Turns out my first post of this turn was a waiver wire. Fitting stuff, that. I was talking about the Jets looking for a QB and the Giants having hope. Tomorrow being the Waiver Wire, you’ll hear more about these things. For now it is more about the headspace I was in all those days (and year+) ago. The goal was to get through a thousand days in this iterative cycle–something I’ve not done before. Halfway through I think I am doing it pretty well. I also believe I’ve evolved quite a bit as a person and a human since 7.1. I still care about a lot of the same things–I’m still a football fan–but I also have cognitive distance from the things I love and a better understanding of what that interaction means from a dopamine and dissonance perspective, and how to have better control over the common sense of all things. I can now, for example, divorce myself from this institutionalized love of the Giants and see them as a thing separate from myself. That team is not my identity. It is not how others see me and it doesn’t need to be representative of self.
That is an important thing to understand during political seasons. We often struggle to divorce ourselves from labels and categories. Voting Trump or Harris becomes a definition of self for those around us, in spite of the fact that the moment of voting is extremely private and personal. Still I can absolutely recognize the dissonance of being in a ‘Forever Trump’ environment and going into that small booth and deciding to cast your vote elsewhere or not vote at all. Just as I understand growing up a Giants fan and then, one day, rooting for their rival as though that choice actually said something about me externally. This could be the thread I start to tug on this semester in my classes. I won’t talk politics, but I do want to talk about self and self-definition and have them write about who they are as individuals and in relation to texts. Heck, that even fights against ChatGPT!
Self-reflection, self-awareness, self-growth is important. These are the things that make us better humans and better scions of society. In a world that feels so chaotic and so driven by rivers of urging and escalation it is often hard to take a moment to sit still and reflect on who you are and who you want to be in this world, and especially on what it takes and what it means to do just that.
I’m trying here.