Why are we so hard on ourselves (and others) – Part II?

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For someone with no formal background in human behaviour, barring one lonely psychology course in third year University, I probably spend too much time watching and thinking about how people behave.

I’m not really a “pink person”, in fact I generally don’t put anything pastel on, but I do have one deep rich pink top that I can’t seem to throw away. No matter how many times it’s been tossed in the “give away” pile, it always seems to migrate back to a hanger in the closet. So on anti-bullying day, I wore my one and only pink top.

Those two sentences just don’t seem to have any relationship, do they?

Welcome to my mind. It bounces randomly sometimes. And this is just a ramble I started a couple of weeks ago and came back to, to ramble some more.

I read an interesting article on the discontent that accompanies happiness spurred me to thinking about the masks we wear. We strive for happiness, but we never manage to achieve it if that’s the end goal. The goal of happiness has spurred an entire new fad in the world of its seekers. Suddenly we are inundated with self-help books, pseudopsychologists (a.k.a. life-coaches), seminars, and on and on. Happiness isn’t a goal, it’s a journey. Happiness of about seeing where you’ve been, seeing who is in your life, seeing the wonder around us. It’s about slowing down and enjoying the here and now. It’s about gratitude. There are a number of recent studies that indicate that gratitude lies at the centre of the happiness riddle.

It was pretty awesome to see how many pink shirts were around in downtown Vancouver on Anti-bullying day those weeks back. This thing has gained momentum and it’s really great. We tend to focus on bullying and behaviour in our youth, but adults can be pretty badly behaved too. Probably far more so than kids. Because adults find ways to justify their behaviour to themselves and others. They blame it on their parents. They blame it on alcohol. They blame it on their parents alcoholism. They blame it on society. They blame it on the government. They blame it on food additives. They blame it on health isues. Whatever, but they place blame for behaviour everywhere but on what they see in the mirror.

A badly behaved person definitely needs to have a personality adjustment. But what about those who are perfectly fine, but unhappy with what they are, and therefore try to metamorphose into something else?

I’ve often wondered why we can’t just be ourselves and be happy with that person?

Maybe it’s because so many people don’t really know who they are. Or they do know, but they want to be something that someone else is. Maybe they existed on the sidelines as a kid, always feeling like they were looking into groups but never feeling a part of them. Maybe they were the nerd in the class, always wanting to be one of the cool kids. Maybe growing up they had a rich friend who received all the things they desired. Childhood jealousies can spill strangely into adulthood, leaving some people still desperately seeking acceptance or consensus. Or, we can grow up and let go of remnants of childish behaviours, envies, wants. We can focus on enjoying today. We can appreciate friends. We can appreciate loved ones. And we can enjoy laughter and fun.

But it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes there are those who need so badly to be a part of soemthing that they can control. Maybe it’s an attempt to make up for something in the past. I don’t know. Consensus seekers can turn into bullies in the workplace. When things aren’t progressing exactly how they want them to, they seek to manipulate the dynamics of the group to their way of thinking. If that doesn’t work, I’m amazed how quickly they can turn to childish tactics of name calling and undermining the ideas of others. I’ve watched in fascination as someone can profess to be supportive of the ideas of others, while in reality their actions and words serve only to belittle – perhaps seeking to gain status in the eyes of the group by appearing more knowledgable. In reality they end up looking churlish and petty. And sometimes, if you look carefully, what’s really going on is an underlying lack of self confidence that needs ego feeding.

Then there are the “big talkers”. The vocabulary addicts. I work with a woman who is incredibly intelligent. I often have to interpret her emails and discussions for others since I (usually) understand what she is saying, but she often speaks and writes well above the people she is trying to communicate with. It’s not intentional (I don’t think), it’s just a case of her existing in several different worlds and not being hugely proficient at communicating in lay-terms. She can, if she thinks about it, but she just often doesn’t because she gets caught up in trying to provide too much information at once. So when she writes something and it’s high level, it doesn’t surprise me or irritate me, because she speaks and thinks in those same words. It’s who she is. She isn’t trying to be anything else, at least I don’t think so.

On the flip side, another person I interact with does’nt speak with a largely technical vocabulary as he doesn’t have the same level of education or technical experience as the previous individual does. And that’s just fine, it’s who he is and he brings other things to the table. But what always surprises (read irritates) me is that he will generate emails that sound like someone else wrote them. They will be full of words that don’t generally come out of his mouth, and which come off sounding pompous and overbearing. They are often inappropriate given the audience they often go to, and aren’t usually well received, so I don’t know why he persists. Sll it serves is to build contempt from others.

Those two got me thinking about my own writing. I can write at either end of the spectrum, largely owing to my varied background (from hairdresser to PhD in science – actually I was doing both of those simultaneously at one point). I can take technical information and make it accessible to those without the background in the topic. I can write high level, technical papers. And I can write flowery pompous letters, but those are usually reserved for when someone has made me angry. And that’s probably not a good thing, because it means I have stooped to arrogance, and I usually eventually regret it when I do that.

Or, maybe it means that I am generally open but that when attacked I slam up the wall of formality and the arrogant academic sneaks out. Sometimes I regret it, but sometimes I am more regretful that I wasn’t more formal at the outset, thereby being ultimately responsible for my own irritation.

The fellow above once sent a message around to a group of people and used my title (Dr.) in the message. But he was using it to his advantage to further his argument by trying to use the weight of my title to back him up. When I asked him to never do it again, and indicated that it was my title, and I generally do not use it, and that no one else has the right to use it in such a manner without my consent, his response was …. interesting … “But it’s great for the intimidation factor!”

Exactly why I tend to NOT use it.

It took a great deal of effort to break down walls and have people see me for me, not for some fancy title that should be mostly meaningless except in a certain conext. All those letters mean is that I spent too much time in school enjoying the luxury of learning and exploring the curiosities of a very narrow band of biology. It’s not something I regret, but it’s also not something I flaunt. It doesn’t make me better than anyone else, it was just a very underpaid job, with a finite term, and that paid me with letters at the end. It was a period of my life that gave me the opportunity to explore, to question, and to learn to think about the world in a less restricted manner.

And amazingly, both times I received a graduate degree, my initial response was “I didn’t deserve this, I fooled them!” Feeling like a fraud, Impostor Syndrome. It’s real and documented. I first came across it in a Globe and Mail article about the time I was completing my PhD.  and it made me stop and think. Interestingly, it’s found to occur more in women in academia than it is found in men. In a nutshell, the more competent you become at something, the less cofnident you feel at it. Wow, do I know that feeling. I used to wonder why I tended to quit things once I’d started to excel. Somewhere along the line I decided that as I became better and better at something, I also become more afraid of what would happen when I eventually failed and displayed myself for the fraud that I really was. Apparently the feeling wasn’t limited to my brain and the issue keeps cropping up – another article just popped across my news feeds this morning – Faking It: Women, Academia, and Impostor Syndrome.

Why are we so worried about what others think of us?

Why is our society becoming more and more individually self-conscious?

Why do we think we have to measure up to some impossible ideal?

Rather than gain credibility, acceptance, and respect through our actions and the way we treat others, why do so many think letters and fancy titles and pieces of elegant paper decorated with calligraphy and signatures somehow make us a better person. Why do so many think that those things should garner respect and admiration? Why the heck are people so fascinated with titles? Why do we all need a label?

I know a person who reinvents every ten years or so. I don’t understand it, but obviously this individual hasn’t figured out that happiness doesn’t come from what you are, or from titles (loves those). Every so often she pulls a bit of a vanishing act, seemingly sheds the skin of her life, and most of the people that were part of it. She reads some weird and apparently personally enlightening book, or most recently, pays a sum of money to take a course that provided a new label as a sort of pseudopsychologist. I used to watch her reinventions with fascination, until she started to cull bits of my life and add them to her cloth, like a decorator crab, picking up pieces of others and adding them to her shell in an attempt to hide who she was and appear to be someone else. It was unsettling and

What makes some people try to hide themselves and try to reinvent theirpersona? Why are there so many masks?

I’d rather know the real person, not who the person thinks the world wants him/her to be. Some people like to surround themselves with like-minded people. I think that’s borning. I’ve had people walk out of my life because I failed to agree with them, or because I debated an idea. They have a “You are with me or you are against me” black and white, simplistic view of the world. Personally, I’d rather enjoy the company of others who view the world differently and aren’t afraid of a good debate. That way we have much more interesting and exciting discussions. We don’t always agree, and that’s awesome!

And if that’s messy and unconventional, so much the better. Life is much more interesting when it’s a bit messy, it makes for better conversations down the road 😉