The cheerful mild constant anxiety / of your childhood turned / to writing
"How do you do what you do" / "How did you get to be doing what are doing" are questions I am never quite sure how to answer because I am not always sure what it is I am doing.
But because questions tend to require answers, and because I am in the business of both asking questions and trying to find the answers to them, I have offered, variously:
- I am good at identifying the (most important) problem and the team required to start to solve that problem
- I don't get attached to solutions
- I love to win
- I love to know things
- I have an exceptionally high tolerance for uncertainty and for risk
- I come from a long line of people who have had to figure things out
- I come from a long line of people who are particularly strong at figuring things out under intense stress and pressure
- Seriously, I love to win
- I am committed to preventing and reducing harm
- I am exceptionally impatient with conditions that enable or increase harm
- I have no interest in being the only one, and if I am the first I am committed to not being the last
- I have learned not to tie my identity to the source of my income
- I will do the work required to be excellent at the thing
- I will take the time necessary to be excellent at the thing
- I don't tolerate people who are assholes or cowards, and I will not allow them to use me to appear to be braver or better than they are
- I try to surround myself with people who are smarter, more interesting, and different from me and to listen to them with curiosity and gratitude
- I try to get out of my comfort zone and to keep a beginner's mindset
- I trust my instincts
- I don't share everything I think or believe and I am always in the process of interrogating what I think or believe
- I think optimism about the future requires a commitment to studied criticism of the present
- I know what my limits are and how they change over time
- I know who my people are and I know that I need to do better by them
Attribution:
The cheerful mild constant anxiety
of your childhood turned
to writing, then meaning came
with its invincible glare—; the page
had borders but no limit—
& you loved letters then,
their breath allowed not
to decide as it curved between
skin-bearer & the being said—
— from The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice by Brenda Hillman