I decided when I was driving today that I’m not going to let anyone else’s voice be my conscience anymore.
I don’t know if this is strange, but I do this very particular thing when I’m trying to decide if something is right or wrong, when I’m trying to sift through my own actions and decide if I’ve been a dumbass or if it’s more complicated than that.
When I’m in that thought space, I often think of another person. They’re usually someone I respect and look up to. Sometimes I’m close to them. Sometimes they’re someone that I’ve watched and thought about for a long time without letting them know. I almost always choose people who have better moral compasses, or better critical thinking and discernment skills, than me. Or at least I choose people who seem that way, from my perspective.
And then I let my own conscience have their voice. I put my compass in their hands. And I think “what would this person think of me if I accepted this belief, based on how it lines up with what I perceive to be their values.”
This has so many complicated layers that if it was a cake it would probably win prizes.
The thing is, I’m beginning to feel really fucking uncomfortable with how much power I’m giving away.
Because, first of all, I’m over here automatically making the assumption that another person knows better and has more of their shit together than I do when in all likelihood they actually don’t.
I’m not saying that I have my shit together, because I don’t have my shit together. What I am saying is that I’m not alone in that. Assuming that another person knows what they’re talking about just because I respect them is unfair. It’s unfair to my own capacity to think. And it’s also unfair to all of the things that this other person has lived though in order to form their own perspectives. It’s unfair to put messy and imperfect human people up on pedestals and think of them as having everything figured out. That is so much to carry.
Hell, it’s hard for me when my mother asks me for help figuring out how to use her iPhone. I have to put on this ridiculous aura of confidence in order to help her feel calm while she trusts me, as I fudge my way through trying to fix a problem that sometimes I actually don’t know how to fix. And I can’t imagine what would happen if that interaction suddenly had to do with an issue of some actual consequence.
Like racial injustice. Like governance of a nation, like dismantling historically broken systems. Like how to take action in the face of a mass extinction that doesn’t impact everybody in the same way.
Actually, I can imagine what that interaction is like, because we have had conversations about those things. And usually I get really wound up about it and she listens for a while. And she does her best in the face of this massive emotional/reactive charge that I have around these topics. But more often than not we end up butting heads and not being able to go on with the conversation.
My nervous system gets sooo fucked up, when I try to process things with this much charge around them. It’s a lot for another person to be around. Given the scope of the problems that I’m trying to process, I don’t blame my nervous system for not fucking knowing how.
Sometimes – and this is dangerous – my nervous system’s response to the things that are wrong in the world are mostly shaped by content on the internet. I spend hours staring into this rectangle of light, and I don’t get to just selectively take in only some of the things that I see in this space. That isn’t how it works.
Some of the shit out there is toxic, and it’s absorbed right along side of the voices raised for awareness and the empathy and the advocacy. The loudest voices on the internet are the ones that have captured the collective emotional charge around a thing, so that it’s shared and shared until it spreads like wildfire. Just because a point resonates with some emotional element of a topic, that doesn’t mean that it’s holistic, or right, or kind, or even true. And if I don’t filter through everything, critically, carefully, then I can wind up taking things to heart that don’t serve me at all. This is a something I have to navigate, even as my viewpoints are formed and shaped by the things I learn in these spaces. It’s complicated.
In all seriousness, some of the more toxic messages that I find in these spaces fuck with my own moral compass to a ridiculous extent. It’s like – it’s like holding a magnet near an actual compass. It throws me off, and I get so lost…
And so I can’t go on comparing my values with other peoples’ in order to to see if they line up perfectly. This applies to both my personal relationships and to my relationship to the things I see online.
This is not because I don’t care what people think, and it isn’t because I don’t value alternative perspectives, because I do. I do care. I especially care when it comes to the people that I respect and look up to and desperately want to be respected by. As much as people say that you shouldn’t care what people think, and fuck ’em if they have a problem with that… there is nothing wrong with wanting to be respected for who you are and what you believe.
I just need the things I believe to genuinely be my own beliefs, and not somebody else’s.
I’m tired of giving up my power of decernment in favor of my half-baked understanding of somebody else’s thoughts. It doesn’t matter if I end up coming to similar conclusions as other people have done, so long as I did the work to get there. If I find out that I’ve been working with basic assumptions that don’t make any sense, and I do end up changing my mind – then that’s an incredibly important shift. I can’t afford to be afraid or embarrassed if and when my opinions change.
In the end I think that I owe it to myself, and to other people, to think for myself and make up my own mind about things. Even and especially if those beliefs break the mold.
And that’s hard work.
This goes much deeper than citing my sources, deeper than making sure I’m staying in integrity with reputable information. This is deeply personal introspective shit.
I need my conscience to have my own voice.
I need to keep my moral compass in my own hands, because otherwise I’ll never know for sure which way she’s pointing.
I hope it’s an excellent Monday and I love you.