Failure

When I was in my twenties, my therapist said "You never learned to fail." 

I didn't know what he was talking about. That was probably about 37 years ago. I still have absolutely no clue what that is supposed to mean.

Why would I even WANT to learn to fail?

I raised and homeschooled two twice-exceptional kids. Something I've thought a lot about and never figured out how to effectively talk about to my satisfaction is that kids, especially kids who have big strengths and big weaknesses compared to expected developmental norms, need to learn their own capabilities.

In other words, they need to learn their point of failure. How much can they do before it suddenly stops working and goes bad places?

The book Seeing like a State talks about this. It talks about recipes saying to heat it until just before the smoke point and then do something different with it at that exact moment.

How do you learn where that point is? Well by messing it up a few times and hitting the smoke point, of course.

Kids need to know how far they can go before they fail. They need to know at what point they can reliably predict they will fail if they go one step further.

If you don't know that, you can never reach full development. If you are too conservative and play it safe and never hit that point, you will always "leave money on the table," so to speak.

You will always stop well before you REALLY needed to do so rather than just before you needed to do so. There will always be unused capacity.

That's not a good thing. Weight lifters know you must work a muscle to the point of failure to grow it and increase capacity. 

The challenge is finding ways to allow children to SAFELY learn at what point they will fail. At what point do you run out of gas or hit a wall or crash and burn without leaving horrific scars and damage that is permanently impairing and actively reduces capacity rather than informing them accurately of what they can and can't reasonably do?

Gifted kids MUST find their point of failure for themselves because the statements most people make about what is "reasonable" will be consistently wrong. This goes double if they are twice exceptional.

I believe it was when Meatloaf auditioned for The Rocky Horror Picture Show that he was told he wouldn't be able to fit in all the words, no one could, so just do your best and don't worry about it. And he was like "Why wouldn't I be able to?" He got the part because no one else could fit in all the words in some part of some song.

Gifted kids are defined by what they can do that others cannot. If you have a gift -- if you are unusually good such that you have star potential -- only you can know what you can do and planet Earth does a poor job of helping such kids FIND OUT the answers to such questions AT ALL, but especially without getting HORRIFICALLY burned such that their gift is lost entirely or is permanently something less than it was or they simply don't want to be subjected to that again and aren't willing to try.

Handicapped kids are defined by what they can't do that normal people can do. Figuring out what you can and cannot do while dealing with both situations is extremely challenging and the world probably doesn't want to support you doing that at all.

The Ladder tells the story of how I kept my eldest safe when he was two and wanted to do it himself and how that helped him know his limits when he was older. 

Like my sons, I'm twice exceptional. I'm very good at some things and I'm also seriously handicapped. I need to figure out for myself what I can do because, like Meatloaf, it's sometimes something no one else can pull off.

At the same time, there's lots of normal or ordinary things "everyone else" can do that I can't do. A glaringly obvious example: I gave up my driver's license quite a few years ago and that's a barrier to getting a job in my career field at all because most urban planning jobs require a driver's license.

In December 2017, at the age of 52, having raised and homeschooled my now adult sons -- so already well versed in best practices for finding my point of failure without cutting my own throat or doing egregious harm to anyone else -- I applied for a job on a lark after being up all night and tripping across a listing for a job that sounded like someone wrote it FOR ME in particular.

I did so with no expectation that there was any hope of being hired, in part because I was newly off the street and open about that and in part because I have very little job hunting experience and no idea whatsoever what is "normal" for other applicants for that job.

I spent maybe ten minutes on the application because I was certain this was a FOOLISH waste of time that had NO HOPE of getting me a job. So with the expectation this was doomed from the start, I sent in a decade old resume I couldn't figure out how to update and an incomplete application five days after the listing closed.

To my shock, they promptly wrote me back and asked for the missing piece of the application and I made it through the first round of cuts but not to the interview stage. I learned that on paper I was much more qualified than I thought I would be, qualified enough for them to overlook a few glaring defects and be willing to work with me.

In other words, probably in some ways substantially more qualified than any of the other applicants. But ultimately my defects were a deal breaker.

I was attending various public meetings at various organizations trying to get a life and get involved and figure out something that worked for me. I attended one public meeting at a local agency involved in helping people get jobs and someone thought I was there by mistake and must have been a client who walked into the wrong room because I was obviously dirt poor and not dressed like the other attendees.

I managed to get hired by a local nonprofit on an extremely part-time basis and was also doing a volunteer position there, trying to network and figure out how to establish myself as a freelancer in town. And I also continued attending the public meetings of the organization where I had applied for the spiffy title of Executive Director and hadn't been hired.

Initially, the person they hired had no idea I had also applied for the job he got. Humility is a virtue and like my father, I'm sometimes capable of running my mouth nonstop and saying absolutely nothing about certain things.

Three months after he was hired, he said to me in exasperation that if he quit, he would recommend me as his replacement and after that others in town began making noises about "You might have another shot at the job."

At that time, I told him I had applied for the job and afterwards I updated my resume and let the organization know I was interested in working for them, part-time or full-time. 

I knew I needed to prove myself in some fashion and overcome various concerns they had. But I also was trying to convince people I didn't really want THAT job. I really wanted a part-time job or to be helped with establishing myself as a freelancer.

I'm seriously medically handicapped. I don't really want a normal full-time job, much less a salaried position highly likely to eat my life and end up being sixty hours a week, not forty.

But in their minds, it was THAT job or nothing. And no amount of me talking or blogging or whatever seemed to make the slightest difference in their mental model for how this needed to go.

So this inadvertently became a lab for sorting out my ideas about community development work for small communities as well as just how qualified I am and how I wish to relate to this stuff.

I had probably already started a private, unpublished website for keeping track of community development stuff for the town and, as a hobby, doing a mock-up of a website for their organization IF I got hired. With having at least two locals telling me I might get another shot at the job, I began working on that website more seriously so that if I got the job, I could hit the ground running. (It was eventually published after editing out the parts about me working for this organization.)

Their website had a pretty good URL but the site itself was garbage. And although the guy they hired bought a bunch of domain names immediately, he did nothing with any of them until the pandemic shut down all public meetings and he had almost nothing else to do other than the websites.

I'm not interested in detailing this too much. It's a long story and I'm not trying to put together evidence adequate to support a court case.

Suffice it to say that I quit my volunteer work in May of 2020 during the pandemic and took over r/aberdeenwa and began pursuing my interests in local development work primarily via Internet because I was fed up with these people using my ideas and not crediting me and treating me as a "volunteer" while knowing I was one of the poorest people in town and trying to network and establish an income.

I was hardly leaving my apartment and suffering cabin fever and mad as hell about how these people had treated me, so for a time I wrote a fairly ranty blog about stuff in town. I ultimately killed that blog entirely but one of the pieces published there was about parking minimums and I later republished a cleaned up, less ranty version elsewhere when I realized that the local transit authority probably read my screed and acted on it to finally purchase a parcel they had wanted for years.

It was extremely obvious to me that the guy they hired continued to stalk me and steal my ideas after I quit. If I said anything about his extremely lousy website, within hours it was updated to remedy the defects I pointed out.

Someone on r/aberdeenwa talked about wishing the grocery store in town had a bike rack and within 48 hours there was a bike rack. I wrote up a piece on bike racks (later cleaned up and republished elsewhere) and bike racks promptly appeared all over the downtown area.

But NO ONE ever acknowledged my contribution. I was never thanked or credited or ever told by anyone in town they were using my work and this guy who was so obviously STALKING me and hanging on my every word and PROMPTLY implementing (and botching) my ideas, NEVER used the free style guide I created for the town even though I wrote a free language template to make it EASY to do by copying and pasting MY writing with MY permission.

If it involved giving me credit, that wasn't going to happen. So it was extremely crazy-making because I couldn't prove any of this and couldn't turn it into an income and couldn't grow what I was doing because I looked like a loon imagining I knew what I was talking about with zero evidence that was true.

After I wrote a piece about how

I never used a shopping cart while homeless, within 72 hours the downtown area where I lived was largely cleared of visibly homeless people hanging out with their stolen shopping carts full of crap and it never again was as bad after that.

So I felt I was seeing evidence that my writing had impact on the town I both lived in and was writing about. But it wasn't leading to anything remotely resembling an adequate income for me nor even any kind of reputation that I could turn into income because I couldn't prove that those bike racks appeared there because of my work much less that the local chief of police was stalking me and implementing policies based on my blog writing.

It was an extremely extremely negative experience where I was threatened with illegal eviction during the pandemic, which I believe was effectively attempted murder, and I was ultimately illegally evicted and left town. I probably have no hope of proving that is at all related to my status as a citizen planner in that town but I believe it was, so I feel strongly that trying to do anything to improve the town you live in is a potentially high stakes game that can involve attempted murder among other serious consequences.

I still own r/aberdeenwa and it currently has 481 members. r/Aberdeen_WA has 207 and r/AberdeenWashington has 96.

My recollection is it had 300 and something the last time I looked, like a year ago to delete a bunch of stuff in another fit of rage and update the description to this:

I made the mistake of doing volunteer work while living in Aberdeen. This sub most likely has the most members of any of the three Aberdeen Washington subs due to locals promoting this sub by word of mouth BECAUSE I took it over and the guy the local org hired instead of me was likely the person encouraging people to join and be actively abusive to me and you people were happy to do so. The town is a shit hole of rotting buildings because the people there are completely unethical. 

So these people who treated me so extremely badly are probably STILL stalking me and STILL actively promoting this sub by word of mouth while STILL not acknowledging any such thing.

Meanwhile, the development plan I wrote for the town and published on the Internet appears to have accomplished NOTHING. They don't appear to have gained a Panda Express or a Chipotle or a new hotel that I'm aware of.

I don't have any idea how to prove to anyone I know anything about community development work. My experience with this town was such a debacle I have wondered if I should quit running r/citizenplanners among other things because I feel like I have no evidence whatsoever that I have any clue what I'm talking about and I don't know for certain how much I accomplished.

Was I being gaslit? Or do I have delusions of grandeur and a tremendous capacity for IMAGINING that my writing had impact?

They could potentially swear in a court of law they weren't paying ANY attention to me whatsoever because I was a total fucking loser. "Coincidence." "She's IMAGINING that was related to her."

I learned that I know more than I think I do.

I concluded that there is a substantial gap in the market where small communities don't have adequate support for their needs because most planning resources are written for big cities.

I believe some of my work was acted upon and got meaningful results for difficult, intractable problems like the overwhelming homeless problem the town had.

I don't think my "experiment" hurt anyone but ME, so I don't owe anyone any apologies.

I have absolutely no clue how to turn my work into a business that makes me money. I'm not sure I wish to try to figure that out given that this was an extremely ugly experience for me and did leave me feeling extremely burned.