This is so intensely brilliant that I had to reblog it:
I think the reason women say they need big blocks of time to get work done in is not that they do not know how to work efficiently. As I keep saying, anyone who got a PhD and a job does know how to work efficiently.
Where the front time goes, the first half of the four hour block of which only the last two will really be used for work, is to thinking oneself back into the identity of the person that does that work.
Because if in the rest of life, including professional life, that identity is being attacked, undermined and eroded, the first thing one must do to get work done is to put oneself back together, remember who one is or was.
That is why it is important to remain in that identity at all times, not become the one that is being projected into you, even if survival, in the moment, seems to depend upon not resisting the projection.
I don’t even know what to add to this flash of brilliance. It is SO TRUE that it scares me.
If you are in academia, you need to read and follow this blogger, people. She routinely publishes some of the most insightful things on academic life I have read anywhere.
P.S. Read the discussion after the post, too. It contains more brilliance. I don’t refer to my own comments. I’m just trying to figure things out.
Clarissa's Blog 
Fascinating. I do not see why it applies only to women, however. I always thought it was just Attention Deficit Disorder making it difficult to concentrate, except at unexpected times. I also do not like working under pressure.
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I’m the opposite of ADD and have no problems with concentrating in any conditions and with any amount of noise and interference. What I have is what this blogger describes.
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I do not believe in ADD, although if some people really have it, OK. I am talking about combatting the effects of verbal and emotional abuse and general degradation. Things that happen at work or elsewhere that you may not choose to fight explicitly but that you have to recover from.
Something that typically happens to me is, I get a call from the dept. chair and secretary saying so and so (male) is to busy writing to do a service obligation assigned him, so could I step in? I can say yes or no, but it is always a negotiation, and the mere fact of being asked — being told my time is less important than someone else’s, and having my own work interrupted so I can be told this.
If you have a lot of things like this happen per day, and also phone calls like the one Clarissa describes from her mother, you really do need to recover in a conscious way, just as you have to heal from any wound. Calling it something like “ADD” is a misnomer and misleading, and also blames the victim.
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“I do not believe in ADD, although if some people really have it, OK. I am talking about combatting the effects of verbal and emotional abuse and general degradation. Things that happen at work or elsewhere that you may not choose to fight explicitly but that you have to recover from.”
– Exactly.
“Calling it something like “ADD” is a misnomer and misleading, and also blames the victim.”
– I agree. I refuse to accept that there is anything intrinsically wrong with me when I can isolate many instances throughout the day when my self-image as a scholar gets undermined and assaulted. I don’t want a pill :-), I want to learn to fight against this.
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This has taken a silly turn. ADD is a genetic condition. We called it being scatter-brained a half century ago. Most non-medical thinkers on the subject suspect it is merely the mental adaptation needed by hunters rather than farmers. I find that in most cases it is an advantage, since it enables me to notice connections that others miss. The cost is that it slows down my work.
It most certainly should not be treated with drugs, since it is not an illness. Drugging pupils for the convenience of teachers, which is the norm nowadays, is outrageous.
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How does this blame the victim?? Would comparing something to having blue eyes be a blaming exercise. In undergrad school, I needed a minimum of two hours of inactivity to shift between say reading history and working on mathematics or physics. This seems very much like what the issue being addressed here is. This sort of victimization is just one form of it, as far as I can see.
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This list is excellent. I once concluded that people tend not to understand very much because they are afraid not to know something, as if this demonstrated a moral failure not to know everything there is to know. Here are some of my reflections on a very similar topic:
http://musteryou.wordpress.com/?s=non-knowledge
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This is not the best paragraph ever, as I am thinking whilst writing, but here I show what I think the problem is:
In all probability, any attempt at clarification, … would probably not achieve its goal. Differences in values can be astonishingly difficult to communicate, and all the more so when the other person assumes that all of the human race shares the same set of values. This assumption of commonality where there isn’t any is what leads any attempt at clarification to be interpreted as “covert competition”, or something similar. Instead of achieving clarification, you are more likely to mount up evidence for having nefarious motives — that is, the more you try to fix the problem. This unfortunate result is because for some people there is no place “outside the box” of their particular ideology. We all have to think and sound alike, or else it is assumed that we are putting on a mask, pretending to be something that is impossible in terms of the other person’s ideological system.
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That is *very* key on the current culture, I think. It is considered “arrogant” or delusional not to resonate with what is officially mainstream. Your true opinions and feelings “must be” those of the official mainstream; when you say you are not, you are just copping an attitude.
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Yes, because people who have sold their souls in order to belong to the mainstream can’t stand the fact that you haven’t.
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Here’s another related link:
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oops. This should be in the section for being a good listening partner. Sorry for so many posts and in the wrong place. I’ve just woken up here in Aus.
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That’s OK, your comments are always valuable. If anybody knows how to be in a dialogue, it’s you.
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“That is why it is important to remain in that identity at all times, not become the one that is being projected into you, even if survival, in the moment, seems to depend upon not resisting the projection.”
This is true, and also it is important to realize that there is, for want of much better words, a spiritual battle going on to shift you out of your identity so that you end up serving others and their needs, including their identity needs. What I’m learning as I’m starting to do sparring rounds again is not to be pulled into someone else’s game. This is easier said than done. It’s better to get hit a few times than to mistake a feint for a hit and lose the sequence of your game. Similarly, I have realized that there are those who don’t want the fact that this is a game to be acknowledged as such. If you fall into the games of such people, by accommodating yourself to their wishes, they will hate you and blame you for seeming to make yourself a victim out of choice.
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“This is true, and also it is important to realize that there is, for want of much better words, a spiritual battle going on to shift you out of your identity so that you end up serving others and their needs, including their identity needs.”
– Yes! Exactly! When you deprive a person of their identity, you can meld them to yourself, as if they were an extra limb and use them any way you like.
” If you fall into the games of such people, by accommodating yourself to their wishes, they will hate you and blame you for seeming to make yourself a victim out of choice.”
– I know, trying to buy your way into their good graces doesn’t work. It simply makes them more rabid.
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Yes, yes! It’s a whole level of reality that most people don’t see, but sometimes there are religious ideas and metaphors for it, like vampires. In Zimbabwe, it is said that someone with strong magic can take a young woman and make her do their bidding and she won’t remember how or why.
In sparring, someone feints a punch but is really trying to pull you in so they can hit you multiple times. You need to stay in your zone. I should say that sparring with Mike is not really physical so much as an exercise in mental awareness and flexibility.
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Yes — this is what the post was about (and not just about changing focus, learning to concentrate if one does not know how, etc.). The point on trying to shift you out of your identity is very good.
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“The point on trying to shift you out of your identity is very good.”
– It isn’t simply good, it’s a breakthrough. I’ve been looking for this answer for such a long time, and now it’s like a bulb has been turned on.
I will be forever grateful for these insights. It’s great how we have these profound discussions and work together to find answers. I miss these kinds of exchanges in real life.
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Just another reason why I hate postmodernism and its idea that it is very clever and sophisticated to keep changing your identity. It’s not just that I hate bourgeois contradictions and phony cleverness.
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The other smokescreen is that what much of reified culture calls your “identity” isn’t a true identity. For example, it would label me stereotypically feminine, when my characteristics are actually stoical, in possession of a very dry humor, non-compliant and skeptical.
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A David – eh guerito, ¿qué tal? Se me hace que te estoy reconociendo. !Salud, ‘mano!
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I fear my French is insufficient to read this, although I could have read it in the 1960’s when I was a college student, no doubt.
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It isn’t French! Translation: 1. It is not helpful to insist people have a problem like ADD if they do not. Have you ever been treated for the wrong thing? It does not work too well. 2. We are talking about recovering from abuse and harassment. I know you have trouble transitioning between subjects and types of activities — I don’t, which is why I can write on teaching days and so on — but that is not what we’re talking about.
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We are discussing the following phenomenon: Sometimes when a person’s mind is focused in a certain way, it takes a surprisingly long time to refocus it in a different way. Attempting to say that these two are very different is analogous to saying that a head-on collision between two Buicks is a very different event from a head-on collision between two Toyotas. The essence of scientific investigation is attempting to find the underlying similarities between phenomena by neglecting, at first, the superficial differences.
I am willing to be convinced by evidence, or even by philosophical argument, that I am wrong about this, but I am skeptical until I see proof.
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” Sometimes when a person’s mind is focused in a certain way, it takes a surprisingly long time to refocus it in a different way. Attempting to say that these two are very different is analogous to saying that a head-on collision between two Buicks is a very different event from a head-on collision between two Toyotas.”
– If we are still talking about me and my massive issues :-), then I would remove the word “focus” from the equation altogether. This is not an issue of focus for me. And the problem appears only when I try to work on my research. It doesn’t arise with any other activity. Before, it appeared with reading but I handled that part of the problem, more or less. The reason is obvious to me: I was always told that reading and research are unfeminine, that only “blue-stockings” engage in them. Whenever I start working on my research, I hear this voice in my head telling me (in a non-crazy way), “This is all useless and stupid. You are wasting your time on this. Women should not be doing this.”
I’m not sure that there are many men who have grown up with this daily badgering about the uselessness of intellectual pursuits, with the daily efforts to conceal that you are reading, to hide books, to hide your writing, with the constant feeling that you are somehow defective if you care about history and politics and don’t care as much about doing the laundry and ironing clothes. And I’m definitely not sure that there are men who have this feeling of “you either read OR you are a man.”
This, in short, is what I’m working with. This is obviously not ADD but a very messed-up upbringing that continues until today.
I’m working on this in analysis and I’m confident that I will deal with it eventually.
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Clarissa, I most certainly suffered daily badgering as a child because I was interested in intellectual pursuits. This did change somewhat on October 4, 1957, when kids interested in science and mathematics became a little less mistreated. But the boys who never read a book and were interested only in sports were still treated better.
Later on, I was subject to not being taken seriously and treated with contempt because of my Appalachian accent. This did eventually fade as people noticed what I was doing.
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Posdata Clarissa: I did enjoy being reblogged like that.
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Then I will keep doing it. 🙂 I usually only copy a small part of the post I want to share. But this post had a sort of an internal integrity that I didn’t want to mess with. Plus I need easy access to it at all times.
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“We are discussing the following phenomenon: Sometimes when a person’s mind is focused in a certain way, it takes a surprisingly long time to refocus it in a different way. Attempting to say that these two are very different is analogous to saying that a head-on collision between two Buicks is a very different event from a head-on collision between two Toyotas. The essence of scientific investigation is attempting to find the underlying similarities between phenomena by neglecting, at first, the superficial differences.
“I am willing to be convinced by evidence, or even by philosophical argument, that I am wrong about this, but I am skeptical until I see proof.”
…So you want proof of suffering from gender harassment at work and from family members, and proof of what the effects are, and you want to be the judge of whether it is real, all in this thread???? And until you see that, you feel you have the right and the authority to say we have ADD???? When an actual, qualified ADD certifier would not say it could be diagnosed from a blog thread???? That wouldn’t be science, bro!
I’m totally willing to believe *you* can’t teach and do research on the same day and need breaks between studying different subjects. You’ve said so, several times.
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You seem to be assuming that ADD is a negative. I most definitely see it as a positive value in ones life, which unfortunately leads to a lot of mistreatment by the educational and medical establishment.
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No, I am just saying I do not experience what the ADD people say they do.
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“I most definitely see it as a positive value in one’s life”
– I’d love to hear more about this. What are the positive aspects of it, in your experience?
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The most obvious value is that as my mind wanders furiously and uncontrollably from one thing to another, I suddenly become aware of connections between totally disparate areas. This has led me at times to be able to solve mathematics problems that had stymied other mathematicians for decades. People who can work consistently in an orderly, systematic disciplined way never seem to make these profound serendipitous discoveries, as far as I can tell. I can sometimes focus on one thing intently, but often I cannot. It is when I cannot that my most creative achievements have happened.
I scored pretty high on the Aspergers’ test that you posted a couple of years ago, also (about 140.) Thus, I am not sure what part of my mental experience is connected solely with ADD.
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It’s true that many people with Asperger’s have some form of attention deficit.
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I am not in any way arguing that both these are not real. I am just arguing that they are the same thing, manifested in slightly different ways, whereas you seem to be arguing that they are as different as meteor showers and feta cheese. I still do not believe that they are inttrinsically different.
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…Yes. Recognizing wounds as such and recovering them is different from redirecting attention or transitioning from one activity to the next. It is an entirely different question. Believe me, I have tried and tried and tried to say I just needed transition time, and as she has said repeatedly, Clarissa’s Asperger’s issue makes her *good* at concentrating and so on, not bad. I do not understand why you seem to feel you have the right to say that what you apparently do not experience, is not real. But I am totally willing to believe you can’t teach and do research on the same day, or switch subjects when studying, even though I can do these things.
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“I am not in any way arguing that both these are not real. I am just arguing that they are the same thing, manifested in slightly different ways, whereas you seem to be arguing that they are as different as meteor showers and feta cheese.”
I should express myself better than I just did, perhaps. I would say that taking a short break, walking around, digesting one’s thoughts on, say, Thackeray and then switching my brain into math mode is a lot different from:
– feeling shock and pain at how one is being treated, dissociating slightly as a result of the blow, not understanding what has happened, not being able to think straight because of it, feeling invalidated as a person, maybe having a bruise or two to deal with, and having to deal with all of this, gather oneself together, remind oneself that one does have the right to be who one is and have the research job one has, and go on.-
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“feeling shock and pain at how one is being treated, dissociating slightly as a result of the blow, not understanding what has happened, not being able to think straight because of it, feeling invalidated as a person, maybe having a bruise or two to deal with, and having to deal with all of this, gather oneself together, remind oneself that one does have the right to be who one is and have the research job one has, and go on.”
– Feeling that your identity is being devoured by external sources, feeling intense guilt for doing something you enjoy, being compelled to engage in self-destructive behaviors as a form of punishment. Yes, all this.
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@Clarissa – yes, and also, not being able to name it. I remember when I most seriously lost concentration, I was about 35. It was because of verbal abuse about career choice and work and so on. I really did try to say I had lost discipline, lost my Zen, whatever. But what it takes is learning to recognize verbal abuse, learning to internalize less, learning to recover, etc.
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…and, I wouldn’t have said I do self destructive things in response to the push to shift out of identity, just that I stop doing (enough) positive things, but it amounts to the same thing. I like to be in places where I am nearly anonymous, because I then feel free to do positive things without fearing this will impinge on the identity someone/anyone feels they need me to have. And all my favorite friends are people I met in this sort of situation or state, and who did not object.
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I have learned to cut my losses. You have to realize that absolutely everybody is projecting. Not all of those projections are malicious. That is, not all of them are means to get you to do something or be something in service of someone or something who can’t be bothered doing it for themselves. Some projections are based on cultural stereotypes, or ignorance, or habit, or any number of things. There are people who talk to me in a way that I don’t identify with; that I think I am not. They don’t mean any harm by it and they are not obstructing me, so I don’t address this. There are others who are trying to get a hook into me. They see my independent spirit and my adventurous attitude and they would like to harness that in service to their own goals, whatever those may be. This seems craven, so it can be hard to believe it is the intent of some people, but all indications are that this is still what some people want to do.
Philosophical idealism is a huge obstacle to understanding how most people operate — that is, by projection. We are taught that people are rational, so therefore if they object to us, or try something on, or appear to engage in mind-games, it must be because we upset them in some way and need to adjust our attitudes. The idea is rarely entertained that we may have upset them by being different, by operating on different principles, by showing that one can embrace attractive options that they have already rejected.
Everybody is projecting, and many men envy women because we seem to represent the ability to access emotions that these men have denied themselves the right to access. We may be oppressively stereotyped, but that isn’t what interests the men who feel deprived of access to their own feelings.
Since this fundamental reality is not considered relevant by most people, I have cut my losses with regard to humanity. Almost everyone chooses to embrace a great deal of irrationality and to operate by projection to a high degree. There is nothing that a rational person can do to change this, as no amount of Mea Culpas will turn the whole thing around. Rationality or subtle adjustments won’t work. Paying attention to what other people claim they need won’t work, as they rarely need what they claim they need. Their deeper need is to get rid of the projective mechanisms as a means of adjusting to the world. Then they can be whole again, and won’t need so much from others. In the mean time, all their claims and demands are bogus.
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“I like to be in places where I am nearly anonymous, because I then feel free to do positive things without fearing this will impinge on the identity someone/anyone feels they need me to have.”
– Same here.
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“The idea is rarely entertained that we may have upset them by being different, by operating on different principles, by showing that one can embrace attractive options that they have already rejected.”
And yet it is incredibly common.
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