Hard to Accept

I think I'm just going to stop listening to other people much at all.  About me, and how best to be me, mostly.  Because I'm starting to think that listening to other people tell you what's wrong with you actually makes that wrong with you.

  Popular psychology suggests that a lot of people have a lot of pent up anger and grief and stuff, and that this needs to "get out," and so one needs to seek outlets for it.  When I was in my late teens and early 20s I thought this.  I got a bow and arrows, a punching bag, a drum kit and  a lot of things like that.  When I turned 30, I took Kung Fu.  To "let anger out."  Thing is, something wasn't working about that.  In my latest book, I think I hit upon a reason why:

  My anger always gets out. It's not like I have no idea I have anger, and am in denial about it, and need to come to terms with it, and express it.  It gets out alright.  And since I was a teen, people were always telling me I was angry.  And I listened.  And my anger grew.

  Also, people were always asking me why I was unhappy, given that I had nothing to be unhappy about, having a lovely family and wonderful church and so on.  I didn't notice how often I hadn't been particularly unhappy to begin with, but the more times someone demanded I explain my lack of happiness, or conversely, made me feel like I needed medication or therapy, the more this actually fed unhappiness.  I'm not sure it didn't cause some of it to begin with.  But I listened to them too.  And the more I did, the more unhappy with myself, and my inability to be happy and not be angry, I became.

  People expressed concern or complained about my lack of joy, my lack of warmth, my lack of positivity. (which, according to Facebook and Blogger, isn't a real word.)  But I was missing something, and so were they.  Or maybe they weren't expressing it so I could understand: I wasn't lacking these things at all.  I was just blocked and awkward and unsure how to let them out.  They were in me alright.  But the anger?  I knew how to let that out.  Because anger tends to fly out pretty naturally.  But affection?  Appreciation?  Acceptance?
  But people judged me judgmental, were critical of my critical spirit, were negative about me being negative and on and on.  Oddly, this didn't help much, though they claimed to be trying to do that.

I "took lessons" from a lot of friends and a lot of 90s TV and movies about how to be funny and sarcastic, and how to shoot down people who were making me feel like a freak. Because I always felt like a freak, and the 90s was the time for sarcasm, irony, parody, satire and all of that.  But I always felt like Mr. Negative.  People certainly presented me to myself like that.  But I had as many good feelings in me as anyone.  And I really didn't know that.

  In my book I wrote about that, and about how, lacking familial and church role models for how males could express and share positive feelings, I never really learned how to do that. I wrote about how those feelings welled up inside, and then, unshared, rotted and turned sour and acidic in there.  And got out only as anger.  Leaking and dripping out of me as nastiness.  

  No amount of playing drums or punching a punching bag was ever going to let out the affection and love and optimism and hope and dream and stuff.  And that stuff dies if you don't use and share it.

  I tried certain things, to let out affection and acceptance.  Dangerous things, mostly.  I wrote poems and songs and drew pictures and painted paintings for girls I liked.  Church girls, mostly.  For most of my teens and twenties, I seldom actually shared these with the girls in question.  I rightly knew that many of the girls in my circle would have been every bit as unable to receive warm acceptance as I was unable to share it.  And when I did share it, I got awkward silence, for the most part.  Overwhelmingly so.  Which I took as rejection.  Which made me feel like a freak.
  I also tried to connect to "happy Christians" (you know?  The ones who "just didn't understand" why I didn't enjoy their church stuff, and therefore was clearly so unhappy, and who made me near suicidal with their continual doubting my ability to feel okay about myself?) I would even go to their churches.  Could.  Not.  Connect.

  The cycle circled.  The circle cycled.  Round and round.

  

The other thing I learned about people and their impression and treatment of me is that when people weren't just projecting upon and creating in me their own crap, often what they were giving back was an echo of my own crap.  Partly something from the past that I was creating and recreating.  Echoed crap.  Still crap.  Let me try to explain:

  One time I drove some students to Toronto a back for a tournament.  One guy, who I will call Steve, had had a difficult relationship with his Mom.  She was always accusing him of stuff.  That's pretty much all she did.  Accuse him.  Keep him thrown off-balance.  Never let him breathe without an accusation.  

  What this meant was, every conversation he had with anyone, he was really having it with a proxy for his mother.  He never said anything without verbally hedging it all around to try to stop the listener from accusing him of something.  It made him need to use a lot more words and talk really fast.  And the listener increasingly became aware that s/he wasn't actually accusing Steve of anything, but that he was defending himself as if s/he was about to, anyway.  Many people avoided talking to him and didn't get him at all. I was in the vehicle with him and another teacher.  So I had to listen to him defend himself against illusory accusations the whole time he simply talked to us.   I had to hear his witty, funny, but horrible self-image.

  Of course I told Steve this, eventually, on that trip.  He responded by trying to defend himself against what he heard only as an accusation.  He felt accused of taking everything as an accusation.  Needed to defend himself against what he heard as an accusation that he always defended himself when no one was attacking him.  He wasn't, in fact, able to hear me saying anything his Mom wouldn't say. 

   Another example: I worked for this guy I will name Ken.  At lunch, and in every conversation, Ken was continually recreating times he "told" someone.  "I told him!"  "I said to him..."  Lunch was about him sitting with us and doing that.  He regaled us all with incessant tales of him getting the last word.

  Now, we were a pretty quiet, laid-back bunch of guys, but Ken was recreating every strife-filled social interaction he'd had, so he could present himself as someone who got the last word, who told people.  It was like no matter what social context he found himself in, he expected someone to try to get away with something. More strange yet, Ken was looking for opportunities to catch someone trying to get away with something, so he could successfully fail to be taken advantage of.  This was his whole view of himself, and his view of others.  And it formed his view of the world.  He never lived outside of that. And people did take advantage of him. 

  Now that I have become a high school teacher, I have found myself acting, not only like Steve (given my upbringing), but like Ken also.  I regale people with stories of kids and parents and colleagues trying to get stuff past me (and trust me, that stuff happens to teachers a lot) and what I then did, or what I said, so as to not be taken advantage of. It's making me a very tedious conversationalist. All war stories.

  

And I have a dad who didn't understand much of anything I ever did.  He was always demanding to know why I was like I was, and why I wasn't what he'd expect a son to be.  Why I always did something he'd never think to do.  Why he couldn't understand anything about me.  I took this as rejection, while actually it was mostly just confusion on his part.  We are very different in certain key ways.  But what I grew up with was, every time I made my mind up to do something, I would be attacked and questioned about it.  And I would still mostly do things my own way, cowed and feeling horrible about myself, but helpless to be anyone but myself.  Stubbornly, helplessly being me.  And this happens at work now, too.

  I have had several bosses or supervisors who, when picking who to bully around a bit, or doubt, or question, or misunderstand, misquote or resent, can see "he's used to that" written all over me.  And I find I've somehow magically recreated my relationship with my dad.  Always doing what I want, feeling horrible about myself, and resenting the accusations, the lack of understanding, faith and trust in me, the lack of accepting and respecting what I routinely can and do do on a daily basis.

  My dad shows me more acceptance and respect than he used to, and I think it's making it a lot easier for me to stop recreating that situation in musty middle age.  The more my dad can look at me and decide "Oh, he's okay.  He'll do fine. He knows what he's doing," the more I can see glints of that in the eyes of those who are in authority over me. No doubt said glints might have been there long before I started to be able to see them.  I was "blind" to them until they needed to doubt or accuse me over something, and only then did I suddenly feel like I was "seeing" them.  Because I had trouble seeing anything but opposition.  Blinders?  On.

A common old-school school saying that teachers bandy about is "This is a tough bunch of kids.  Don't let them see you smile until a few months in."  (Or "...until Christmas".  There are variations.)  What a horrible thing for me to listen to! I'm not good at smiling.  When I have a smile inside my face, there's often nothing at all on the outside of it to indicate this.  There are whole facial expressions (such as surprise) that I just came into this world entirely without.  And my voice is deep and resonant, but it's very lacking in emotion, most of the time.  Soothing, but boring and not terribly warm.

  So in the first week, the kids get a face-full, gale-force dose of my resolve, my pickiness, my structure, my personal vendetta against school being a meaningless experience, of doing brainless busywork with the kids, or letting surly thugs and clueless space cadets take 99% of my time away from everyone else.
  And what they don't get, what needs to get out, is that I like kids.  (that sounds wrong.  I like hanging out with them.  I like telling them stuff. I like helping them.  I like hearing them talk and seeing what life's like for them.  They remind me on a daily basis of what it was like to be a kid.  They make me feel old and they keep me young.  And the older I get, the more funny it is if I drop words like "twerk" into discussions of Shakespeare or the Renaissance.)
  But sometimes the kids, in my first month of teaching them, might miss this.  What they might get is "He hates kids.  He's trying to make us act like adults because he hates kids."  And if they've been fighting with their parents, I'm just more of that adult trouble.  They can recreate or flat out continue arguments they were having at home, once they walk into my classroom.

  I think I'm getting better.  The more I teach kids who I taught last year, at which time they saw me loosen up over the course of the semester, the better.  Now they're back, us having learned to work and joke together, us knowing stuff about each other, and them having learned things, and matured.  Once they talk to me like a person instead of a faceless authority figure/obstacle to their getting out of the room, the more I feel like I'm getting better at how I'm dealing with the room.

  You know what helps?  Through a series of apparently disconnected events, I'm teaching all the senior kids this semester.  Usually I get grade 10s.  Not this semester.

  When I started out in the school, it was all "new kids," (kids new to me and the school alike, all mutually unknown quantities) every single semester, for years and years.  I was new, they were new, and no one knew anything about anyone.  That's wearing.  The power games never stop.  And just when you've gotten to know each other, the semester is over and you get a whole new batch of new kids to start all over on for the next three months.

  But when you've already gone around the proverbial mulberry bush ("I didn't know it was for homework"  "It's on the class website." "The printer doesn't work."  "Here, let me help you") a few times with the majority of the kids in the class?  If you get the same kids again, you just slide comfortably into what you were doing at the end of the previous year.  And the story continues, rather than reboots.
  And the end of a semester for me is always a very relaxed and happy time compared to the start of the semester.  I smile a lot more at the end of a semester. And I ask "So, what do we want to do today?  The one thing we do, or that other thing we do?  That thing we tried a couple of months back?"  And I can relax so much of the structure and order I needed to start them on, because we know each other now, and it's just going to work.  Almost no one's going to be a jerk, not now that we know each other.  And we all know each other, so we know we're people and we have to treat each other like people, not like annoyances or problems.  The room simply isn't going accept one person acting like a jerk anymore. Day 1 is Me Vs. Them.  The game is won by how soon it becomes The Room Vs. The One Kid Trying To Wreck Things.

  So this year, I've got a lot of familiar faces.  And I'm feeling the benefits of being able, awkwardly, tentatively, eventually, to put some warmth and affection and acceptance out there right off, and to get it right back, from most of the faces in the room.

I used to argue on the forums on the Internet a lot.  On each one I poured everything into it for a year or two, and then eventually left, sick of it, feeling fairly cut up.  Because what I did on them was recreate my church experiences.  Arguing mostly with the stuffier people who didn't want me to be me or act like myself.  I'm sure it's entertaining for the audience looking on, but it's always taken a toll on me, and hasn't necessarily been good.
  But I've armed myself to the teeth against these straw men who for me represent the unheeding, heartless men who were "church" to me, growing up.  I've told them to fuck off, I've told them they sound like the whiniest of the bitchiest of the fifteen year old girls I teach, and I have heard white-haired old men have nothing better to offer in return than "No, YOU sound like... that."  (And I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.)  It's been fun.  Cathartic.  I don't know that's it's been altogether good, though, to carry on for too long with.  I don't know how much it's allowed me to grow.

  We wrestle not against flesh and blood.  Sometimes we're wrestling with our own pasts and our own psyches, trying to deal with it all.  Those not-quite-dead-yet men who silenced the voices of my dad, me, and all my friends, who demanded I sacrifice my heart, my soul, my spirit, my thoughts, my life, to them and their dubious expectations, cannot be beaten.  Because the spirits they embody live on after them.  Be quiet.  I'm right. You're different.  That's not okay.  What kind of Christian are you?  How can you say, feel or think that? Touch not, taste not, handle not.  And on the forums of the Internet, they rise again and again like an unceasing, everlasting tide of zombies.  Head shot.  Head shot.  Head shot.  Satisfying. And yet eventually you've gotten bit a lot. And you start to feel sick.  And you're running out of bullets.  And it's not fun anymore.  In fact, it's exhausting.  So I left the most recent one.  I don't think anyone noticed anyway.

What do I need?  To give and get acceptance.  Connection. What I do not need is to put out honest feelings somewhere almost no one else (certainly no one else male) is sharing feelings unless they sound pious, and then perhaps either have my feelings grudgingly "approved", translated carefully into thoughts or "positions,"  subject to some doctrinal correction and redefining of terms, or else to have them rejected as unChristian, with demands about "Well, how do you get around Hez 4:3, then?"  When I feel something, it's not good or bad, Christian or unChristian, true or false.  It's a fact.  I feel what I feel.  I may not act upon it, and my thoughts may not go along with whatever it is, but if I feel it, I have as much control over the fact that I feel it as a meteorologist has over the clouds, and less than the mother of a two-year-old has over what her child is feeling.  So, when I feel something, I don't need to get it "approved." I don't need to run it past a bunch of Christians to see if it's okay or not that I definitely feel that.  So why do I feel like I need to do that?  I don't think I need to do that.  So I'm not going to do that anymore.
  I do not need to have my precise use of the English language continually quibbled over, when I'm just trying to talk, trying to say what I have to say, any way I can, even though sometimes I'm saying things that are almost impossible for me to put into words.  When I'm finding I actually seem to need a lot of words to get to the bottom of a thing.

  Increasingly, I am tired of talking to men.  Tired of the one-up-manship, the "I told him!" stories,  the "so sad that you/they don't know the scripture on this," the jockeying for who is oh-so-helpfully mentoring or helping whom, who has "special knowledge" or the only correct interpretation, the "As a second year theology student with a lovely wife, a dog, a minivan and a wonderful church ministry" stuff, and all of that.  Tired of people who know how to repeatedly ask "Why?" but never "Why not?"  Of people who panic if discussions head toward any suggestion that Christians are free (or can get that way), or could be happy, instead of just obediently "rejoicing" joylessly, (however one does that, exactly).
  I have had it with trying to connect and instead finding people who all desperately need to be righter than each other. Than people who don't go to their church.  Than younger people.  Than everyone.  I am particularly sick of being one of those people myself.  I am sick of repeatedly backsliding, "going native" and getting sucked into acting, thinking and feeling just the same way. Answering the most emotionally stunted folk according to their emotionally stuntedness, being emotionally stunted myself.  Dumping gasoline on the fires of obsessive people, by being every bit as obsessive as they.  Face answering to face.  Being a fool and answering Grinch-hearted, obsessive, mercurial fools according to their folly.
  I want to be challenged. I want to talk to people so emotionally healthy that I'll look like a freak if I don't grow up. I don't need a place where we're all equally emotionally retarded (I use that word literally).  Not unless we're connecting to get better.  Definitely not if we're feeding our stuntedness with "being right" or "I told him!" when what we really need is to get and give acceptance.

  When I have had good Christian talks, over the last few years, it has almost always been with women.  And not all of them were even Christian women.  Women seem to naturally "get" that connecting, accepting, valuing, not failing to miss the significance of things, keeping lines of communication open, having each other's backs, that all of this is a large part of what real Christianity is about.
  When I tell a woman that I think or feel something, she generally is able to accept it and respond to it, even argue with me about it, and all without it feeling like I'm not "supposed" to think or feel that way, nor like they need to "approve" it for me.  Women, at the peak of their game, are the best at acceptance and connection.  With men, usually it's, in some form or other, a firehose of "Listen to me!" to the face.  "As a first-year theology student and member of the local militia, I know what I'm talking about!  And so I told him!  So sad that so many today aren't clear on what I, and possibly you (?) are clear on!"
  And I'm no better than any other phallically equipped human.  And when I talk to a man, usually that's where the conversation fairly quickly goes.  Whose doctrine is bigger, more powerful, more upright.  Whose logic and bible knowledge thrusts more deeply and more correctly.  But when I talk to a woman, I act less like that. I am better.  It feels great when a woman unthinkingly accepts who you are and what you're doing, and you can give that right back.

I naturally like talking to people with problems, though.  Then I get to be the mentor. That makes me think, male-wise, that I'm "on top" of the situation.  That I'm helping.  That I'm useful.  That I have a role and am being accepted.  Of course it's a way of feeling accepted.  It's a buzz.  It's what being a doctor, teacher, nurse or many other professions provide, on a good day.
  And if I don't get to do that, often I am miserable, and certainly vulnerable to people deciding to mentor me.  To give me advice.  "Change the name of your blog."  "Change your language.  Don't ever use swear words."  "Change your hair and clothes."  "Change your attitude."  "Change your circle of friends."  "Change your Facebook profile picture."  Change. Change.  Change.  (sometimes we need the opposite. Sometimes we need to be accepted.  Right here. Right now.  By someone who doesn't need us to change a thing first before that acceptance is grudgingly, conditionally granted, subject to withdrawal at any time.)

  So I don't need the continual prodding to change anything and everything that doesn't suit people.  I have had a lifetime of it.  I don't need a personal army of pastors, counsellors, life coaches, therapists, agents and consultants helping me get "acceptable" so I can, maybe, get accepted by the largest number of people.  This isn't how Jesus or Paul or Jeremiah lived.  I'm not Justin Bieber. I also need to outgrow going rogue, like Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan, and doing whatever it takes to be unacceptable, but "edgy." To get noticed and accepted as the poster child for "unacceptable."
  I never do what anyone says anyway.  I have listened more, to more people, sought out more people for advice, then listened some more, pondered their points, remembered every single word, repeated what was said to others, and never quite did a damn thing they said anyway, than probably anyone on Earth.  I'm annoying like that.

  Because I'm not looking for a mentor, or even someone who needs one.  I'm looking to accept and to be accepted.  That's all.  I'm not looking to meet who people think they want to be, to eat a sandwich with what people hate about themselves, to chat with who people think they should be, to have a beer with who people plan to be, or hope to be.  I'm looking to accept and be accepted by actual, real people.  Being their real selves.  Now.  In realtime. With faces and voices in the same room as me, if possible.

  Can you accept that?  If not, that's too bad.  Because it's what's on offer.