It's not easy being a rebel.
Feb. 10th, 2008 12:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qcontinuumOOC: Reposted from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
theatrical_muse from 2/9/2006, 37 of 50.
The advantage to only getting around to these when the mood strikes me is that then I can go all thematic. Certainly, given the repetition of questions about trust, betrayal, and so on, sometimes one needs to go for a theme or else risk having to repeat oneself, and I do so hate to repeat myself.
When in your life did you know you were not alone?
At the moment of my creation.
The Q are never alone. We can't be, we're part of an overmind. Our selves, everything that we are, are inextricably linked to one another... whether we like it or not. Frequently, I come down on the side of "like it not", but then, I didn't have much fun either of the two times I have been separated from the Continuum.
What is your greatest strength?
I exist within an overmind. I am, like all of my people, dependent on the existence of the rest of the Q the way you mortals depend on air to breathe. But, while all of us struggle to maintain a certain degree of independence from the other Q, I've made an art form of it. When entropy takes us, we don't die... we conform. We lose our selves, our independence, our "me-ness" in the ocean of "we" we swim in. And we are five billion years old (give or take; some are a bit older than that.) There's been a lot of time for entropy to work on us. Very few of the Q have nearly so strong an identity as they had when we were born.
I, however, am still considered one of the most independent Q in the Continuum. I have always fought entropy by standing for change. Maybe change for change's sake, maybe change because it's just boring not to change, maybe my reasons weren't always entirely stellar, but when we change, when we grow (or shrink for that matter), we fight entropy's hold on us. We fight the conformity that has slowly been consuming us. I've done some genuinely stupid things in my time, and some things that had no good reason, and maybe even a few things one could call downright evil, and I can't say my motives were always pure. But I have always (almost always) been willing to stand up to the Continuum. I've always been willing to say that not only does the Emperor have no clothes, but the rest of us are butt naked, too. I've always been willing to demand that we break from tradition, that we do things that are different just because they're different, that we take risks and occasionally *do* things that are stupid because it's better to be stupid than dead, and utter conformity is our version of death.
There have been enormous forces arrayed against me, in my lifetime. People who are being sucked down the black hole of conformity and sameness don't like to hear a message of change, advocacy of difference. Also, they think they know what's right and appropriate, which makes my behavior terribly gauche, don'cha know. They've always pressured me to be a good little Q, but I'm stubborn enough that it almost never worked. And that is my strength (and, to be fair, probably one of my larger weaknesses as well); I don't play well with others, I don't listen, I don't do what other people tell me to do. I oppose authority because it's there. And that has enabled me to remain a maverick for five billion years, and hopefully for many aeons more.
Talk about a time you overcame serious self-doubt.
As one might imagine, a society that has come to be consumed by stultifying sameness and the tyranny of the status quo would rather not hear from a rebel very often. Many times, the Continuum tried to contain me, but they tried the tactics that worked on everyone else -- shame, humiliation, chastisement. These don't work on me so well. Oh, I'm as vulnerable as any other Q to mockery, but I'm also better at it than most of them, so few of them want to go mano a mano against me. And chastisement only works if you actually feel guilt, which I don't, usually.
And then I went too far, and they finally had an excuse. They threw me out of the Continuum and took away my powers. At that they were going easy on me; an old friend of mine sold me out, advocating the removal of my powers, because he was trying to prevent the rest of them from deciding to outright kill me. They only had to exile me for a single day; the combined stresses of loneliness, being hated by everyone around me, feeling crippled and helpless, and then the fact that there were entities trying to kill me, left me terrified. When they took me back, I was overjoyed and relieved, but I never stopped being afraid that they might do it again. So for a while -- six years, which should be nothing to the existence of an immortal, but it seemed longer than some millennia I've lived through -- they had me broken. I conformed, I was a good little Q, I did evrything they told me to, including things I personally found morally reprehensible.
And it wasn't all fear. a lot of it was self-doubt. You simply can't be part of an overmind without absorbing some of their opinions; I couldn't fully bring myself to believe that I was right and every other omniscient, omnipotent immortal with access to the same knowledge I had was wrong. It was just easier to take the blame. To believe that I'd lost my powers because I was a bad Q, and thus my judgement and my moral sense were suspect, and I should defer to the will and the judgement of the others. Frankly, it was too painful to admit to myself how much of a coward I was being; it was easier to believe that I was just wrong, that I was slavishly obeying them because I'd had my eyes opened and I realized they were right, than to recognize that I was doing things I considered morally wrong because I was just plain scared.
Then the Continuum sent me to enforce the sentence of a dissident philosopher who we'd stuck in an incredibly, soul-destroyingly boring prison because he was trying to kill himself. And honestly? No, I didn't think he should kill himself. I didn't agree with his ideological reasons for trying to do it, and in a lot of ways I thought he was doing harm to the cause he and I shared, the belief that the Continuum was stagnating and it should change. So it wasn't hard to convince myself I was doing the right thing. But I wasn't. I was betraying my ideals, and he knew it, and he pointed it out to me. When the ruling went against the Continuum, I let it stand, even though it was just a mortal making the judgement and I could very easily have pulled in the rest of the Continuum on the grounds that a mortal wasn't a particularly worthy judge and we should just overrule her. Because he stood up for his beliefs. He had endured three hundred years of boredom and loneliness -- I was nearly insane after only 40 -- and he stood up to the Continuum despite it, whereas I caved after less than a day of losing my powers. I was ashamed of how weak I'd been, of how I'd let the Continuum push me around, and how I'd let my own fear take over my judgement. I let the ruling that he had the right to die stand, I made him mortal, and when he decided to try to kill himself with a steak knife, I stepped in and gave him a poison to take so he could die with dignity.
The rest of the Continuum was not happy. But I did the right thing. I followed *my* moral beliefs, not the ones they were trying to impose on me. And I have vowed that I will never again let fear and self-doubt control what I do, or make me conform blindly to what they want me to be.
theatrical_muse from 2/9/2006, 37 of 50.The advantage to only getting around to these when the mood strikes me is that then I can go all thematic. Certainly, given the repetition of questions about trust, betrayal, and so on, sometimes one needs to go for a theme or else risk having to repeat oneself, and I do so hate to repeat myself.
When in your life did you know you were not alone?
At the moment of my creation.
The Q are never alone. We can't be, we're part of an overmind. Our selves, everything that we are, are inextricably linked to one another... whether we like it or not. Frequently, I come down on the side of "like it not", but then, I didn't have much fun either of the two times I have been separated from the Continuum.
What is your greatest strength?
I exist within an overmind. I am, like all of my people, dependent on the existence of the rest of the Q the way you mortals depend on air to breathe. But, while all of us struggle to maintain a certain degree of independence from the other Q, I've made an art form of it. When entropy takes us, we don't die... we conform. We lose our selves, our independence, our "me-ness" in the ocean of "we" we swim in. And we are five billion years old (give or take; some are a bit older than that.) There's been a lot of time for entropy to work on us. Very few of the Q have nearly so strong an identity as they had when we were born.
I, however, am still considered one of the most independent Q in the Continuum. I have always fought entropy by standing for change. Maybe change for change's sake, maybe change because it's just boring not to change, maybe my reasons weren't always entirely stellar, but when we change, when we grow (or shrink for that matter), we fight entropy's hold on us. We fight the conformity that has slowly been consuming us. I've done some genuinely stupid things in my time, and some things that had no good reason, and maybe even a few things one could call downright evil, and I can't say my motives were always pure. But I have always (almost always) been willing to stand up to the Continuum. I've always been willing to say that not only does the Emperor have no clothes, but the rest of us are butt naked, too. I've always been willing to demand that we break from tradition, that we do things that are different just because they're different, that we take risks and occasionally *do* things that are stupid because it's better to be stupid than dead, and utter conformity is our version of death.
There have been enormous forces arrayed against me, in my lifetime. People who are being sucked down the black hole of conformity and sameness don't like to hear a message of change, advocacy of difference. Also, they think they know what's right and appropriate, which makes my behavior terribly gauche, don'cha know. They've always pressured me to be a good little Q, but I'm stubborn enough that it almost never worked. And that is my strength (and, to be fair, probably one of my larger weaknesses as well); I don't play well with others, I don't listen, I don't do what other people tell me to do. I oppose authority because it's there. And that has enabled me to remain a maverick for five billion years, and hopefully for many aeons more.
Talk about a time you overcame serious self-doubt.
As one might imagine, a society that has come to be consumed by stultifying sameness and the tyranny of the status quo would rather not hear from a rebel very often. Many times, the Continuum tried to contain me, but they tried the tactics that worked on everyone else -- shame, humiliation, chastisement. These don't work on me so well. Oh, I'm as vulnerable as any other Q to mockery, but I'm also better at it than most of them, so few of them want to go mano a mano against me. And chastisement only works if you actually feel guilt, which I don't, usually.
And then I went too far, and they finally had an excuse. They threw me out of the Continuum and took away my powers. At that they were going easy on me; an old friend of mine sold me out, advocating the removal of my powers, because he was trying to prevent the rest of them from deciding to outright kill me. They only had to exile me for a single day; the combined stresses of loneliness, being hated by everyone around me, feeling crippled and helpless, and then the fact that there were entities trying to kill me, left me terrified. When they took me back, I was overjoyed and relieved, but I never stopped being afraid that they might do it again. So for a while -- six years, which should be nothing to the existence of an immortal, but it seemed longer than some millennia I've lived through -- they had me broken. I conformed, I was a good little Q, I did evrything they told me to, including things I personally found morally reprehensible.
And it wasn't all fear. a lot of it was self-doubt. You simply can't be part of an overmind without absorbing some of their opinions; I couldn't fully bring myself to believe that I was right and every other omniscient, omnipotent immortal with access to the same knowledge I had was wrong. It was just easier to take the blame. To believe that I'd lost my powers because I was a bad Q, and thus my judgement and my moral sense were suspect, and I should defer to the will and the judgement of the others. Frankly, it was too painful to admit to myself how much of a coward I was being; it was easier to believe that I was just wrong, that I was slavishly obeying them because I'd had my eyes opened and I realized they were right, than to recognize that I was doing things I considered morally wrong because I was just plain scared.
Then the Continuum sent me to enforce the sentence of a dissident philosopher who we'd stuck in an incredibly, soul-destroyingly boring prison because he was trying to kill himself. And honestly? No, I didn't think he should kill himself. I didn't agree with his ideological reasons for trying to do it, and in a lot of ways I thought he was doing harm to the cause he and I shared, the belief that the Continuum was stagnating and it should change. So it wasn't hard to convince myself I was doing the right thing. But I wasn't. I was betraying my ideals, and he knew it, and he pointed it out to me. When the ruling went against the Continuum, I let it stand, even though it was just a mortal making the judgement and I could very easily have pulled in the rest of the Continuum on the grounds that a mortal wasn't a particularly worthy judge and we should just overrule her. Because he stood up for his beliefs. He had endured three hundred years of boredom and loneliness -- I was nearly insane after only 40 -- and he stood up to the Continuum despite it, whereas I caved after less than a day of losing my powers. I was ashamed of how weak I'd been, of how I'd let the Continuum push me around, and how I'd let my own fear take over my judgement. I let the ruling that he had the right to die stand, I made him mortal, and when he decided to try to kill himself with a steak knife, I stepped in and gave him a poison to take so he could die with dignity.
The rest of the Continuum was not happy. But I did the right thing. I followed *my* moral beliefs, not the ones they were trying to impose on me. And I have vowed that I will never again let fear and self-doubt control what I do, or make me conform blindly to what they want me to be.
