Volatility

I mentioned in my last post that I've started to work seriously (once again) on this book I hope to publish professionally. Of course we'll have to see how far I get. But in some ways the exercise of working with a professional editor has already been very educational.

A couple of days ago, I wrote you that my δαίμων appears to be alive and well and still in business, even though it has been so many decades since I was in school.

And today I came face to face with my old, familiar volatility.

I should explain.

Back when I was a child—or a teenager, or an undergraduate—my emotions were often volatile. It was one of the things that I understood to be distinctively true of me. When I learned the word mercurial, I latched onto it as a self-identifier. As a little child I had played at being Mercury, in and around playing at Batman or Superman. And then I learned that the word which best described my emotional life was derived from this same Power! How delightful. How apt.

The process of growing up was, for me, one long, long process of suppressing that mercurial volatility, of learning to distrust myself, of learning to slow down and wait. And of course in many ways that was a good thing. Certainly I learned over the long years of marriage to Wife that I couldn't just say the first thing that popped into my head! Nor could I with D, for much the same reason. By the time I was involved with Debbie, I had learned enough about my own dynamics to ask for—and get!—"the right to say it wrong." I described that years ago as "the assurance that, if I said something which upset her, I could take it back and try again and she would stop being upset." All of this was valuable progress in growing up, in becoming a mature adult instead of an immature prat. All of it was valuable progress in slowing down.

Except of course that all of you—anyone who reads this blog—knows that it's all an act. I never really slowed down my emotions. All I did was to slow down my external affect. I don't react as fast as I used to. But my emotions still bounce around. You know that, because you have to listen to me. So you are perfectly well aware that I will rage and whine and pout over developments that I end up accepting with (so far as anyone can tell externally) calm and grace. As I say, you know it's an act.

Sometimes I pretend to myself that I've made a kind of progress. And maybe I have. Maybe control over one's external affect really is a kind of progress, whatever is going on inside. But, as I said at the beginning, working with this professional editor has brought me face to face with my old, familiar volatility.

As I described in my last post, she sent me a development edit of the whole manuscript. And there were some changes that just sent me around the twist. Instead of marking up the same manuscript document, I funneled all my feedback into a separate document where I could write, "No! You're wrong, WRONG, WRONG!" Fortunately my painfully-learned habits of maturity kicked in last night, so that I didn't send her anything until this morning. Then this morning I wrote a cover email saying, "By the way, I think you're wrong about a few things but you are also write about some others." I attached the document and clicked Send.

Observing myself this morning, I noticed several things.

• Part of me wanted to stop and not send her all that feedback, in order to avoid the conflict that might ensue. Of course that would have meant that I had wasted the entire weekend, and where would we go from here if I couldn't send her my feedback?
• Another part of me chastised the first part, saying, "This is how you always get in trouble in relationships too, by failing to make a stand early when you should. Better to say something now and have done."
• A third part of me wondered, "Can we treat this email as an experiment? How does she handle criticism? If she handles it well, then you can keep working with her. If she handles it badly, that's an early sign of future trouble."

I thought it a remarkably interesting internal conversation.  

Fortunately the outcome was an anticlimax. Her response was very measured and reasonable. I answered her in a similar vein, thanking her for her answer and focusing on plans for the next step. And all the drama blew over, just like that.

But my renewed awareness of my own emotional volatility—and the interesting three-sided dialogue I held with myself this morning—those things have stayed with me.