I finished Dragon Quest, which was a very fulfilling thing. My partner also finished Legend of Zelda, so it was an exciting day of gaming in our household. Unfortunately, I have yet to finish any of the homework assignments I set out to do today. I spent a lot of time trying to come up with responses to questions that are a lot more difficult to answer than I had initially thought. Between trying to come up with discussion questions around Tzvetan Todorov’s “The Grammar of Narrative” that theorizes literature from a linguistic perspective in structuralist fashion to trying to answer what thriving means to me in an assignment inspired by Kia Darling-Hammond’s bridge to thriving framework, I am admittedly overwhelmed by how I have an understanding that lacks words to do what I need to do.
This is something that happens quite often to me, and it’s a frustrating issue that doesn’t have any clear solution. So often, I’m lost on the words that I want to say or a way to articulate or even make sense of the thoughts that abstractly float through my mind. With Todorov, I wonder what is there to ask for discussion when he has posed all the questions and left them unanswerable? On the matter of thriving, how do I define a positionality that accepts and refuses itself simultaneously to come upon a sense of security that is the basis of a greater sense and state of being? I find myself trapped in ironies that make my thoughts and opinions feel foolish, as what I think and believe contradict and affirm itself all at once.
I will say that part of thriving is the idea of vulnerability which has been the center of today. To feel secure in oneself, you need to be vulnerable to yourself about your needs and desires. You have to open up to others to make clear of what these things are. You need to let yourself be vulnerable to minor setbacks and downfalls to let in a better way for society to function. To be vulnerable, you need to be secure and vice versa, making thriving a difficult goal.
Being vulnerable with myself is one of the hardest tasks I can think of. It involves accepting that I’m not as strong as I think I am or want to be. It involves realizing fears that I try to hide from myself and the world. It is about loosening the tension that has been gripping all the broken pieces of myself together for so long. I am reminded of this ever so often and I then engage in this practice of vulnerability to face truths that I don’t admit. But when it gets too hard, I close the book because I can’t turn away from the demands of life. Being vulnerable takes time and energy that society is not made to accommodate. This happens because of attempts to keep power in power, as was the case in the rise of the structuralists in literary criticism and analysis. In trying to formalize the process of literary analysis, literature itself was dehumanized and became a thing for only academic authority to contribute to. The 50s had taken away the vulnerability of literature. How can you have a discussion on that? How can I address my positionality when I have refused it to attain my version of thriving that I must now explain in terms of said positionality?
These questions I have and topics I pose are probably not very relatable to most who read this. But they are thoughts that I need to be vulnerable about. If this society let us speak or even think without consequences or judgement for us to perhaps imagine and develop ways of appeasing us all, where would our minds go? Where would society go? If only it were possible to step out of it all to understand what we would choose for a blissful moment.
The Mindful Jackalope 