Life has given me a lot of reasons to think about myself as a person and how I came to be who I am. With a child on the way, I've spent an incredible amount of time worrying over whether or not I can be a good father and raise a good person, given my jaded, cynical world view. I've spent a lot of time thinking about my own childhood and the challenges my child will face in theirs.
Throughout my childhood, empathy was one of my biggest problems. Not a failure to feel it, but an incredible excess of it and an inability to manage those feelings. Anytime I thought I'd done someone some harm, no matter how small, it felt like the end of the world. I apologized for everything, and generally felt like garbage about 100% of the time. I started thinking about suicide as soon as I understood the concept of death, because I was completely certain the world, and the people closest to me most of all, would be better off if I weren't in it.
In my childhood cartoons, I eventually ended up more interested in the villains than the heroes. It wasn't because I wanted to be villainous, and to do evil things but because I already felt like that was who I was and what I was fated to be. That being the case, I admired the villains' ability to be okay with who they were.
Skeletor was the iconic example - underneath the terrifying visage, there was a guy who'd rescue children and puppies, but did so knowing that at the end of the day he'd still be the 'bad guy' and he was okay with that.
There's actually a Facebook page with over 250,000 followers devoted to appreciating and embracing oneself through Skeletor-themed daily self-affirmations, so at least I'm not alone, right?
Megatron (Transformers: Beast Wars), Mr. Freeze (Batman the Animated Series), Dr. Doom (Spider-Man the Animated Series), and David Xanatos and his beloved wife Fox (Gargoyles) were all comfortable with who they were, and did what they thought was right, even if what they thought was right wasn't necessarily heroic. Sometimes villains like Boba Fett (Star Wars: Expanded Universe) even seemed like better people than the heroes they were in opposition to (remember - Han Solo is a drug smuggler and terrorist who physically harassed one of his female passengers with unsolicited sexual advances). I didn't often share the villains' assessments of what was right and moral, but I admired their unwavering sense of self.
How could I find that sort of ego admirable? Because it kept them safe. On top of my own mental health issues, there was no shortage of people who would want to capitalize on my vulnerabilities. In elementary school boys would hold up an "L" and call me a loser (or pin me to a wall and punch me repeatedly). In high school they spit on me getting off the bus (but no punching, so a win over all). But by college the bullies had changed - they were much more savvy when it came to psychology. They'd buddy up to me, pretend to be my friend, and then slowly poison me with their own toxic narcissism - and when that gag was played out, they'd just start trying to sabotage or humiliate me in more forward ways.
The problem is, guilt is always my Achilles heel, and that's not hard to figure out. I avoid social situations as much as possible because I'm hyper-sensitive to the possibility of upsetting someone with the wrong choice of words; I should probably have a "social anxiety" diagnosis because of it. Despite my mother's advice, my instinct is still to be a 'people pleaser', and there are a remarkable number of people in the world who are willing to leverage that quality in order to further their own goals or to simply entertain themselves at your expense.
One of the easiest games for people like that to play is to find a way to be offended by just about anything you say or do, keeping you in a constant state of apology and contrition. People like to feel powerful, and coercing apologies for dubious offenses is a good way to satisfy that desire. Ever see someone raise hell at a restaurant, treating their server like crap and then complaining loudly to the manager over some ridiculous slight? That's why (well, that and the free desert); it's a power trip.
Unfortunately, that creates a significant dilemma for people like me. See, I was persuaded by one of my high school Latin teachers that it didn't matter what you actually did or said to upset someone - all that mattered was that someone said that they were upset. Whether or not something I did was "offensive" or wrong was purely a function of whether someone said it offended or wronged them. In taking on that mindset, I gave up what power I had to reflect upon and judge the morality of my own actions, and gave that power over to my tormentors - both those I had to interact with face-to-face everyday, and those I interacted with incidentally on social media and websites. When your mental health status puts you at persistent risk of suicide, that can be deadly.
So I had to cope with the world as best I could. My mom admonished me as a child not to apologize for problems that weren't my fault, and told me "you can't please everybody all the time." One of my colleagues in graduate school told me I needed to remember that I am not responsible for everyone else. My best friend told me I needed to learn to 'turn it off' occasionally for the sake of sanity.
I couldn't become completely callous towards others - or at least, if I could I didn't want to be. I still wanted to feel a basic sense of compassion towards others, and I still do (enough so that I can't watch a horror movie without getting horribly depressed), but I dumped the notion that the morality of my actions is both somehow subjective to the observer and yet totally determined by the observer for me.
Simply put, if someone tells me that something has wronged them - or, more often, that something would (hypothetically) be offensive to someone else - I don't take their word for it anymore. I don't challenge their assertion that they feel wronged, but I do think about whether it is really reasonable for that person to feel wronged (either directly or vicariously), and I react based on that determination. If your grievance seems sincere and reasonable, I'll be embarrassed and apologize or join you in condemning whoever upset you, but if it seems like you're having to make associative leaps to connect my actions to your distress (or your belief that someone else would be distressed), don't expect a mea culpa. If you have to work at being offended by something I say or do, I'm not responsible for your feelings.
Of course, maintaining a critical attitude rather than an indulgent one is generally not considered "nice," and people tend to assume that if I don't provide them with an apology or commiseration in a timely fashion, then it must be because I'm ignoring them, misunderstanding them, or disrespecting them. Which usually results in them explaining it to me again, and again, and again, with growing condescension until they resort to insults or passive aggressive platitudes 100% intended to make themselves feel like morally superior adults, rather than intended to actually change my mind about anything.
So, that sucks, because when it comes down to it, I'm still a 'people pleaser', and that approach pretty consistently leads to people saying I'm devoid of compassion, empathy, decency, humanity, etc. I can shut the windows and close the blinds, but I can still hear the eggs hitting the side of my house.
So, now I'm looking at the world our child is going to grow up in, and it looks pretty rough. I know they're going to have to deal with bullies of every type of sophistication. They're going to have to take some literal and figurative punches and get back up again. They're going to have to deal with toxic people and emotional malingerers (and malingerers by proxy) who want to make them feel like crap every time they open their mouth or put words on a page.
I know I have to prepare them for all of that, but I also know that I need to raise them to be good and kind, and to recognize when they are wrong and amend their behavior accordingly. I have to raise them to have moral standards and the volition to adhere to them, but also to have a strong enough sense of self and enough respect for human autonomy that they can recognize when other people's problems are not their problems.
But I also don't want to raise them as a super villain, because that never works out.
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| Well, almost never. |
