I noticed recently, and by recently I mean it was a gradual noticing over severals of months, that I haven't been thinking much (at least not directly or clearly) about support for the past severals of years. I guess I thought I had the subject all squared away four years ago, folded up and forgotten.
I mean I wore it every day, and I did notice and think about it once in a while, but for the most part I pretty much must have decided I knew everything there was to know and said everything there was to say on that subject. However, I think this topic has been grossly underdeveloped these past several years. With so much changing and so many ideas bustling for attention all the time I forgot to focus on what is probably the biggest concept I struggle with.
I mean, after all, how supportive I am or others are is constantly on my mind. And what I support and how I choose to support it is, after all, at the basis of whatever muddled up ethical system I am mucking by on at the moment. Nine times out of ten when old criticize-my-neighbor-Hope pops up it is either because I disagree with what someone is supporting or how they are supporting it or more importantly who. And probably most of the times the reason I am so passionate about it at all is that I feel that person has been directly or indirectly un-supportive or even anti-supportive of me.
So since I base most of my decisions around this support idea, and since when I do judge people it is almost always based on my idea of what support should be, I think it is an important subject for me to rethink once in every while or so.
First, some self-recognition. I have come a long way. There, I said it. Back in the dark ages, Hope was a creature who murked about in the shadows waiting for someone to shine a flashlight on her and tell her she was a person. I was obsessed with support for purely selfish reasons, I needed some bad. I needed it like a malignant drug. I was completely addicted to it and I would do anything for a fix.
Trouble is, support is hard to find when you want it that badly. People pretty much figure, methinks, that if are so undernourished in the area of support there must be a reason people aren't supporting you. Any loved ones or friends you might trick with your traps for a little while see through you pretty quickly and grow tired of your neediness not much after. This is the solution I was so hard at work on the last time I studied the idea of support. I don't need to worry about supporting others so much, and people don't owe it to me to support me, I need to support my self.
At that time my second discovery was that my parents had relied on us kidsies for support for many numbers of years, if not our whole lives, as their parents before them relied on them for support. I realized that the healthy formula is for the parents to support the children, because in this healthy scenario the parents would have been supported when young and then learned how to support their selves by the time children came into the picture. Not so for my unhealthy little family.
It was a malignant cycle, and it would take a lot of strength to break such a cycle, I surmised. Somebody would have to let go of the fact that they never received gobs of support from anyone, and become an adult who supported self and others just the same. I believe I have, at least in large part, been this strong person and thus transformed myself. Of course, this would not have been possible if it weren't for a number of wonderfully supportive friends and an even more supportive lover.
So, as I've said, I made good progress in the area of support without ever rigorously examining what I meant by the word or idea. This is my current project, and these are some of my thoughts so far.
There aren't very many truly supportive people. I know I'm not one. Most of us get by on cheap imitations. Insincere compliments, pats on the back, sympathetic gestures, stamps of approval. Most of us get by on people telling us we did good when we did something really big. I mean really big like graduating from college. If you work your ass off for four or more years, and get a shiny piece of paper from the school to support you, then if you're lucky ten or so relatives will send you more shiny pieces of paper congratulating you.
This is all well and good, and I am certainly not opposed to this sort of support, however so often it is obligatory. So often none of these people visited you, or sent you money for books, or asked how your courses were. So through this line of thinking I learn that being supportive, to me, has to be active. Not constantly by any means, but enough that we have some idea of what is going on in the lives of those people we support.
Furthermore, I think the time support is most important is when someone is making something or doing something, as well as when they have already made or done something. This includes everything from a painting to a job search to a plan.
Now, by support I don't mean telling someone you like what they are doing. I mean holding up, backing what they have already done, and offering what resources you can toward their next project. For example say some theoretical person were deciding where, when, or who to marry.
To be supportive includes telling them if you think they are heading toward the wrong decision. By telling them what you think you are acknowledging that they are the person making the decision and that you respect their ability to do so. It means acknowledging that the person is taking their time and considering all angles to make the decision. However, it does not mean continuing to repeat arguments they have obviously decided do not hold merit to them. The decision is that person's and in order to support or respect them you must acknowledge that they are capable of supporting their self and making their own decision.
Another important factor in supporting someone is liking them. This one may seem obvious, but I think it goes overlooked. In a lot of ways supporting someone is a two part process to me. First you like someone and what they are doing/making then you offer what resources you can to improve that person's chances of succeeding. I know people who claim to love and support me, who do not like my aesthetics, my ethics, my metaphysics, the way I look, the way I think. I don't know how these people could ever claim to like me. Love, yes. Support, no.
Being supportive is awesome. You get to share in the processes not just the successes of your friends. Being supportive is also difficult. It's an art.
One of the toughest parts of being supportive, I think, is when someone fails. It's easy to tell them it's going to be all right, or even it is all right, or offer them suggestions and resources that can help them be all right, and by easy I definitely mean easier. The tough part is still sticking by their decision even though the results were bad. Still sticking by that person's reason and intuition even though you can both now see that the outcome was suck.
This is the area that I see parents and friends and self fail in the most. I have heard of a most loving mother telling her kid he should feel dejected when he lost his job. I have heard parents who boast of how proud of their kid they are turn around and humiliate her for wetting the bed or not drawing what they would have drawn or cutting her hair a certain way or wearing a certain outfit to an interview. I have heard parents again and again make it crystal clear that they do not think I am old enough or reasonable enough or good enough to make my own g-damn fuggin decisions, simply because they made mistakes or people they know made mistakes and the consequences were dire.
Calm down. Take a breath. Like, trust, respect... these are the best ways to be supportive. To back someone with these means everything. To remember when someone is making something you don't like or doing something you hate, that you like, trust, and respect them despite how you feel about this particularity is important. If you don't like, trust, and respect someone then fuck off. Stop pretending to be their friend.
Now I am not advocating a world in which we support each other all the time. But I am advocating a world where we support each other more often. I am also supporting a mass decision, as adults, that we grow independent. That we each learn how to support self. A person who supports self feels confident in their decisions and feels secure allowing others to offer support even in the form of criticism to their decision making process or in reaction to the results they create. Being a supportive person is something I strive for, it is not something that comes easily to me.
Two things I am working on the most:
1) Supporting my own decision even when the consequences are less than ideal. (Such as my decision to post these thoughts even though I wasn't able to lay them out as eloquently and succinctly as I'd originally hoped.)
2) Supporting my results. (Such as not feeling like this post is utter crap.)
