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"
Conversation
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"
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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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It's also a *really* great place to safely explore more touchy things; as in I've learned a lot about how to communicate anger because I get to feel angry a lot in circles and explore how I want to deal with that, which helps prepare me for it happening irl
It's like - meditating gets you really familiar with yourself, and that's often quite useful. Circling is meditation on interaction with others; I get to catch and watch a bunch of parts of me that typically are glossed over or happen so briefly i wouldn't have noticed otherwise
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as a note, I've noticed experienced meditators are actually quite bad at circling, which surprised me. I think 'meditating on yourself' and 'meditating on yourself in connection with others' are two skills that don't easily translate
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