When I was in high school I had a lot of what I termed “ straight girl crushes “.
Sorry.
That phrase is used to erase bisexuality/queerness, and just generally undermine everyone’s sexuality, particularly women.
Sorry.
But I think it’s important to say what I said because my biphobic insecurity was explicitly idealizing — pedestalizing intentionally unattainable people that didn’t really exist.
I was hyperfocused on their every move, even when there were other things I needed to be paying attention to, like… Geometry, or what we were going to run for the 2N.
It was like that scene in Mean Girls where Cady is like oh my God, Aaron asked me about this thing, and it was October 3. So I told him it was October 3rd.
I was obsessed.
But this was in part because whatever pedestal I was projecting these people onto was so different from what that person was actually like, that in order to maintain it…
I had to think about them all the time.
High school is rough, man.
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A couple of years ago a bunch of my high school friends came to visit me in Chicago, and one of these crushes came up.
I liked to pretend those crushes were unnoticeable to anyone who wasn’t me, that they were never really that big of a deal.
Turns out that was just another fantasy.
My friends dispelled me of this illusion. “ Oh my god yeah…everyone knew about (that crush). Everyone.” they said.
“ No offense H… We love you but… Sometimes it was kind of creepy. “
After they told me this, they proceeded to beat me at pool. Ouch again.
I bring this up because I think something about these crushes, as horrified as I am by them, is part of what drives the work I do now.
Then, I was using Hyperfocus to maintain a false reality, an illusion of how “ this girl was so great and awesome and the best ever and if I could earn her approval I would no longer be sadly gay or uncomfortable in my own body “.
I’m trying very hard to avoid upholding fantasies in my life anymore.
But my hyperfocus hasn’t necessarily gone away.
It just shows up differently.
It’s a little more healthy, (though admittedly not necessarily any more helpful).
I notice it especially when people aren’t being truthful about what’s going on with them.
When they are maintaining a gap of some kind between what they are saying and what they are doing.
It turns out when you’re an expert at lying to yourself, you can eventually start to notice when others are lying to you too.
At work for years I would leave meetings angry at everyone for not saying what was underneath the surface of what was going on.
“ Why didn’t you just say that you’re trying to find another job because you hate it here so you aren’t motivated to work on the campaign?” I would ask coworkers.
And they’d be like “ uh you have no idea how jobs work if you think I could say that? But… how did you know?”
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Switching gears: Robert Caro wrote eight books about LBJ, Robert Moses, and other powerful politicians.
The thing that kept him going, that kept him documenting every single detail of their lives was his self described obsession.
He went to Texas and lived there for like eight years, asking people questions like, “ what was the color of this carpet on the night LBJ insulted your mother?”
Or demanding people show him the rope they used to haul up buckets of water when LBJ was a kid.
One of my favorite quotes from Caro is about why he dropped out of policy school.
He was looking out the window at a bridge during a budget analysis class as the professor talked about the Cost and Impact metrics used to build bridges.
But the bridge Robert Caro was looking out the window at?
No cost and impact metrics were used to build it.
Instead, Robert Moses, the developer king of New York at that time, had lied, power played, and finangled to make it happen.
“I knew then that if I couldn’t explain to people why that bridge actually got built, not why we said it was built,” Robert Caro said, “ then I couldn’t do anything useful at all.”
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I didn’t think of my weird work habits or Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize winning career, as related to straight girl crushes until a year or so ago.
I was reading Robert Caro’s latest book, Working, a short one where he talks about his own life.
He says that part of the reason these stories are so important to him, that he spent his entire life devoted to them, is because he got obsessed.
And he got obsessed because he thought it was important to share the truth.
He wanted to challenge what political power looked like, how it was gained, and what action to take based on that information.
He believed that the usual stories about power, about how bridges got built, were in the way of people actually building bridges.
Or at least, building non-corrupt sleazy bridges.
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So, look: nothing I do is ever going to win a Pulitzer Prize.
And I can’t build bridges.
I can’t even sit through a 45 minute documentary on building bridges — I tried last week with Ernestina and I kept getting on Twitter.
And as long as I am obsessed with Game of Thrones trivia as I am with the interpersonal power dynamics are happening in my immediately surroundings, my vestigial Hyperfocus is not exactly useful, even at work.
But here’s my point.
Maybe when you have an obsession interfering with your day to day life, you’re noticing something that matters.
A discrepancy.
A discrepancy between what is Understood and what is true.
Between reality and an Ideal.
Between whatever people are saying and what’s actually true.
Or maybe, it’s a simpler discrepancy, even a hopeful one:
The difference between what is and what could be.
So — what are you obsessed with?
And what are you going to do about it?
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Originally published at https://notesonfeednet.substack.com.
