friends (15/150, weekly): Typically the people on this list have a day assigned and that’s the day I reach out and just say hi. The point of this experiment, on any of my “levels” is that a reminder to reach out is just to say “hi”. I am trying to work on the timing of when I reach out so that I get people at times that work better for them, but one nice thing about SMS or FB messenger is that you don’t need to respond immediately. If a conversation happens, great! If not, there’s always next time.

Loose Friends (≈30/150, biweekly): This is a confusing category for some but I’ve found it useful. A lot of folks in this category live in various parts of the country that are not in my immediate vicinity. They are busy people. I want to know what’s going on in their lives but don’t need to be nosy. I also don’t need a play by play of their lives, unless they wish to live Tweet it. Every two weeks is a good spacing to say “Hey, how goes?” Highlights of a two-week period can be summed up in a couple sentences. It’s a long enough period that generally my friends have some degree of introspection and don’t dump daily drama from this time period, but still feel close enough to share if something negative is going on.

Acquaintances (≈40/150, monthly): When I was asked recently what differentiates someone from being on the biweekly list from the monthly list I thought for a minute, looked the person in the eyes and answered “The monthly people are people I want to talk to twelve times a year.” This is the frequency for what I feel is the required boundaries of certain relationships. In a lot of cases, many friendships in this category are strong and long lasting. But my friends are busy, awesome people. Poking them once a month isn’t too much but helps me keep a good pulse on their lives.

One thing that I’ve been asked several times is whether my categorization is rigid. No, it isn’t and if people reach out to me I will generally respond. Except if I’m not in a good place, then I have been practicing a lot with drawing boundaries! A big reason I created the “less frequent” categories of biweekly and monthly were that I have noticed a trend in my adult life. I am almost always the one to initiate contact. I have historically been responsible (generally voluntarily) for the entire upkeep of most of my relationships. I wanted to give myself a break. Decreasing the frequency allows me to either let others step up if they want a more intimate relationship. It also allows me to forgive myself for “letting things go” in a relationship. I have only committed to reaching out once a month. I met that commitment. I can forgive myself for not being a “good” enough friend. I am good enough.

Professional Acquaintances (≈45/150, quarterly): Folks in this category are people I’m interested in knowing professionally or I need to keep a lot of distance for my emotional health. This type of category used to be accounted for by holiday cards but these days it’s a bit difficult to find holidays everyone can get behind. I have a lot of former classmates on this list and I hope that as we progress into our professional careers that they will become valuable players in our job searching quests. Part of going to a Big American University should be the benefits of the alumni network, right?

At this time you might notice that my total is closer to 135 than 150. I’m going to call that as a win for right now because the folks on this list are by no means the only people I talk to. It was more of a way to formalize my energy expenditure and give myself permission to chill out.

I am working with a company called Contact Otter to help design a product that my friends might be able to use. The founder of this company has put together a survey that you might be interested in taking if you would like to use that product. If you’re a computer programmer and you’d like to design a different system, let’s talk! I feel like I put significant time into crafting this the way that works for me, but I’m sure lots of other people work differently and there is space to make multiple tools.

**Challenges**

Sometimes my reminders pile up on my calendar so I wind up with 15 or more in one day. I have generally tried to work around that so there aren’t more than 10 people in a day. But when I was working the security gig the other week, the timing of the workday was really bad for actually communicating with my network. I tried to still contact people because I have found connection, whether deep and genuine or quick and frivolous, is legitimately the best preventative medicine for Depression. I generally gain energy from being around people so reaching out to friends and letting them know I’m having a hard day has actually increased my relationships and also lessened the burden of having a bad day.

**Surprises**

I don’t know why I found this surprising but this experiment has lead to SEEING a lot more people. Saying hi regularly has led to several impromptu get togethers. I have learned that more of my friends are OK with being physically present even if we’re working or it’s a challenging day to be mentally present. A lot of my friends will see my name pop up and then next time they have an extra ticket to a show, offer me that ticket. I realize this is exactly what I signed up for but I have been touched by how much closer I’ve gotten with so many people. My house has become so much more of a home, housing far more friends on a more regular basis than I’d ever dreamed. Once we even had ribs…though everyone involved that night agrees there was a level of serendipity there that was unreasonably lucky.

I hope this entry has given you a peek into my methodology. Thank you, as always, for listening to me. Here is a random giant ball of yarn to reward you for getting to the end of this post!

And now a show tune. A dismal, dissonant show tune. ^____^