Words are terribly significant and phrases are perhaps more so. Context is probably all important in interpreting them however. To be asked what I am ‘working at’ feels a case in point. How, for instance, does the phrase contrast with a phrase using a different preposition, as in this question, such as: ‘What are you currently working on’. The latter seems easier to answer for it immediately designates a product and an answer in that spirit, such as: ‘I am working on a play, a model boat, a nuclear reactor or a jigsaw.
But to ‘work at’, as even more is the case in the phrase ‘working towards’, is often a phrase we use to designate something we have not achieved or a kinder way of not having achieved, or failed in the most brutal language, an acceptable standard of achievement. The engineers of SATs in the UK school system (for instance) classify a mark of 80 as the cusp of a pupil having satisfied an acceptable standard, on the one hand, or being in a state of ‘working towards’ that standard on the other.
However, differences in culture in the use of prepositions aside, and the North East of England where I live has a very fluid attitude to the use of ‘at’, to ‘work towards’ or ‘work at’ usually, in my mind at least, designates working to achieve a state of satisfaction in a matter of judgement by self and others. Examples are ones subjected by the sentence with optional endings follows: ‘I am working at my weight / self-esteem / confidence / writing skills’. How the phrase is normatively used in the USA, where this question on what I am ‘working on’ originates, I do not know.
But if I am ‘working at’ a state of being now it is self-acceptance. And that is worth ‘working at’, I think, for the idea of failing in that qualitative state is unbearable I find. Prompted by a feeling of rejection that is probably over-sensitively geared, it is easy, for a time, to slip into a state of self-negation that makes work, and even play, seem a difficult ask. Even so, I think I often ‘work at’ an attempt to role-play the efficacy in life and relationships I like to think I sincerely feel when things are better.
That interim state between two poles of an unreal binary, between work and play, is an interesting one: if it were not that it can be also deeply distressing. For instance, when you love openly, one can, under pressure of feeling that something like your heart has gone AWOL as it were, look for affection in others as a compensation for what once made you feel its active beat, even an over-compensation for that state. I think that easily turns a genuine sensitivity to others’ situation into a demand for oneself as a substitute for what one has recently lost. It is the source of becoming one of those ‘monsters of demanded affection ‘ that plagues novels of mismatching in the nineteenth century, usually focusing around women and satirised By Harriet Smith in Jane Austen’s Emma.
I am saying I think that ‘working at’ is too prone to get displaced by ‘playing at’ when applied to finding sources of a state of satisfaction whilst undergoing any kind of stressor. We play at something by taking on an enacted role rather than understanding where we truly are in our life. The old binary of work and play is inadequate. For instance symbolic interactionism as a mode of understanding child development, in Mead and Dewey, insists that children play to learn the limits of a role at which they might later work, be it as parent or nurse, and to increase their belief in their ability to ‘be’ in identity with that role. There is then a lot of deceit, if you want to call it that, in becoming a serious worker at first as anyone starting a new job knows.
But ‘playing at ‘ learning to love again as an adult can have serious consequences.You can hurt others. If you work at it, your approach is different. It assesses your current resources and re-evaluates the ones you always had, but maybe neglected to value as you should, and assesses ones made available to you, by social support for instance. It balances these against an achievable goal, such as a balanced view of your life opportunities and sources of doing and being good, and receiving good in return. It distinguishes role play from work that has measures for its progress and it is wary of self-deceit and intentional and unintentional deceit of others.
With this kind of reformulation I satisfy myself that some months after that rejection, I know I am on the other side of something, have stopped to replace the source of rejection and am feeling the wash of feeling love for many others again, even, in dreams it seems, the memory of the one who prompted those feelings of having been rejected by love itself.
Self-acceptance after all has to be acceptance too of diversity and even inadequacy with how other people deal with things. That is, perhaps, because acceptance of what feels like failure in others is indivisible from self-acceptance of that in yourself too. It is also the beginning of truly ‘working at’ and not ‘playing at’ how to address shortcomings in the systems which satisfy needs and wants sustainably. That version of the question helps me to think in that useful way, useful to me anyway.
And, to the return to the question asked, I cannot say I am ‘working on’ self-acceptance because that would assume it was an entity that I know of and can easily recognise a blueprint for the making thereof. I can’t, so I am ‘working at’ self-acceptance. And that project even explains my failures on the way and possibly ones to come – but I am ‘working at’ it. Lol.
All my love
Steve
Appendix
For the example of SATS in the UK refer to : https://www.sats-papers.co.uk/expected-standard/#:~:text=the%20expected%20standard.-,Highest%20scaled%20score%20and%20lowest%20scaled%20score,working%20towards’%20the%20expected%20standard.
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