I am the white, North American, heterosexual, cis female, postgraduate-educated, fully able-bodied child of college-educated parents. I recently married a white, North American, heterosexual, cis male, postgraduate-educated child of postgraduate-educated parents.

I want to be a more vulnerable person. I believe I need to be as honest and direct as possible about who I am in order to fulfill my life goals.

Right now, my long-term goal is to assist people in doing the things that empower them to be educated, and my immediate goal is to be physically and mentally healthier.

I have always been too goal-oriented. But I have finally pared down my goals and these ones have stuck for the last 36 months or so. I know what I will do during the day to meet those goals. I will become an occupational therapist so that I can work with people as they gain or re-gain the competencies that they deserve. I strongly believe that occupational therapy can foster confidence in children and adults who have been abused or inculcated with hatred. Occupational therapists facilitate activities that offer reminders of empathy and hope to severely mentally ill adolescents and adults. If you want to talk more about my opinions of OT’s broader implications, let’s share drinks or food sometime.

I’m not confident that the simplest labels I can use to describe my identities are ostensibly relevant to the narrative to follow. At the same time, I don’t want to side-step your right as a reader to know my many types of privilege. It’s far too often that I try hard to demonstrate my goal to be an ally to friends and strangers, while I simultaneously neglect intersectionality by telling them absolutely nothing about my background.

On the contrary, as recently as May of this year, I reverted to a habit that I cultivated when I was 11 or 12 years old: I allowed myself to scroll through social media presences of friends and acquaintances. Then, I felt alienated when their tweets were not particularly relatable. Whoa. I must be the only person who exists in the world, right?! Errbody’s oeuvre of tweets is directed personally at me!

By no means do I consider this feeling of alienation to be a byproduct of empathy; rather, I’m curious about people, and when I don’t know people well, I must be careful not to compare myself to them or project on to them. Understanding people has always given me energy and motivated me.

As a child, I often accompanied my dad to a Borders Bookstore. Typically, he was at the bookstore to read or write in the coffee place. While he was doing so, I would venture to the children’s section by myself. There, I would meet ≥1 fellow child and ask him and/or her ≥2 questions about herself (usually by beginning with “What’s your name?”). Then, I would meander (my sense of direction was, and still is, poor) back to my dad’s spot, where I would tell him, “Hey! I made a friend, [Ashley/Madison/Austin/Tanner]. S/he is 6 and s/he goes to Tulakes Elementary. Her/his mom is a dental hygienist. Isn’t that cool?”

I don’t think I ever saw any of the fellow children I met at Borders Bookstore again, but they met my definition of friend at the time nonetheless. The remainder of elementary school is a blur of close mentorships from teachers at the small semi-rural school staffed by education professors and students of my mom’s university. I realized that I did not know how to make friends anymore when I got to 6th grade.

You see, I didn’t know how to interact with people during my three years of tri-weekly middle school academic team drills or two semesters of bi-weekly middle school tennis practice. That made me sad. I wanted to do better! After reviewing resources such as television and movie white person media examples and my schoolmates’ Xanga blogs, I concluded that every American had fulfilling, intimate friendships and romantic relationships, and I wanted to know how to attain those. (More simply put, I wanted to be cool, like many other pre-adolescent children.) My dad’s adult friends in his city seemed to think I was charming. So, evidently, I needed to average our ages and replicate the images and purported personalities of some population belonging to that mean age group.

Twenty-somethings (read: North American young adults engaged in the arts) became my target replicable group. In fact, twenty-somethings were listed as “Heroes” on my Myspace profile. Mind you, I made the decision to idealize and idolize this demographic prior to Barack Obama’s campaign and election as US President and the subsequent Occupy movement. Millennials were not sensationalized by media outlets yet.

Middle and high school Mad(dy/die) used the aforementioned social media perusal periods as fact-finding sessions. I needed the fact-finding to help me curate the interests and qualities that I allowed my peers to see: the books I (wanted to) read, the music I listened to, what my sense of humor was like, how to change my physical appearance.

The appearance focus became intensive and unhealthy during high school. I nearly shaved my head in an effort to look older, then felt hella gratified when classmates told me I looked good; I transferred to a high school near my mom’s work for less than a semester because I thought I would find friends with similar interests there, then tried scarily hard to fit into a small friend group; I lost weight excessively and put concealer on my arms and legs(!) before wearing outfits like these; I straightened my hair. (The linked photos are from the file host I used throughout teenhood. Oh, also, I promise never to use the word “teenhood” again.)

As recently as months ago, I oversimplified my adolescent fixation on white educated arts-oriented culture by nervously chuckling when I talked about the strategies I thought would help me secure some semblance of individuality from age 11 to 21 or so. Now, though, I recognize that those quick chuckles were too cavalier.

On one level, it makes me sad that I thought that 1) there was a single method for learning to relate to my peers, 2) that the method was something other than relating, i.e. talking, to them, and 3) that fledgling social media pages of equally fledgling affluent suburban American youth was probably the method. On another level, I believe that emulating an image I’d constructed was an important phase for me developmentally.

In college, I built closer friendships, quickly found friends with similar interests, and spent more time on extracurriculars and networking than building social status anxiety. My first serious boyfriend was eight years my senior; I met him when we worked in the same chain restaurant. When we met, I was 18 and he was 26. We were “together” for two years. We only spent the second of those two years living in the same city. I spent much of that year hiding my youth from his friends. I avoided conversations during which my age might come up and chose night shifts at my job in a health food store so that no one would question why I never joined them at bars. He broke up with me because he wanted to “work on himself“. I immediately realized that I, as a 20-year-old, needed to do the same. Relatively abruptly, I realized that I needed to hurtle myself toward my community and learn from people. Studying abroad would have been an optimal decision at this point, but again, I admired my stepdad’s work ethic and wanted to start making my own money, so I worked hard (researching and cold-calling) to get a part-time job at an urban planning office. At that time, that was what I wanted to Do With My Life.

After college, though, I slipped back a bit. I followed a possibly healthier, albeit precariously similar, formula. I adhered my identity to the Full-Time Job (capitalized ‘cause I always emphasized that) I had secured as a mid-level planner (b0$$, I know) for the municipal government in the city where I was raised. White well-educated liberal guilt told me that any job that alleviated poverty was to be heralded as “real work,” and I believed I was helping reduce income inequality in some way.

In this job at municipal government, I was not happy. I built a narrative that I was working to create a “more equitable distribution of resources” (how the fuck that happens I do not know, but I kid you not, I wrote that exact phrase on at least two applications for professional development funds) and serving society. I was not providing direct social services, but rather giving one-time presentations on a recycling program that was not championed by my employer and writing grants that posed the air quality and public health outcomes of living in a car-dependent city as a rationale for installing more bike racks in that same city. Cognitive dissonance much? I worked as much as 55 hours per week during my most imbalanced periods. My only near-hobby was exercise. Cooking is one of my most important creative outlets, and I never even cooked for myself. Oftentimes, I drank too much on the weekends.

There were a host of reasons for the drinking. In particular, I was not especially reflective about my job’s societal benefits, nor my own work-life balance. This was because I was comparing myself to a person I did not know (who possibly did not exist): I had found a way to convince myself I was a social justice advocate. This was even though my employer denied my proposal to attend a conference on homelessness because “the topic seemed too political” and I was explicitly told not to tweet about oppressive mechanisms I observed. I was able to ignore this because I was convinced that my Change Agent counterparts were also writing a high volume of emails and managing an array of piecemeal projects. It was a bizarre kind of apathy.

This type of apathy was characterized by Maria Popova* in her very recent commencement speech at Penn’s Annenberg School of Communication:

“But here’s the thing about self-comparison: In addition to making you vacate your own experience, your own soul, your own life, in its extreme it breeds resignation. If we constantly feel that there is something more to be had — something that’s available to those with a certain advantage in life, but which remains out of reach for us — we come to feel helpless. And the most toxic byproduct of this helpless resignation is cynicism — that terrible habit of mind and orientation of spirit in which, out of hopelessness for our own situation, we grow embittered about how things are and about what’s possible in the world. Cynicism is a poverty of curiosity and imagination and ambition.”

I do not feel cynical about my own life anymore. By the same token, I do not feel as idealistic about the status of my country or my world as I did while working that first Full-Time Job, either.

Still, it scares me when I scroll through peers’ blog article comments, tweets, and Facebook conversations that are cynical in either of those ways. This week, my friend eloquently voiced her outrage at a Western studio’s decision to produce a biopic on Rumi in which Leo DiCaprio portrays the Sufi mystic. The thread suddenly escalated into a smattering of jokes about cultural appropriation in Rihanna and Coldplay’s “Princess of China” music video circa 2012. This friend is a Muslim woman who began her commentary on the post as a jumping-off point for discussing Western INGOs’ misperceptions of the rural communities where they work. She was brilliantly using immaterial pop culture as a way to provoke conversation about a broader social issue. Here her peers were, more comfortable with laughing than asking questions. I wanted to cry.

Laughing at ourselves is powerful, but we must not laugh so hard that we normalize cynicism at the expense of ourselves and our communities. Trivializing scares me! I want all of us to consume at least some Internet content that calls us to action or educates us. I will figure out a channel for throwing my most genuine self out to the Internet someday. I want to produce art that I can use to do that.

In the meantime, my thoughts that are worthy of weird/caustic Twitter all remain in my private writing. I consider my favorite honest, vulnerable, witty Twitters of acquaintances to be a type of art I haven’t dabbled in yet and probably never will. I’m glad that is okay with me. It is a relief that I don’t feel excluded from my peers because I don’t interact in some of the ways that they interact. That’s a big change for me.

And for the record, I very much prefer caustic Twitter to the self-aggrandizing #over #hash #tagged professional tweets of my former urban development colleagues. At the same time, I disdain the corners of the Internet that trivialize heavy subject matter ad nauseam, even if their participants have the right to participate in them.

Hold up, now. I’m not taking it as easy as the previous paragraph might indicate. I still want to figure out whether ironic Reddit threads and tongue-in-cheek sentiments like the ones I just mentioned are a): a manifestation of cynicism, b): a critical form of Western self-expression, c): an antidote to my 14-year-old self’s tendency to take myself too seriously by embracing silliness instead, d): some combination of these three, or e): something else entirely. Do you think time will tell? I do.

Do you like non sequiturs? I do. I got married in May. My partner and I do not talk about our appearances, nor others’. We relate to each other, but we make it a point not to compare ourselves to each other. We have had explicit conversations about the pitfalls of doing so. We both laugh about how desperately we wanted to identify “coolness” when we first started developing as people. We both laughed at ourselves for throwing a mostly traditional North American wedding, all the while realizing that the institution of marriage will not change our partnership in any way. I wish I could shout on a roof top that marriage is not necessary for most people, but that he and I wanted it. I consider marriage one of the most personal decisions. I wish it was not sensationalized by a cohort of my Western peers. But that’s not necessarily any of my business.

That being said, the last time we had lunch before he left town for a week, our entire lunch conversation was about how to discover ways that we can avoid self-indulgently beating ourselves up about our weaknesses. We still have work to do. Do you?

*If you, like me, would enjoy reading more quality content from prolific authors and activists past and present, but know that you don’t currently leverage your time in such a way that you will commit to The Daodejing this week and Between the World and Me next week, I highly recommend subscribing to Brainpickings’ newsletters. It is my opinion that Maria’s condensed accounts of authors’ works and insights have made me a more self-aware person.