Choosing My Glasses

a creative writing post (#39)

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Advisory About Comments

I need all my time, energy, and attention during the week to focus on my new job. Comments were only open over the long weekend and are now closed. This will be the usual pattern—whatever I publish during the week will be comments-closed until after work on Friday until the evening before I go back to work.

I apologize for the annoyance, but this is really helping me function better in my new job, which has to be my priority. Thanks for understanding.

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My apartment is most of the top floor of an old Victorian farmhouse. My front door opens to a flight of New England Death Trap stairs, at the top of which is a small area without carpet.

I wear reading glasses the majority of the time I’m awake, but when I leave the apartment I switch to distance glasses, especially if I’m going to drive.

At present, I have three pairs of distance glasses. I bought little cheese-wedge-shaped holders for them.

One pair has round, black frames, like Harry Potter’s glasses. One pair is rectangular with light purple browline frames, and one pair is rectangular with light blue browline frames.

The glasses I like best, and that I think look best on me, are rectangular with black frames, which is why I chose them for my Memoji. The next time I get new glasses, I will get distance glasses as well as reading glasses in that style.

The Memoji is an Apple/iPhone thing, where you can create a cartoon character to resemble yourself. They offer a wide variety of options, both for individual looks and for emotional states that the Memoji can express.

The glasses I choose when I leave the house are entirely dependent on my mood. I’ve noticed that I tend to choose the Harry Potter glasses when I want to hide or avoid human interaction and just carry out necessary errands, the purple ones when I’m going somewhere to be social, and the blue ones when I go out to draw, write, or otherwise be creative.

Lately I’ve been thinking about choosing glasses in another sense, especially as related to my negativity bias.

What Is Negativity Bias?

Negativity bias refers to the psychological tendency to give more weight to negative experiences, events, or stimuli than positive or neutral ones. It’s especially common in people who have been through trauma or difficult life experiences, as they often become more attuned to potential threats.

Negativity bias can lead to focusing on negative events, interpreting neutral situations as negative, or recalling negative experiences more vividly. It is easy to confuse negativity bias with a related concept, that of salience bias. But salience bias refers to how certain things stand out more in general, whereas negativity bias specifically highlights how, for the individuals who evidence it, negative information disproportionately captures attention and impacts decision-making.

Acceptance Is Key To Overcoming Bias

Overcoming bias, of any kind, isn’t easy. And it starts by admitting that you have it.

I have negativity bias.

In my case, it seems to be related mostly to my PTSD hypervigilance, where it pops up, but in any given situation it can be very difficult for me to differentiate negativity bias from reasonable caution.

This is a lot trickier than it may seem at first, and the line is absolutely a dynamic one.

What does that mean? Well, in my case a certain amount of hypervigilance makes sense. I live alone, and I’m deaf.

Imagine that you were in charge of assessing a situation and saying that someone did or did not need to get professional help for a thing. How many times would someone need to, for example, feel compelled to double check that their door was locked before you would consider it a problem requiring intervention?

I don’t know what your answer would be, but I’m guessing that the number would be a bit higher for a deaf woman who lives alone than for a military veteran, able-bodied man with perfect hearing, would it not?

I can hear my therapist’s voice in my head, asking if I’m making excuses.

Yes, some. But only some.

Caution, fear, anxiety, and the like are all reasonable sometimes and not at other times, and it’s not a simple thing to draw lines for—to say “healthy” is on this side and “unhealthy” is on that one.

This is partly why negativity bias is such a pernicious thing for people with a trauma history. When something bad happens related to something I have negativity bias about, it can seem like a simple re-affirmation of common sense.

When I first started working very, very, very hard on no longer being terrified of all human males, a big part of my psyche felt like I was trying to convince myself that sleeping in a lion’s den was safe.

That was an understandable way for me to feel, after my childhood experiences, but it didn’t make sense for me to feel that way as an adult.

It simply was not going to help me build the adult life I wanted.

But overcoming it was both extremely difficult and terribly fraught. Not long into that effort, I had an experience on the city bus. A drunk man put his hands on me and threatened me, entirely unprovoked.

Trying to convince myself that it was just a fluke, not an affirmation that every man is a dangerous monster who hates women and controls himself from hurting as many women as possible only because concealed carry, police, and prisons are all things, was really hard.

There was a voice in my head screaming, “What the hell did you expect, you goddamn moron? That’s. What. Men. Are!! That’s. What. Men. Do!! Exactly how many times do you need reality affirmed before you accept it?!?!?!?!”

I kept trying, and over time got to a good place, but it was agonizingly hard work.

Nowadays, my therapist is more likely to accuse me of regarding men as inferior to women — regarding them as children, incapable of an adult level of self-sacrifice and responsibility — when I am too understanding of a man’s shortcomings and failures.

Did my attempt to overcome my negativity bias just go too far in the other direction? I’m not sure. I’m still very cautious about my physical safety. I choose where I go alone, and when, very carefully.

But there’s also very much a level on which some of the cultural stuff about men, especially in popular entertainment, strongly affects me.

And for as maddening as it can be, that cultural tendency sometimes works in men’s favor. Being regarded as a buffoon, as men so often are in pop culture, also means that nobody expects you to live up to adult responsibilities.

There are a lot of things that men get applauded for but women get judged over, especially around parenting. A divorced dad whose child support is paid on time and who never misses his four days a month of visitation is an absolute superhero in many people’s eyes, whereas a mother who asked for precisely that arrangement in a divorce would be considered an inhuman monster, unworthy of having had a child in the first place. (Why yes, I’ve been reading Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” type forums — how can you tell?)

I grew up in the South, a place where the idea that men are “head of the household” is common, but in practice, men are often (no, not always) anything but. In practice, they are often treated as my coworkers treated my boss at my most recent job—as an overgrown toddler who must be appeased with constant praise while the women—the actual adults—get things done.

The assumption that men are incapable of things that women do while working full-time as a matter of course—cleaning a house, planning and cooking a dinner for guests, remembering where his children go to school and who their pediatrician is—are the kinds of things where, when I spout this line, my therapist reminds me that I sound like a Woke moron who believes that black Americans can’t figure out how to get an ID.

So negativity bias can be excruciating to understand and work on, largely because in any given situation the boundaries and definitions can be fluid.

But it’s also almost impossible to tease apart cultural norms from these things…at least for me.

How to Work on It and Be Happier

One way that I work on my negativity bias is to skip all the dithering and calculus of what’s reasonable when and under what circumstances, and just focus on the positive.

To choose what kind of glasses to put on, so to speak.

I’ve been trying very hard lately to consciously recognize and notice when things go right. To say it out loud, ideally to someone else. To remind myself that things often go right, sometimes unusually right, and that being grateful for those moments is both a happier way to live and a way to train myself to notice the positive things more often.

To wear glasses with a kind of positivity bias — to put my energy into that effort.

In that spirit, here’s the most jaw-droppingly wonderful thing that happened to me lately.

It went so well, so much better than I expected, that if I were writing it as fiction, I would regard my own story as way too on-the-nose, and reject it as an unrealistic deus ex machina caricature.

It involves a gun shop and an Asian redneck, two things that were never on my bingo card at all, much less in the same week.

Here’s that story.

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This story is about a trauma-aware professional in a place I never expected to find one.

If you’ve ever dealt with one, at all, it’s not hard to notice when you find a truly trauma-aware professional.

Trauma-Aware Professionals

The phrase “trauma-aware” is one of those cultural concepts that has been overused so much that few people know what it means anymore.

When it’s used properly, here’s what it means.

Before COVID, I took yoga at a studio where all the teachers were given trauma awareness training. Yoga is one of the most evidenced approaches to overcoming trauma, and trauma therapists often send their patients to yoga.

In the context of yoga, being trauma-aware meant several things. As with most yoga studios, the clientele were overwhelmingly female. When a man did come to class, the teachers would offer women (quietly, discreetly) the chance to move if, for example, a woman was on a mat with the wall on her left and a man on her right, or a woman was on a mat with more than one man in close proximity, whether boxed-in by the wall or not.

Many yoga poses — google “happy baby yoga pose” if you know nothing about it — are not things that a woman with sexual trauma could do with a strange man two and a half feet away.

Additionally, anytime a teacher needs to adjust a student’s pose, she gets permission before touching the student. They also keep an eye out for emotional reactions—I don’t understand how or why this happened, but yoga often caused me to get in touch with blocked emotions—and will have the class move into a resting pose, eyes closed, when that happens, giving the student who is becoming upset an unobtrusive way to leave the room.

I get my annual pelvic exam from a doctor who is trauma-aware. She plans extra time for the appointment, and we spend the first part of the appointment just talking about anything at all, giving me plenty of time to try to be calm and feel normal. When she comes back in for the exam, she stands far away and repeats, several times, that I’m in charge and we can stop anytime, the exam isn’t an emergency and we don’t have to do it today at all, and absolutely nothing is going to happen that’s a surprise or that I’ve said no to. She narrates everything she’s going to do before she does and asks if I’m ready.

It’s not pleasant by any means, but it’s never even come close to causing a panic attack or PTSD trigger — which is a drastically different experience from pelvic exams prior to finding a trauma-aware doctor.

The Gun Shop

I bought my first-ever gun last week. I fully intended to never own a gun, because I have a strong tendency towards depression and most of the risks for suicide.

But I am doing a lot better than ever before, and the majority of the external stressors in my life are either gone or replaced with positive stress.

What is positive stress? It’s a kind of stress that promotes well-being and happiness, rather than diminishes it.

My new job, which I love, is presenting me with positive stress. At my old job, my results didn’t matter a lick in the grand scheme. On a micro level, they mattered insofar as one of my toxically stupid bosses either could or could not make use of them for his own political ends. And that was all.

At my new job, my results matter. Which is wonderful; I love this kind of challenge. Before, my results would either please or displease a jackass based on his own inscrutable wishes and hidden motives.

Now, they either work or they don’t — my prediction model will either predict accurately, or it will not.

That’s positive stress, a kind of challenge that’s exciting and stretches me.

So with mostly positive stress in my life, and most of the factors that have caused my depression in the past either resolved or much improved—as well as some reasons that I will write about eventually but not yet—I decided that I was ready to get armed and learn to defend myself.

But I knew that I did not have one single, solitary clue what I was doing.

The gun shop I went to had one of the most memorable people I’ve ever met in my life working there. He was ethnically Japanese, with a long, scraggly beard that made him look like one of the guys from Duck Dynasty. And he was kind, thoughtful, wicked smart, and ably answered all my questions, including the questions I didn’t know enough to ask.

He talked to me, very seriously, while the paperwork was running for my background check, about how important it is to get training.

He gave me the number of a local guy who does private training and almost begged me to call. I promised I would, and I did.

A Shocking(ly Wonderful) Surprise

When I called the guy, I told him how and from whom I got his number, and why. Then I said, laughing nervously: “They told me that you’re the ideal person to talk to. The guy at the shop made it sound like you basically specialize in helping single women who are nervous first-timers, especially who don’t know enough to be safe. So, that’s why I’m calling, to talk about scheduling some private training, with safety as my first concern. But I know that I don’t even know enough to ask the right questions, so please, feel free to assume I know absolutely nothing, because I do know absolutely nothing, and just tell me everything I need to know.”

Then he started talking, and it was utterly obvious that he was fully trained in trauma-awareness.

The first few sentences out of his mouth were: “I’m so glad you called. Thank you for trusting me and for reaching out to get training. There is absolutely nothing that any gun enthusiast wants to hear more—no sweeter music to our ears—than someone who comes into it knowing that she doesn’t know enough to be safe and wants to learn proper safety right off the bat. The most important thing for you to know, the thing most crucial for you to understand, is this: learning what you need to know is a process, and it’s a process for which you are in charge. You are the one in the driver’s seat. We will go as fast or slow as you decide. You can ask me to slow down or repeat anything, as many times as you want, or to repeat any part of the training over and over until it feels second nature, if that’s what makes you feel comfortable. We only move on to the next step after you say you’re ready, because this is a process for which you are fully in charge.”

Just like that, ninety percent of my anxiety started melting.

We talked for almost an hour, and he explained everything in clear, understandable terms, and asked me questions that were obviously chosen to help him assess that I really did understand — to affirm that we went by both my own feeling that I understood and was comfortable with my understanding, as well as some objective reality—questions for which I would either get a right or wrong answer.

That gave me significantly more confidence than I would have had otherwise, because I knew he wasn’t humoring me. I knew we were only talking about the next part of the process because I both felt like I was ready to learn more and actually was ready to learn more.

By the time we finished talking, he had learned enough about me to realize that math was the way to approach this with me. He’s a retired engineer who now spends his time teaching gun safety, but math is still near and dear to his thought process. So we talked about force, mass, acceleration, and how they affect what to expect in terms of kickback.

Putting things into mathematical terms started removing the mystery and terror, and I started calming down.

By the time we scheduled my first lesson, for later this month, I felt nervous-but-ready.

I’m not an idiot. I’m still apprehensive, and that’s appropriate. I know what guns are, what they’re for, and what they can do. What they are in fact meant to do.

As I wrote about in my essay on suicide, “How to Keep Breathing: no matter how much things suck,” I found a gunshot suicide. On a separate occasion, I also cleaned up the mess from one. (A friend’s wife died by suicide, and the biohazard company wanted $5,000 that nobody had.)

But I believe that I’m ready to try to get past these traumas and the near-phobia of guns they resulted in — to approach being responsibly armed as a responsible adult.

Notice the Positive and Let it Matter

When things go wrong, it is often easy for me to let that matter. To have the rest of my day be affected by it. To remember every detail, often forever.

It’s crucial for happiness, and for the kind of life I want to have—which does not include holding a constant negativity bias—to learn to let the positive things matter, too.

If a casting director wanted to create a character who would be the ideal person to teach gun safety to a nervous, traumatized woman, he could not have done a better job than real life did in directing me to this guy.

That matters.

I can choose to let it matter as much as I want.

I want to let it matter a lot.

I want to notice and be affected by unusually positive things, even more so than by negative things.

I am choosing to work on this desire by noticing, articulating, and expressing gratitude for the positive.

A miraculously ideal-for-me person was referred to me, to help me, and I am going to let him help me.

I am very grateful.

And I will not let myself forget this.

Y’all have a good weekend!

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