I could not find a fitting picture so I drew this lifelike portrait of how INCREDULOUS I am when insulted
Sometimes I sit in the darkness or cold of my room for hours because it doesn’t occur to me that I have the power to turn on the light or close the window. I have an eggplant-like awarenes of my surroundings anyway but it’s not like I don’t notice, it’s just, I don’t think to consider solutions.
I distinctly recall an event in elementary school that may have cultivated this attitude. School is easy to indict because it is coercive. We were told “okay, now you are going to do some art. Oh, it has been 45 minutes, you will not do any more art until next week. Also suddenly there is a social worker here now to teach you people skills”. With no agency we flowed from one bizarre subjection to another, like plankton in an ocean current.
So those social workers? In second grade they told us that when someone says something that hurts your feelings, that is called a “zinger”. I never heard a single classmate use that word, because children are not dumb. That is too fun of a word for that serious breach of etiquette we all knew was an “insult” or at least “being mean”. We could not conceptualize feeling “zung”. I dared not speak the word because I knew that my underwear would magically pull itself over my head out of principle.
We called B.S. on the social workers for teaching us their fancy jargon and clever clichés because we intuited that actually talking to people was a pretty solid way for developing people skills. But we were forced to sit through it anyway. Lectures and talks and seminars can be awesome when you choose to attend them, but in second grade, “treat people the way you want to be treated” was (depressingly) hard to swallow when the people telling you that were coercing you into hearing their lies.
Obviously it wouldn’t be smart to just let us do whatever we wanted all the time but I could never shake the feeling of “I am just letting stuff happen to me”, which really hurt when that stuff also made no sense, like middle school assemblies.
What I think we need to start realizing as big capable but fearful adults is that there are a lot of things we simply do not have to tolerate. The rest of the world will try to convince you otherwise and indeed made it difficult for you to be practical. Daylight saving time is still customary even though barely any of us farm anymore and it is a concept so disconnected from our thoughts that we never say it right (as in “savingS” or emphasizing the “saving” instead of “daylight”).
Fear.less contributor Danielle LaPorte had a profound blog post a while back that simply said “examine what you tolerate”, and recently put one up about how business cards are obsolete. Why should we have to endure ridiculous practices like voicemail just because they’re so ingrained? Why should we have to think that we can do nothing about a cold room or an outdated business model?
I kinda railed into daylight saving time or voicemail or business cards a little here, I hope nobody feels too zung about it.
