but circling *accepts* me hating that. I can loudly, aggressively, express how much I hate it, and I have total freedom to push back against any of it inside the circle. And I often do! It's weirdly the *safest* feeling activity I've done - it accepts all of me
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i feel like i should say, after hating on it, that i actually think circling is really good for the people it's good for, i have seen the positive emotional effects it can have, i just have an allergic reaction to it for reasons i can maybe semi-explain
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yea i also wanna say I don't think circling is for everyone, some ppl just don't jive with it, get it, enjoy it, or learn from it, and that's totally fine - it's vaguely similar to psychedelics imo.
but also interested in hearing the semi explanation
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any structure designed to make me feel free and expressive typically makes me feel un-free and muted -- i understand social freedom to be not "no constraints" but "mutual understanding that constraint violation is fine, but they're still there to riff on and default to"
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alessia once told me, when we were dancing at the luna loft, to "loosen up" -- but my jerky movements were my looseness, goddamn it
seems related, along with my feeling that the nude photo shoot at the castle, while fun, was also kind of hokey
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by "no constraints" i just mean "no normal constraints," i understand that circling has its own constraints, and i do think there are arguments to be made for them
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the impression i get out of this is something like; a deep suspicion that people are lying to themselves; trying to get somewhere; holding an ideal version and judging what's not that without owning it; top-down modification of interaction being flawed cause it's top-down?
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like; if circling wanted to do itself in our conversations then it would have been done already; thus circling does not want to do itself, and trying to do what does not want to be done is artifice?
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idk how well this comports with Sasha's experience / feelings but my revulsion to this is mostly based on a gut-level belief that induced intimacy is dangerous
or it's probably just personality and that's my rationalization, which is kinda the same anyway
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like I don't want to do the thing that circling seems to be for in the first place, and I don't trust most people (including most though not all of my actual friends) with this kind of rawness
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you don't have to be raw; a lot of times i've been in circles where i trust nobody with my vulnerable feelings, and *that's* what i share - I'm like "I don't trust you with my vulnerable feelings, I don't want to disclose what's going on with me"
I guess I don't really grok what the point of that is? like why you would want to do it? but I accept that it's different viscerally than it is to describe, many such cases after all
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Because I learn things about myself in these situations. When I don't want to be vulnerable and I'm closed up, I sit there listening to ppl talk and react to me and I watch my insides do really interesting things and I learn more about my guard and my boundaries.
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sometimes i literally just don't respond to questions at all
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