ONWARDS AND UPWARDS...!
Before I get started...
Warning: I once did a philosophy degree, and this blog post discusses some of the ideas that I have developed from those ideas learned... I might get bogged down, wish me luck...
As a background to today's post, I'll talk about me for a minute.
I recently turned 35. Big deal? Well, if I'm honest, this birthday has been more difficult than any other so far. I'm single, I've rejected my first career and I haven't made it in my second (yet), I'm broke, and I still don't want children. I also, for some bizarre reason, seem to spend most of my time with people in their mid twenties, who can only be described as Gen Y, distinct for their constant lack of perceptiveness. I have more than cognitive dissonance; there is a near complete obfuscation of my identity, because much of the time, my identity (as a rock nerd, as a musician, a nurse, a cynic, a nihilist...) is eroded into their neuroses. I counter this with escaping from the city very frequently, to spend time by myself near the ocean. By myself. Yes, I am in a position of immense privilege to be able to do this. I remain very, very lucky.
A dear friend visited me here at my ocean nest last week. Her comment, and I found this to be incredibly flattering, was 'I need to be drama-less, and you are drama-less'. I realise that I like to minimise the drama in my life. I blame a great deal of my clear thinking on the fact that I ... have very little drama in my life.
**I have had rather a lot of drama this weekend, which I have tacked onto the end of this post as an after thought, rather than distract from the actual point of this post...
Okay, today I want to talk about happiness
Not because it is something that eludes me, or because I want to tell YOU how to be happy.I am curious about happiness. I'm one of those wankers that runs with the mantra that happiness cannot be found or achieved; instead it just is. Ergo, nothing that you do or say can have any impact on your state of happiness, so you may as well not try.
That is not quite true. I'm not a fan of the concept of free will. I think it is misleading to say that we can control our actions, and it is more than misleading to say that we should control our emotions or thoughts. There is a more abstract concept, however, of primary and secondary desires. We cannot control our primary desires, such as whether I am going to have one of those chocolates sitting over there, or if I am going to keep reading my evidence notes right now (as opposed to writing this). We can, however, control our secondary desires. These are such things as broad decisions over our lives, such as whether we eat meat, or what goals are reasonable and rational to set. So I might decide to set a goal, and then change the structures in my life to achieve that goal. This way my primary desires are unlikely to be incongruent with my secondary desires.
These secondary desires, while we can 'control them', are driven by environmental factors. Such as core beliefs instilled at childhood (like religion), inherited understandings of the world (like arachnophobia), and experiences of systems. They are also driven by internally driven, so called genetic factors, such as cognitive functions, intellect, attention span.
Well that got a bit complex suddenly. What I'm getting at is: we don't really have free will, because at both levels of desire, we are driven by what we are.
But anyways, these secondary desires seem pretty interesting...
I sometimes wonder if it is dissonance at the secondary desire level that causes drama. When these desires become the unattainable, or are driving towards something that is out of your control, then you position yourself in a situation where happiness is impossible. Well, not necessarily impossible, but certainly improbable.
In other words, if your prime directive in life is to be loved unconditionally by a handsome man, then your happiness is directly correlated with how successful you are at achieving this goal. Also, when you are not successfully on the path to succeeding this goal, you will also be unhappy. If you have some doubt as to the quality of the love you are receiving, your happiness is conditional on these thoughts, and you delay happiness until you get a resolution. If you believe that your happiness is reliant on your complicity with a 'happily ever after' scenario, then you are more likely to tolerate terrible attacks on your body and soul from an abusive partner, because being with someone who loves you is better than being alone.
I clearly subscribe to a different school of thought. I enjoy delayed gratification, but I will not delay my happiness. When I was a teenager, I saw that young women (I was private school educated, and didn't have much access to young men, so women is all I know) were delaying their happiness to after they lost that weight and fit into that dress, or after that exam, or after school finished. While I was generally one of the most miserable humans on the planet during my adolescence (one day I'll blog about this), I still understood that thinking this way is a product of oppression. I also realised that this extended to all people in society, from my mother and her chronic inferiority complex over the car that she drove, to every advert ever trying to convince us not to be happy without their product.
Don't delay happiness. Take it.
This is why I am single, and I do not want to look for a relationship. Because I know that my net happiness is not dependent on the presence of a person in my life. I also know that my net happiness is not in any way influenced by being 'in love'. Further, when I am heartbroken, it takes me a really really long time to get over it, and this has a negative impact on my net happiness. The gamble of relationships just doesn't pay off. Working and getting paid? A no brainer. Getting super high marks at Uni, now that is a gamble that pays off.
Getting romantically involved, where the other person might want to also get involved, but there is a chance that they will rip your heart out and stomp on on, but also, you have to make sure you keep menstruating because abortions are expensive, and also have to expend the emotional energy to make sure that person is okay all the fucking time, and let them know what you're doing, and be careful don't hurt their feelings, and are they loyal? do they love me? do they watch porn? is that my problem?
No.
Saying all this, I don't think that a relationship is something that I will always live without. Some people... well primary desires come into play. When certain people come along, it is like the stars align, and it is just easy. These people are so so few and far between; there have been two people that I've met since CB that fit this category, and neither have been particularly available for one reason or other. It is random. It is not something that you can find through sheer willpower, or via trolling through every man on Tinder or OkCupid...
So, I choose happiness. I choose serenity, I choose exerting all my efforts into doing what I do really really well, and have my little fan club of sycophants. I will continue bulldozing my way through a world that doesn't fit me anyway, pointing out when people try to oppress me into adopting their secondary desires, in my hedonistic journey into oblivion.
NOW! AS PROMISED!
A spray about Jessup Moot, and moots generally
So. There is this thing that happens at Law School called 'mooting'. It's pretty much fake court. You pretend to be a lawyer, you do the research, you write up a court document, you stand up and you give submissions in front of a judge. I do ultimately want to use by legal training to be a barrister, and this is the sort of practice that you need to get ready for the bar. It's horrible, but sometimes fun, and great training. Also, I hate public speaking; my heart goes into VT, my arms and legs go numb, I feel dizzy, and my brain doesn't work. Saying that, there is a wonderful thing called beta blockers that happily address this problem. I've done 3 moots, had a bit of public advocacy training, but because of the way that I have done my legal training, I haven't really had time to commit to it in a big way. I did win the first moot that I competed in. There were 23 other teams. That felt good. Not that it led to any opportunities. But this is not about that.
So, with my interest in public law, and international law, and public international law, I decided to apply to be on the team for the public international law moot. I'm about to graduate from law school, I have a relatively light load over the summer, and I really want to consolidate my knowledge of public international law. Also, I've done the subject.
And I haven't been chosen for the team. Which makes me really really angry.
I am angry because:
- I was specifically asked to complete an application to compete in this competition;
- There was only six applications for a five person team, which means that I was perceived as the worst applicant out of the six students;
- I am the only final year student who applied, and who doesn't have the opportunity to do the moot next year;
- I was the only applicant who had done the public international law subject;
- I was also the only applicant who has completed all the core public law subjects;
- A first year student has been accepted onto the team, they have 3 more years to apply for this competition;
- Another student was asked to do the moot by one of the mooting committee, and has no interested whatsoever in public international law; in fact, 3 of the chosen students have displayed no interested whatever in public law;
- When it became obvious that it seemed that there was going to be some extended discussion over who would be on the team, I offered to withdraw from the selection. I did this, while maintaining my keen commitment and desire to compete, but I did this in order to maintain my relationship with the woman organising the competition. She declined to utilise this route;
- I was informed at 4:57pm on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend, by email, with no explanation; and
- This is not the first time I have been overlooked for younger, whiter students.
If the overarching goal was to win the competition, the people making the decision as to team members should have been to put me at the top of the list. From my perspective, they should be begging me to compete. I am clearly and definitively the single most qualified student at the university to compete in the competition. Without my structural knowledge of the law, I cannot see how the team can possibly gain any advantage over the law schools with *actual* interest in public international law. Without my writing skills, the magic I have at putting together law and fact, the team is seriously fucked.
There is no rational reason that I can see to deny me this opportunity. All I can do is put it down to bias and dislike, and while some people might perceive this as arrogant, I cannot see any other reason for this decision. But also, giving me the news, without the opportunity to hear the reasons for the decision, in the middle of fucking swotvac, is just fucking unprofessional. I cried for two days straight. Rejection is like being stabbed in the guts, repeated rejection completely wears out the soul.
I don't know what I'm going to do about this, and I'd like to get to the point where I can rise above, and move on. In saying that... well... my pride is bruised, and my soul just needs time to stop bleeding.
Shannon out.
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