A Letter To An Unpleasant Man

Dear Sir,

I dislike you.

How difficult that is to say aloud!  Our culture doesn’t permit this sort of communication.  We’re supposed to be polite and kind, at least in our words.  To say this type of thing, we’re forced to rely on other methods of communication.  You, however, seem to be oblivious to those methods.  When you are standing too close to me, you don’t notice when I step back, when my body angles away from you as if longing to spring into the air.  You don’t see the exasperation and discomfort in my expression while you’re laughing at your own joke, the same one you’ve been telling all day (and all yesterday, too).   You don’t hear the hesitations before I speak, and you don’t understand what my pauses mean.  My carefully worded answers to your questions are works of art, so much energy and thought goes into every word and inflection as I try to express my true thoughts in a non-antagonistic way.  What a waste!  I might as well be talking through a gag.

Let me make it clear that your liking for me does not change my dislike of you.  In fact, it makes matters worse.  I see the way you treat my friends, have been standing next to them as you shout and roar for no reason at all.  That you later apologize to me, claiming your anger was not directed at me, does not make it better.  It was there, that senseless cruelty that demands the lowering of others, and I saw it, felt it on my skin.  I know it is in you, and your honey-sweetness to me sticks in my throat.  I would rather you shouted at me, too, so I might be justified in shouting back.

I recognize that your need for control is a desperate response to the lack of it.  Perhaps you do not like the way your life has gone, and for that I am sorry, but it does not give you the right to tell everyone that their way is wrong.  Allow me to inform you that I was here long before you arrived, and I was good at this before you came to tell me how I have been mistaken.  I hate especially that your logic makes sense when you first spill it at me, in that kindly, reasonable tone that makes my skin crawl, but it is a carefully constructed kind of sense that more often than not comes crashing down at a single question.  I have placed those questions before you once or twice, punching a hole in your perfect plans, and I could see so clearly the closed expression on your face, the irrefutable denial in your eyes as you pleasantly demanded that I do it your way nevertheless.  “Humor me,” you say.  Well, sir, my humor has long since expired.

I would like you to know that you have changed a warm, open environment into a place that makes my stomach sink whenever I arrive.  You have used your power to place yourself on a pedestal, but let me warn you that you will not stay over my head long.  I stop short at implying that you will be dragged down—God knows that many men worse than you have remained all their lives in a place they do not deserve.  No, what I am telling you is that your power over me is far more limited than you know.  I am more than you see in me, oh so very much more, and fear will not hold me in your shadow.  I will walk out into that cold world rather than become as small as you think I am or want me to be.  Do not think of my discretion as weakness.  You, sir, will be very much surprised.

Sincerely,

A woman whose power was not given to her by someone else

Many Steps To Go

“The only courage you ever need is the courage to live the life you want.” Oprah

I saw this quote on my friend’s coffee cup at work last night.  It took me a moment to figure it out, possibly because I was about as sleep-deprived and spacey as it is possible to be and still be functioning.  But I think a larger portion of my confusion comes out of the fact that, as good as the quote sounds, its logic is a bit flawed.

The implication here is that all you need to do is make a leap of faith to get the life you want.  Take risks, chase your dreams, the usual motivation we hear from graduation speakers.  The implication is that if you have the courage to defy expectations, to ignore “common sense” and turn down that job selling insurance, you’ll be able to build a life doing exactly what you want.  It’s a pretty picture, isn’t it?  A very American ideal—take charge, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, find the right door and burst right through.

Image from http://therefinedimage.wordpress.com/

When we are young, we believe that we’ll step off the college campus and right into a four-bedroom house, a six-figure job, and a happy marriage.  In college, we dream of world travel, of art and culture and fine dining.  The reality is much more complicated than that, as most realities are.  What we don’t realize until we are out in the world is that those lives we imagine for ourselves have to built from the bottom up.  To buy a house or even rent an apartment, you need money, and that takes years of carefully stockpiling your wrinkled singles and diving for every penny you see.  To get that amazing job, you need to make connections with the right people (or even the wrong people), send out dozens of resumes that often disappear into the ether, and tear your hair out in frustration.  And when it comes to relationships, you may find yourself in a string of losers (of either sex), be trapped in an interminable pairing with someone who isn’t right, or even find yourself standing alone, wondering if there’s even one person in a hundred miles who is not repulsive or taken.  The old adage doesn’t say that a journey of a thousand miles can be accomplished with a single step.  There are many, many more steps that have to be taken before we reach our destination—assuming that you even know where you’re going, which is not true at all for most of my generation.  I know how tempting it is to take an easier, if less inspiring path.

True courage for me, then, is in those who just keep walking.  Those who don’t let the long hours and sleepless nights wear them down.  Those who take rejections and hang them on their walls to motivate the next try.  Those who show up at their dead-end job every day and do their best at it.  Those starving artists who neatly stack their pennies so they won’t actually starve.  Those who come home at three in the morning, rub their eyes, and sacrifice sleep to the dream.  Those who don’t let this cold, crowded world drag them down into the rut of doing work they hate to make more money to be able to continue doing work they hate.  It’s true courage to live on that line, compromising common sense and foolish hope, trusting that yes, you will have enough shifts to make rent and enough free time to make you happy.  And honestly, though it may be terrifying sometimes, I can’t see any other way, because for me, the cost of accepting the easier path is far too high.

The Shape of Our Containers

"Every configuration of people is an entirely new universe unto itself."  Kristin Cashore, from her book Bitterblue

The identity is a complicated thing.  I am a different person depending on my surroundings and my circumstances.  With my family, who have known me the longest, I am a goofy and young, rather naïve, and a bit clumsy.  Perhaps more than a bit.  With my friends, I laugh a lot, but I also am a great deal quieter, smiling and listening more than I speak.  At work I am professional, rather more sarcastic than elsewhere, with long fuses of patience that cause large explosions when they burn out.  And at home I am silent, thoughtful, and I often speak to myself. 

It is truly impossible to fully understand a person.  The intricacies of who we are and what has shaped us are so complex that we have trouble keeping track of ourselves, much less others.  With each person we meet, we become a little different, responding to their responses to our actions and words.  We build layer upon layer of awareness and behavior, then tear those layers down when a new person comes into view.

This is the adaptability that has placed us at the top of the evolutionary ladder.  In the physical world, humans had all the best tools to survive, and now in this world of hearts and minds we have done the same.  We have made ourselves malleable, liquid personalities capable of surviving any challenge of hatred or fear or inquiry that others may present to us.  And in so doing, we create our own struggles, because these constant changes make it all that more difficult to understand ourselves, to know what that odd little word “I” really means.