Halfhaven

On the first night of SlutCon, brimming with energy, I wrote up some vignettes from the first day. As is so often the case with events like these, the rest of the weekend was a lovely blur. I’ve taken some time to process and reflect, and I want to share some of what I experienced and learned. More Vignettes Saturday I wrestle with a friend of mine as onlookers play music on a Bluetooth speaker: first Duel of the Fates, then Careless Whisper. It’s a hard-fought match, and we both get sweaty and scraped up. At one point, I have him in a headlock, but inexperienced as I am, I worry about hurting him and let up. After the bout, he calls me out on this, saying that he likely would have tapped out and given me the win if I had followed through. I reflect on the parallel to flirting; it’s hard to go for what I want if I’m not sure I can trust my partner to enforce their own boundaries. ...

I grieved recently. The process was intense and unpleasant, and it helped me a lot. In this essay, I’ll talk about my experience and my theory of why it was good for me. Some background context: my friend broke up with me around a year ago. I had expectations for the future, a vision for our life together. I’m sad about losing those. I didn’t want to be sad. I clung to her for palliatives to keep the sadness at bay: sex, time together, reassurances. The pressure hurt her. I started trying to push the sadness down so I would stop hurting my friend. ...

Some stories from my first day of SlutCon. All names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the people involved, except for Nick, who is one of the organizers of the event. I go to a talk on men’s fashion. The presenter points to me as a positive example, someone she would see and be intrigued by. This makes sense; I’ve been getting a lot of compliments on my cloak and matching dyed face hair. ...

Take a moment to think of something beautiful to you. Not something morally correct or widely appreciated, but something you delight in. For me, this could be a friend’s smile at a party, or a steaming bowl of delicious stew, but I can’t say what brings you joy. Got it? Good. Make the world have more of that. You are good, your tastes and values are good, and the world should be shaped in your image. You are good, because you are the source of your values. Recognizing yourself as good is the basis for making the world better. Notice how you want the world to be, and fix things that are out of place. You don’t have to fix everything; indeed, you aren’t obligated to fix anything. It’s just that the more you improve the world, the better the world will be. And I reiterate, “better” means more in line with your own vision of a good world, not what anyone else says you ought to work towards. ...

Bleh, I really don’t feel like writing, but I didn’t write yesterday, and the commitment for Halfhaven is a post every other day. This one’s gonna be 500 words of low-effort stream of consciousness, just to clear that bar. I’m not obligated to write, of course. I don’t really believe in the concept of obligation. I hope to do a high-effort post on this at some point. For now, I recommend Nate Soares’s writing on the matter, which heavily influenced my own view. No, I don’t have to write, so why am I doing so even though I don’t feel like it? Well, I want to follow through on Halfhaven. I’m looking forward to the feeling of pride about my 30 blog posts at the end of two months. I’m against self-coercion, but sometimes hard or unpleasant things are good to do. The trick is to remind oneself of why one is doing it. For a while, I just didn’t do hard things, and it turned out that only doing easy things wasn’t a recipe for happy thriving. Ever closer to my dao! ...

Index of posts for Halfhaven Treading Water, Oct 1 Introducing Halfhaven, Oct 3 Some Nonsense For My Third Halfhaven Post, Oct 5 You Are Good, Oct 8 SlutCon Vignettes: Day 1, Oct 11 More About Slutcon, Oct 16 Good Grief, Oct 20 Lighthaven, my favorite place in the world, will be running Inkhaven, a month-long residency in November aimed at growing people into great writers. Apart from support in the form of advisors running workshops, Inkhaven provides a commitment mechanism: publish every day, or be kicked out of the program. I won’t be participating in Inkhaven. The price is beyond my means these days, and I’m not so committed to writing that I want it to be my main focus for a month. However, I do want to write more, or at least to have written more. So, when my friend keltan told me about Halfhaven, a less-intense and free version of Inkhaven’s peer group and commitment mechanism, I decided to give it a try. ...

I signed up for a membership at my local YMCA a couple days ago, inspired by this post. The YMCA is full-featured, and remarkably cheap remarkably cheap by Bay Area standards, as far as I can tell. My plan is to start a strength training habit of some sort, but I haven’t done so yet. Instead, today I took advantage of the pool. I was low on energy today, due most likely to some mix of poor sleep habits and the drain of ongoing emotional processing. Whatever the cause, with the clock approaching 7 p.m., I found myself lying in bed, ruminating on some issues in my life and staring at the overdue “Exercise” on my to-do list. Luckily, when the inspiration struck that I could solve both problems in one fell swoop, I still had enough motivation to get up and give it a shot. I grabbed my bathing suit and a towel, and walked down to the gym. ...