At the beginning of the post, I wrote: [update: I deleted it because I didn’t really expect it to help people and undercut the opening]
This post is probably hazardous for one type of person in one particular growth stage, and necessary for people in a different growth stage, and I don’t really know how to tell the difference in advance.
If you read it and feel like it kinda wrecked you send me a DM. I’ll try to help bandage it.
I thought about putting it again at the end, where people would actually be more likely to see it when they realized they needed it. But, also, it felt like it would undercut the poetic heft of the end of the post. But then I realized I could put it in the comments here, which feels like a reasonable middle ground.
I am but puzzle about how your post could wreck someone, it’s a great piece to help those with fears about something they cannot control to not worry about it too much or understanding the importance of learning to grieve. If I were in those spots, the message is an optimistic one
There is an optimistic message there, yes—equanimity and internal locus of control and so on are valuable and useful skills. But if you’re not ready to learn them, and you’re not in a place where you are prepared to walk the path to truly internalize them, they can feel impossible, and make you feel inadequate and incompetent, and demoralize you, and lead to depression, or dissociation. Those things may also happen if you are prepared, but the difference is whether you’re able to get through to the other side.
I didn’t have an exact model of what I’d expect to go wrong, but was generally aware that it might pack a big emotional wollop for people in particular spaces, (two people have messaged me so far to say they were shaken by it, in a good way), and it seemed generally better to say “hey this gun is loaded” and be ready to deal with whatever fallout there turned out to be.
But, at the very least, people might just have a lot of stuff going on and don’t necessarily have time to have some hopefully-cathartic-but-meanwhile-destabilizing-or-intense-reorientation..
...
[edit: Maybe one particular thing I’d be worried about are people with a belief that things-will-be-okay-soon-because-something-will-end-or-someone-will-help them, and then this post questions that belief, and suddenly a psychologically loadbearing belief is gone and they don’t immediately have the tools to deal with it]
I am but puzzle about how your post could wreck someone
when someone does not have the capabilities to face those fears. Even just meditating is dangerous for some people because it makes them face something they are not equipped to face. In order to learn, one must face challenges with the right level of difficulty for them at that point in time. Too easy and there’s no learning; too difficult and it is a wall instead of a challenge. If the challenges are psychological or similar, this wall may be something that hurts, only hurts, with no -or minimal- gains.
At the beginning of the post, I wrote:[update: I deleted it because I didn’t really expect it to help people and undercut the opening]I thought about putting it again at the end, where people would actually be more likely to see it when they realized they needed it. But, also, it felt like it would undercut the poetic heft of the end of the post. But then I realized I could put it in the comments here, which feels like a reasonable middle ground.
I am but puzzle about how your post could wreck someone, it’s a great piece to help those with fears about something they cannot control to not worry about it too much or understanding the importance of learning to grieve. If I were in those spots, the message is an optimistic one
There is an optimistic message there, yes—equanimity and internal locus of control and so on are valuable and useful skills. But if you’re not ready to learn them, and you’re not in a place where you are prepared to walk the path to truly internalize them, they can feel impossible, and make you feel inadequate and incompetent, and demoralize you, and lead to depression, or dissociation. Those things may also happen if you are prepared, but the difference is whether you’re able to get through to the other side.
If you were wizardborn, Mr. Potter, you would know to take it seriously, when a powerful magus tells you only to beware.
What’s “I am” mean in that sentence?
I didn’t have an exact model of what I’d expect to go wrong, but was generally aware that it might pack a big emotional wollop for people in particular spaces, (two people have messaged me so far to say they were shaken by it, in a good way), and it seemed generally better to say “hey this gun is loaded” and be ready to deal with whatever fallout there turned out to be.
But, at the very least, people might just have a lot of stuff going on and don’t necessarily have time to have some hopefully-cathartic-but-meanwhile-destabilizing-or-intense-reorientation..
...
[edit: Maybe one particular thing I’d be worried about are people with a belief that things-will-be-okay-soon-because-something-will-end-or-someone-will-help them, and then this post questions that belief, and suddenly a psychologically loadbearing belief is gone and they don’t immediately have the tools to deal with it]
when someone does not have the capabilities to face those fears. Even just meditating is dangerous for some people because it makes them face something they are not equipped to face. In order to learn, one must face challenges with the right level of difficulty for them at that point in time. Too easy and there’s no learning; too difficult and it is a wall instead of a challenge. If the challenges are psychological or similar, this wall may be something that hurts, only hurts, with no -or minimal- gains.