A flinch is something that makes me 1. feel a little bit bad about myself 2. in a value-aligned way 3. such that I don’t want to think about it anymore.1 My current strategy for dealing with flinches is to skate away from them as fast as possible, which is an enormous improvement over my previous strategy of becoming so paralyzed by guilt over any possible suggestion that I wasn’t behaving optimally that I would have to lie down and/or cry and/or physically hurt myself. Recently, however, my skates have been snagging, and I’m feeling the need to return to a saner middle ground.
To that end, here is a list of personal flinches, which I will update over time. I am planning to do nothing with these, for now, other than sit with them. If nothing else, I think this will be helpful for reducing their associated shame. Sometimes, when I notice that I am flinching, this prompts me to take skillful action towards reducing the flinch. I will, for now, treat this as a bonus.
I saw a post on Tumblr (that I can’t find) arguing that while some people aren’t vegan because it legitimately doesn’t make sense for them, or because they don’t care very much about animals, some other people probably aren’t vegan because they care a lot about animals and the dissonance between their care for animals and their diet is too painful for them to hold in their mind, so they develop an emotional ugh field around it. I think this is the mechanism behind a lot of values-related avoidance; it feels congruent with my experience, at least.