Story! Finding Their Footing

Finding Their Footing by Marissa Lingen.

A story about new beginnings and adventure and relating with kindness. The main character is a soil scientist who is also a mother with young children. I appreciate that this story includes the essence of emotional labor - the labor of managing one's emotions.

Link: The community spectrum: caring to combative

The community spectrum: caring to combative by SKUD.

The Competitive Spectrum describes communities as being:

• Caring: members are motivated by helping each other.
  
• Collaborative: members share goals and help each other to achieve them.
  
• Cordial: members have their own goals which do not conflict with each other.
  
• Competitive: members share the same goals, and compete against each other to achieve them.
  
• Combative: members must achieve their goals by preventing others from being doing so.

This is such a useful idea! I ran across it (via brainwane I believe, although I can't find the reference) shortly after telling my singing group that I want us to give each other kind, collaborative feedback. By which I mean, feedback that helps us become better singers and make better music. People keep thinking I mean that the group is run collectively. Nope! I'm the leader, *and* I want us to be at least collaborative, if not caring.

Links: When things go awry

Normalization of Deviance - learning from the Challenger disaster by Foone. I still clearly remember the moment I heard about the Challenger disaster. Good to understand a little more about it, and the general principles behind that.

Normalization of deviance is the idea that things are designed and limits are calculated. We can go this fast, this hard, this hot, this cold, this heavy.

But we always want to optimize. We want to do things cheaper, quicker, more at once.
And the thing is, most of the time going a little faster, a little hotter, that's fine. Nothing goes wrong. Engineers always design in a safety margin, as we've learned the hard way that if you don't, shit goes wrong very fast.

Later Abortion: A Love Story by Missy Kurzweil.

Ending my pregnancy was the most selfless act of love I have ever committed.

Struggling more with disability in times of political emergency by Ruti Regan. This makes so much sense! I hadn't put it into words, but I could feel it in my body.

The times we’re living in involve a lot of fear and extremely stressful political crises. This kind of stress makes everything harder. If you have a disability, some of your coping skills might not be working very well right now. Acceptance may also feel a lot harder. It’s worth remembering that it’s normal to struggle in situations like this — and it’s not your fault that disability matters now. Your body is not a character flaw.

Nonviolent Communication can be emotionally violent by Ruti Regan. Again, this is something I had sensed about NVC, but hadn't put into words. I think the problem isn't specific to NVC - any communication tool can be subverted in abusive ways. Beware the 'splaining in the comments!

In a NVC interaction, you have to regard your needs and the other person’s needs as equally important, no matter what they are. You have to regard their feelings and emotional reactions as equally valid and worth hearing as yours, no matter what they are. That is a good thing in some contexts, but it’s dangerous and deeply destructive in others.

city folk ain’t rude, they just polite different

It’s true. The closer in to a city (and the larger the city) the more the concept of polite changes from “how you are [a]ffecting the person you are communicating with” to “how you are [a]ffecting the people packed in around you”