The Gift of Complexity
Ya know, I’ve got one of those brains that just LOVES a category. Well, maybe “loves” is the wrong word…”needs” may be more apt.
I know it is said that most human brains seek categorization by their nature, but I think some of us are much more entrenched in this way of thinking than others, whether that entrenchedness comes from nature or nuture. When I’ve talked with friends about the level to which my mind is constantly scanning the environment for patterns to synthesize every little thing neatly into a classified place, I’ve come to understand that mine is even more inclined toward sorting than the average. I’m the first to use terms like “X-adjacent” or “it fits under the umbrella of Y.” Sometimes this way that I seek “order” is my super power. I can walk into a messy process and help create sequence and systems that allow work or collaborative projects the space and organization to flow.
Of course, our greatest strengths are also our biggest limitations*. Given my propensity to deeply desire making “sense” by placing things in neatly defined rows, for a long time, one of my biggest faults, was binary thinking. The broadest, easiest, simplest category that one can create is a yes/no one…you pick any given attribute, and you say, here is my definition of This Thing, and all objects are either This Thing, or they are not This Thing.
Let me give you a few examples of some binaries I used to really believe in to help illustrate what I mean:
Either something is TRUE or it’s not.
Either someone is a GOOD PERSON who should be in your life, or they’re not.
Love and abuse are mutually exclusive.
People are either male or female…and for that matter, people are either gay or straight.
Something is either HEALTHY for you, or it’s not.
Situations in life are either happy or sad.
Either there are rules and order or there is total chaos.
The biggest change between me at 25 and me at 35, is that the older I’ve gotten, the more I realize that just about every damn thing you can encounter in life is not well served by this binarist mindset. I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot, so if you’ve heard me Tweet, Tumbl (is that a verb?) or talk about this lately already, please forgive this redundancy. But embracing the gift that is the ambiguity of all things has been a Big Deal for me and I can’t stop thinking about it.
Some binaries were fairly simple for me to abandon. I was presented with enough firsthand personal evidence and interactions with others that obliterated my binariest ideas of gender and sexual attraction. It was a little harder to come to understand that there is no such thing as ultimate truths…everyone’s version of truth is colored by their interpretations and contexts. And for that matter, when we look back at memories, the stories we tell ourselves across time impact “truths” and are inextricable from them. It took me getting some age under me to fully realize that.
By painfully taking a slash and burn mentality to some toxic relationships in my life, I learned along the way that sometimes people are good people, but they are bad for you…or they are deeply flawed people who were good for you in a moment, but not forever. Sure, love is not abuse, but there are relationships where the person both loves you AND they abuse. Both are true and the love doesn’t justify the abuse. Just like something can be “healthy” for your mind and detrimental to your body or vice versa. If there was one thing that the shitshow that was 2019 taught me with stark, glaring certainty: Some eras in our lives can be simultaneously the most joyful and the most painful all at once, twirly swirled all together, inextricable from one another.
Knowing that everything is way more complicated than I can possibly even comprehend is on one level terrifying. I feel indignant and cheated that there is no ultimate rule book we can point to as a guide. I become enraged when I think about how it’s now clear to me that laws that tout “justice” or “morality” are most frequently inflicting harm on the most vulnerable.
It’s easy to let the terror of these realizations be the loudest response. But hiding behind that terror, for those who wish to actually embrace the gifts of ambiguity and complexity, is the greatest sense of excitement and freedom that I’ve perhaps ever felt.
It’s been a false security blanket for me to pretend that simple binaries can be relied upon in any meaningful sense. It’s comforting for my brain to delude itself into thinking “these two situations I’ve forecasted are the whole range of possible outcomes. Don’t worry…there’s nothing else at play, you know all the variables. You got this.” But I’d like to emphasize that because this is a FALSE sense of security and a DELUSION, retreating into this space is not only incorrect, it’s also dangerous and foolish. When secret scenario option #3 inevitably comes to fruition, (and it will because everything that involves any human element will find a path toward surprising you) then the cognitive dissonance that I experience between what I thought was the possible list of outcomes and the lived reality of ending up in secret scenario option #3 is enormous. I’m left not only reeling because I couldn’t predict secret scenario option #3 which feels like a failure on my part, but I’m now vulnerable and unprepared in my inflexible stance, and I’m doubly traumatized because I deluded myself into believing that I could predict the outcomes in the first place.
There is such a sense of relief from leaning into the chaos and teaching myself that I can’t predict everything and that perhaps the only certainty is that uncertainty complexity will ALWAYS rear its head.
The one single “rule” that I think I can hang my hat on is this: all I can do is the best I can at any moment with the variables that are in front of me. That is the real gift. Unwinding my claws from the need to feel in control is the real gift. As counter intuitive as it is, admitting that I actually know next to NOTHING is the real gift. I’m borderlining on some cliche about “accepting the things I cannot control” or how “the more I know, the more I realize what I don’t know” but, cliches exist for a reason.
I have come to believe that one of the hallmarks of true maturity is throwing up your hands and declaring “what do I know?” to the universe. That is not a lesson that was outwardly transmitted to me at all by my family, elders, or culture. I was taught faking it until I make it (which does have its place), having a “game face,” and win win win.
What I’m speaking to here is a close cousin of a scarcity mindset vs. an abundance mindset. You can google those terms for a much greater examination of them than what I’m about to give you, but a simple way I think of them is that a scarcity mindset sits in the conjunctions “either/or” and an abundance mindset is the territory of “both/and” like this: “either I am a winner or I am a loser” (scarcity) vs. “both you and I can have great lives” (abundance.) In other words, this taco commercial was right all along.
I don’t want to pretend that the narratives I have inherited are universal. However, if you, like me, were raised in mainstream white American culture, I’d say there’s a really good chance you, too, have been indoctrinated from day one into a scarcity mindset. (Even if your brain doesn’t crave all the categories mine does.) I would like to go on a long tangent here about all I recently learned this in great detail when I devoured Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance. But in an effort to not retell what you can go better learn from him directly, I will summarize it by saying that the white-centric, hyper-competitive, individualistic, “strong hero will save us all” mindset is really harmful. (Villaneuva is writing for folks like me who work in or are connected to professional philanthropy, but his messages and takeaways are relevant for anyone, so definitely check out this read if you’re interested to explore this topic more.) Villaneuva samples the principles of "white supremacy culture" by Tema Okun, which are also (finally) being widely discussed in my professional circles. All throughout this list Okun has identified a scarcity mindset as inherent to white supremacist thinking: Perfectionism, Only One Right Way, Paternalism, Either/Or Thinking, Power Hoarding, Individualism, and I’m the Only One are each elements that highlight how stepping away from binarist thinking isn’t only a process that is only good for me personally, it is also good for society collectively, and necessary to rooting out white supremacy. (I’ve got a whole other blog in me for another day about the role of perfectionism in all of this and my own journey to let go of it, but I’m too newly on that particular path to yet have words to do it justice. Suffice it to say that perfect = good/imperfect = bad is another binary that is satisfying as hell to unwind and leave behind.)
The last thread I want to tie into this topic is “harm reduction” because it’s a really important application of stepping away from binarist thinking. Like many people, I first learned about harm reduction as a way to treat addiction…I can’t recall when someone first brought it up to me, but it was probably a few years ago, and I think at work, among the social workers who make up the majority of my colleagues. I remember it begin couched as an alternative to “abstinence only” style recovery models, like AA/12 steps, and thinking that it made so much sense that some people may be failed by the total sobriety framework that says, essentially “either you are using OR you are OK” and instead it can be “what can you to do limit the harm you will face today?”
In the following years, I began to hear of harm reduction applied to more and more contexts. Over and over, it just made sense to me, as I was on the same many year journey of “oh wow maybe the world is much more complex than these either/or categories I built.” When you can’t know what is “the one true, ultimate RIGHT way” then, perhaps, you can at least look at all the variables and make the choice that you know will produce the least amount of harm.
Which, as you maybe could imagine, led me to this application to political spaces.
I remember a time when I was “A Democrat.” That time died many years ago and as I watched Joe Biden become the 2020 nominee earlier this year, I was……………..…………..really fucking pissed off. (Let it be known that I considered carefully what phrase I wanted to use there and I realized that the 100% unfiltered truth is the best.) Early on, as I watched Sanders’ chances dissolve before my very eyes, I declared to friends, “I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. I can never vote for Biden.”
And I felt it….strongly.
But over the following months, as I have watched “harm” skyrocket for so many people under the current administration of garbage president who shan’t be named, I walked my righteous indignation and perfectionism and binarist thinking back around to my new guidebook….the Guidebook of Life Complexity which has just that one rule I’ve come to rely on: all I can do is the best I can at any moment with the variables that are in front of me.
In that spirit, here’s a little “harm reduction” voting graphic I made earlier this week.
While the ridiculous US two party system forces a problematic binary in itself that I think is simply WRONG, I can be BOTH disappointed in that AND casting my vote for the person I see as least likely to inflict more/continued harm. And for now, while I must work within the system as it exists, I’ll be voting Biden AND I will enjoy trying to do anything I can to have better options in the future, push the structures further left, etc. etc. etc.
So there you have it…over the past decade or so I have come to believe that the world is infinitely more complex than I can possibly comprehend and I am, slowly, figuring out how to navigate that reality in the best way for me. I am not “a good person” but I am a person who tries to do the best I can do at any moment with the variables that are in front of me. And that’s good enough for now.
*spoiler alert: that realization itself is a very non-binarist way of thinking, now that I am putting this all into words, I see it!