I am narrow minded in my thinking.  Debate tends not to work on me because I cling defensively to my opinions.   I fight for my generalizations, and defend.  I sideways attack because somehow i feel "gaslit."  Part of the reason I draw lines or make judgments is that I see things, a recurring pattern and I don't want to sugar coat it by saying that "no two people are the same."  When people retract what they told me and tell me I'm generalizing about them, I feel gaslit because they're lying to me.

 I chase my own tale tail and defend my half baked opinions because I'm mad, but also they have more than a sizable grain kernel of truth.  I think I'm fighting through a fog and ultimately fighting

myself.  The term gaslighting came up. I feel like the idea that "everyone is different, no two people are the same" can frequently be gaslighting for someone observing and remarking on a pattern in human life. It diffuses any attempt to draw parallels between people.  To categorize, describe, synthesize, and cut apart, to explain what we see in people.  

I tend to hold on to these opinions until they're wrested from me because I never get to the point where I deepen or test them.  I simply keep describing and defining them without a structure.  The introductory paragraph without the middle that moves the story along.  Deconstruction is what I'll blame for this because the half baked way deconstruction was imported in my school was that terms are rehashed but not defined in  their beginning continuously, and never accepted to a point where they can be used and a story moved along.  I.e. That neighborhood was sketchy.  What does that mean?  What is sketchy?  How is that bound up in our institutionalized dialogue?  What is a neighborhood?  Have you read bell hooks?  You don't have the right to use that word.  On and on.  The argument stalls in its beginning stages.  This is a crime.  No one's mind gets past square one.   

Whenever I state an opinion I'm angry in advance.  No matter what.  Because the first sentence will be challenged.  The beginning principles, the fact that I made a generalization or a definition challenges people who do not immediately and facilly start a story with undefined terms immediately, but hash over the beginning because their terms don’t deserve to be taken at face value.  This is our education.  To consider all things that are PC.  

I fight in a deluded way, swiping with my eyes closed.  I refuse to let the alpha dog get to my mind.  In my mind I can rewrite the story right?  But this in itself is lying about history which is EXECRABLE TO ME.  The only way to fight to grow ones ideas is to develop them in writing, then have them critiqued and force them to move past square one.  To listen and slowly ingest the criticism.  Then decide if it's correct when not drunk on defensive emotions.  

And it's hard to pull me out of my narrow mindset.  It may be making me stupid or deluded. 

I'm mad all the time.  I think that a professor would get me for my half baked arguments and ideas but no one's here to check me.  To expand my mind.  Who wants to go through life believing in a falsity?  To be glib and sophomoric?  Without knowing that they are?  The big fish in the small town, the "'realll nice writah," says one's aunt while doing needlepoint.  

Fighting through a fog of one's own ideas is pitiable.  Without having emerged with a goal, without having emerged with insight or truth.  It's possible to never bring an idea to fruition and reach truth.  This means bringing it through a middle paragraph and end crisis.  To test the idea against itself and others.  One can live perpetually deluded, in a pink fog.  I can and do.  The minute I start elaborating an idea I'm in my comfortable place.  It is never challenged in a way I can't foresee.  One can spend life unenlightened.  Untested by wise critics.  Sitting in one's own juices without anyone alerting them to the state of things.  This is the way with talent that doesn't get tested.  Who in the small town is going to tell their only writer he is glib and has to know to develop?  

I don't think truth comes from debate.  Not when either person clings to their opinions.  Truth can arise from discussion.  Debate is an argument, a verbal fight.  The winner can leave feeling like their appendage got really hard.  Or call me an "emotional" girl.  I'm a sore loser.  In hand to hand combat.  A fight dirty.  One who is accustomed to feeling emasculated by fighting in honorable combat and losing.  Women can feel emasculated.  As two dogs in the park, puffing out their chests to see which is dominant.  The A dog wins and the B dog honorably removes himself but with humans it's more chaotic.  The B dog can delude himself or covertly undermine the A dog or simmer and wait for revenge and never get over it.  The A dog can boil over.  Denial powerfully copes against stark defeat, denial, isolation, and reworking the story.  Becoming drunk on reliving and repositioning events.  Epiphanies are cheap, they are tacked on to the ends of 20 minute episodes like SATC where every break up ends in an epiphany.  Relationships are broken less than a character learns something that will later be proven useless to him.  Jack Donaghy thinks he provides a solution in every other 30 R episode, epiphanies appear longer than lasting relationships, thus insight is cheap on television, the one solution, the magic bullet is repeatedly revised.  Relationships are entered into rapturously, like the "happy ending" of star crossed lovers in Golden Age 1940s movie, both kissing ferociously with their mouths closed and necks wrinkling.  Yet, the raison d'etre of the relationship, what each liked about the other, what keeps it moving, this is not allowed to be developed.  A couple is not allowed to stay together and grow.  But, damned if a character isn't moved to learn a disparate thing every episode!  What brought the two together, what were their separate worlds like and what brought the two to meet?  How do they survive on a daily basis and their union still stands?  These questions aren't answered as much as a character making a conclusion about their life direction based on the events of the day.  I don't think this is realistic, other than someone driven to find stereotypical "self help" and "purpose" in their life, I meet few people who have an epiphany a day.  The epiphany is true and precious.  It is approached with the integrity of wanting to find the truth and being willing to discard an idea if it is false.  This is mental integrity and philosophical integrity. 

The idea that we may be fighting ourselves through the fog is a fascinating one.  The topic must move, it must move toward resolution, insight the petit enlightenment.  Critics may hold value because they jolt us out of our own perspective, of our own movie that we set up about our work, our own narrative.  Having only one's own opinions to go by has a potentially drunk effect.  I remember that when I would be stuck in a string of thoughts, soundtracked by a song in my head, a movie with a different storyline had a potentially sobering effect.  Perhaps generalizations would tell me that women don't act this way or that men who are estranged from their families must be avoided.  Little jokes like those on Mindy's show.  Jokes that reference deeply held generalizations.  Like the episode in which she tries to sleep with someone she has diametrically different ideas from and doesn't respect so she doesn't get attached.  Or Meg's scene at Katz's.  Sometimes I'm shocked that televised rules of behavior are so far from what I've known.

How to combat narrow mindedness?  How to get to the correct, the true idea and not be deluded for the rest of one's life?  Intuition?  Maybe being deluded, but alive (which is true) isn't so bad?  The truth may be more shocking than we know.  Maybe the arrogant wrongheadedness of a college sophomore isn't so bad.  Battling for my opinions against people who know more than me.  Maybe we have to be more gentle with ourselves as the truth is unconcealed.  The people that know view our divided ideas with a kind pity.  A compassion and love and wrongheadedness.  When we get it we'll shit bricks right?

The key takeaway today from my friend is that I need to structure my writing.  My friend says find which thoughts and sentences work well together, and in what order they are at their most riveting

My tea has roses in it.  The truth may be more shocking than what we know.