Learning to Be An Individual

It was an interesting day yesterday at work.  I was so ragged that I had my guard down.  I think this was a good thing.  I said some things in our first staff meeting during my tenure that directly contradicted my boss.  In this crowd no one disagrees openly.  If I hadn’t been so tired, I think I would have been more attuned to following the rules.  It was okay.  He trusts me.  I was making what, at least to me, is an important point – there are ways we can use our financial resources to serve our agenda and we should keep our agenda in the forefront of our minds.

I am a little weirded out, meaning nervous, that I said that this morning, but I am less weirded out than I would have been in the past.  I am much, much more anchored in my private life than I ever have been before.  It’s a relief.

I probably need to stop writing this morning and go about getting into my home life rather than just reflecting and processing.  I am still figuring out how much plain old living I need to do and how that nourishes me and how much thinking helps me move forward.  I survived in the past by thinking things through.  So I totally default toward reflection, but I also know that getting what’s in my heart and trying to take shape into some collection of words helps me with the just living part, too.

So I guess I will keep writing.

I have been reflecting on something David Brooks wrote about in relation to Elena Kagan and her Supreme Court nomination:

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.

If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.

If you listen to people talk about Elena Kagan, it is striking how closely their descriptions hew to this personality type.

He goes onto elaborate how Kagan has not distinguished herself by taking controversial stands in her professional life.

I am not writing this because I agree with Brooks’ description of Kagan.  I don’t know enough to have an informed opinion.  But I do relate on a guttural level to his description of Organization Kids.  I relate to trying to do well, to please authority.  It often feels hard-wired in me.

This must be why I have been so fascinated this spring via my writing here with being a jerk.  I want this muscle so badly.  I want to be able to survive being controversial.  I so admire this in others.

I have also been reading my favorite writer on the emotional needs of children and adolescents and how to give them the parenting they need – Carl Pickhardt.  He won my heart originally with his insightful book The Future of Your Only Child, and last week I appreciated him all over again with his book Why Good Kids Act Cruel.  It’s about social cruelty and bullying, but it’s really more about the developmental tasks early adolescents need to face and succeed at in order to make it to healthy adulthood.  He explains how parents can help adolescents navigate this time of life.

Then this week in his blog he talked about popularity.  He concluded with this great summary of the costs that can come with being popular:

• Popularity requires pleasing – you must strive to be nice to people who you want to keep liking you.
• Popularity brings pressure — to belong you have to conform, being like, behaving like, believing like other members of your group.
• Popularity takes being current – you have to look cool, keep up with what’s happening, and stay cutting edge.
• Popularity is precarious – people can vote you in and they can vote you out, and “elections” can be held at a moment’s notice when you accidentally offend or someone “better” comes along.
• Popularity is partly unpopular – while some people admire you, others envy you, can get jealous, and want to bring you down.
• Popularity attracts imitators – people act like you so they can be liked by you, and liked by others by acting like you.
• Popularity breeds insincerity – you may often fake being nice to people, and people may often fake being nice to you.
• Popularity is confusing – sometimes you wonder if people want to be your friend because of who you are or because you’re popular.
• Popularity attracts attention – you are noticed more, judged more, your flaws and failings are more closely observed, and you are more gossiped about.
• Popularity is competitive – since so many people want to be popular, you have to perform your best against your rivals every day.
• Popularity can go to your head – popular people can believe their own reviews and act special or entitled, injuring friendships they thought secure.
• Popularity can be limiting – the more you invest in popularity at school, the less you are likely to invest in creating a social life outside of school.
• Popularity can be demeaning – people who pursue popularity will sometimes accept mistreatment from more popular people just to be accepted.

Most important, popularity and friendship are not the same. Popularity is political; friendship is personal. Popularity is about rank; friendship is about relationship. Popularity is more casual; friendship is more caring.

I look at this list and I cringe as I recognize how I have borne many of the costs of trying to be popular.  At the same time it is such a relief to see this all spelled out and know there is another way.  Out there in our culture there’s talk of “people pleasers” but I never quite got that that was me.  I was so steeped in it, but looking at this list I get it.

The cost above that really gave me pause was the one about popularity breeding imitators.  Over the last couple of years I have been noticing how I adopt other people’s habits – the phrases they use, the intonations, etc.  I am so influenceable.  I know I do this so that I can fit in.  I also know I did this as a child because I was looking to the outside world for how to act, how to behave.  Not a completely bad thing, but I’m an adult now.  I want to grow out of the habit of modeling myself after others so I can be liked and fit in.  I want to be able to hold onto what makes me, me.  I don’t want to adopt who other people are so I can fit in.  I know that I did this when I began my new job.

I also recognized parts of me in the statement that popularity is competitive.  He says that everyone wants to be popular and so “you have to perform your best against your rivals every day.”  I never consciously thought of other people as my “rivals” but I recognize the insecure part of me that has feared not being at my best because I might lose my standing in my world.  Oh.  That’s not a pretty thing to see in myself but it’s so true.

Andrea and I talked this week about how I learned working with customers in the family business how to get along with almost anyone and how I ignore people’s poor behavior toward me and relentlessly remember the good in them.  I know that this is often what happens to a lower ranked person in a relationship.  So I recognize that I have paid the price of being nice to people to keep them liking me as well.

I can see that I have been a victim of unpopularity, but I  hadn’t recognized how much I was living my life according to the codes of popularity and in doing so being a perpetrator, too.  In this way I really relate to what he says about popularity being fickle and that “elections” can be held and a moment’s notice and the tides can change.  This is ugly, and I recognize myself here, too.  Very well.  I know the instinct/desire to not be caught in an unpopular relationship or whatever so very well.

It’s such a relief to have him identify these things and just by being more aware unhook myself from this way of being.

I love the work of Robert Fuller who thinks deeply about the abuse of rank in his book Somebodies and Nobodies.  Pickhardt and Fuller’s work dovetail nicely together with Pickhardt reflecting on how to help kids develop as strong individuals so they can grow into who they really are and Fuller pointing out how in the adult world we are all somebodies and nobodies in different circumstances and we need to be very conscious of treating all with dignity.

My young parts have always been soothed by Fuller’s work, getting intuitively what he is talking about and grateful someone was taking a stand against poor treatment – completely unaware at the time how poorly treated I had been.  My young parts are now glad Pickhardt has shown her how she can step away from the kind of thinking that kept her trapped.

In my workplace I often feel like an early adolescent.  I want to be liked, I want to be popular, I want to be admired and followed.  I fear being excluded.  I fear being gossiped about.  I want to be with the in-crowd.  I knew I needed a year of relatively low stress work so that I could confront these kinds of feelings.  When I decided this a while back, I didn’t know what these feelings would be, but now that I am here I recognize them.

I am so, so glad to be right where I am in this life, learning what I need to be learning.

I wonder in another year how it will feel to be me.