A conversation that led into a rabbithole and a post-conversation analysis with Claude shook this out: “That also makes your role clear: you’re the integrator in a group of visionaries. It’s why OMI feels alive and also why it drains you.”
And, well, ok.
Claude suggested strategies for holding a bunch of visionaries together and I recognised a lot of them, that I somehow managed to do already: use structure that feels like play, not a cage – well, hello gameful approaches. It mentioned “do-ocracy – short quests and visible progress” which is how much of FOSS works already. Small, revertible commitments, using rituals rather than bureaucracy, dealing with admin first before we get to the visionary good stuff … and a recommendation to build the integrator roles in deliberately, which is exactly my current work. But then it said:
You’re partly this type too. You weave worlds and love big visions. The difference is that you can also hold. That’s rare in this crowd, which is exactly why everyone leans on you, and why the structure has to carry what you’ve been carrying.
OK colour me shook?
So I asked, why do you think I am like this? to both be able to weave worlds, to love big visions and then also to hold?
It gave me some stuff which I mostly agree with, but that wasn’t answering the big why: How did I manage all this? What made it possible? Surely others are faced with these challenges and possibilities too? Why is this rare?
Resilience research says it’s a mix of what you were given, what you chose, and luck.
What was given:
One would need “at least one steady person.” My PhD acknowledgements came to 5 pages and left out a bunch of research-adjacent people. My life was filled with steady people who stayed for a while. I will forever be grateful. “Something you’re good at” – to build the sense that you can act on the world, that what you do matters. Temperament, meaning – a feeling that life can be different, and then, importantly, access. Education, opportunities, money.
Ann Masten, a resilience researcher, calls all this “ordinary magic”. Resilience isn’t rare superpowers. It’s ordinary protective factors that happen to line up.
I find that beautiful.
What I added; well, I left. I left the shit bits with no guarantee of finding a better next. I took that leap. I chose, again, and again, with heartbreak and hurt and wounds and scars and brokenness, but I chose, over and over, to look clearly instead of numbing. Tedeschi and Calhoun call the result post-traumatic growth: not just surviving damage, but developing capacities because of the struggle.
Maybe this is temperament, also something that was given, but heck, I’ll take the kudos of staying with it, because this shit is hard.
My life feels like a long quiet road, with the odd campfire glimpsed across the valley. I keep wondering why I so rarely meet others who’ve walked a similar road, who see the world in a similar way, why I mostly don’t feel met in conversation or relationships. I guess that combination of what is given, what is chosen, and luck makes for low probabilities. There’s no shortage of people holding the world together without ever getting to have their own dreams, and there are many visionary dreamers who never learn to hold together the people who could help them get there (which is where this whole conversation started, actually). Families pull people back into their old roles (there’s a whole field on this, family-systems role theory). Leaving costs a lot. Survival mode eats the energy that growth needs. And good therapy, time and money aren’t handed out evenly. For most people, it just doesn’t all line up.
And so, I don’t know. But tonight after having made a wonderful thai green curry from scratch I feel magical. An ordinary sort of magic.