Letters to the Editor
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Anger is underrated
Anger is a wonderful emotion. If balanced with reflection, diplomacy, and kindness (you can learn these skills over time) it will help you get and find the right job; excel at the job; get to know yourself; stand up for mankind; give your bus seat up for an older person when others just sit on their butts; stop being a yes-person; have better sex (because you know how to ask for what you want); and get into a good relationship and stay in it because you won't bury your feelings. Vive anger.
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I am the letter writer
although I haven't become angry yet... just very sad.
It's a difficult thing to realize that the assholes get everything (because they demand it, and they make life hell for everyone else until they get it) and the nice people just get dumped on, again and again.
And yet, I can't stop being nice. I find it pretty much impossible to not do the right thing, or the self-sacrificial thing, even when I'm being buried alive.
And it's made worse because I grew up hearing "if you're a good person, people will recognize what you do and appreciate who you are..."
No, they won't. Not until you're gone, anyway!
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Born again
Well, both the ecstatic seeing of light and the more earthbound versions of seeing things anew that Cary describes could be said to be born-again experiences.
So consider yourself being born again. And when you're first born, you cry real loud and flail a lot, because you can't yet speak and you can't yet walk. And then you start growing and you gradually calm down, learning to speak in clear assertive ways that get your needs met, and walking over on your own two feet to grab the things you couldn't get for yourself before.
(But try not to indulge yourself too much, during all this growing. This world is already far too noisy and irritating.)
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Guernica
Do you know Picasso's Guernica? About in the center, toward the bottom, just above a hand holding a broken sword, there is a flower blooming. In the midst of the hideous carnage, something tiny and beautiful is taking hold.
Or on a more popular line: our souls are a little like Fibber McGee's closet. It sounds like your anger is the beginning of a search for something quite beautiful. Just don't stop where you are.
By the way... are you my wife?
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My best teacher ever,
a communication professor, taught me that true communicative competence is to be able to disagree across all social situations. Not to be disagreeable, but to be able to disagree.
I've come to see this as the central human problem-- politics, work, culture, relationships. The whole weight of culture is that women can't disagree with men, blacks with whites, poor with rich, young with old, workers with bosses, and on and on.
So, now you feel the whole weight of the problem, and you don't know how to do it! But isn't it cool to have got this far?
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Hmmm
Well, don't take me too seriously because I read the letter, skimmed the Cary response, and am responding after an evening of relaxing watching a DVD of Season 2 of "How I Met Your Mother" (Neal Patrick Harris is hilarious) and drinking 2 glasses of wine.
But I know what the Letter Writer is talking about. I didn't grow up in an abusive household, and I'm sorry you did, but I was certainly meek for far too long. The unfortunate result of being meek is you tend to hold in those bad experiences, where you should have spoken up, and they sit and rot in your psyche over time. They grow and ferment and turn uglier than they should.
I think it is universally true that people who hold things in will explode and go much farther than they should when they finally fight back. Standing up for yourself is something that has to be practiced at. If you're not in practice, you tend to overreach, swing too hard, over-adjust. You go from an impotent gutter ball on the left side to an overbearing gutter ball ont he right side.
You may be acting out your father's problems. Possibly he was a pussy in his professional life and a tyrant at home. You are replaying his weaknesses in your own way, perhaps. Obviously you want to get past this as quickly as possible.
When you get angry, imagine you are being videotaped. Imagine your reaction when you watch the videotape later. You don't want to be embarrassed watching that tape. You want to be proud of yourself. You want to watch the videotape of you, standing up for yourself, and think, "Wow, I was right-on! I handled that perfectly."
So be aware of yourself. Hold steady. If you find yourself getting too angry and out of control, step back. Sit down. Calm down. You don't want to lose control. Because when you're angry and attempting to set matters straight, control is the one thing you need most. That and dignity.
Dignity is the most important thing. If I could I would draw little golden lines around that word in this message. It's one thing we all need more of. When Jack Nicholson was angry and got out of his car and started hitting the other driver's car with a golf club, he lost all sight of dignity. Dignity is an amazing thing -- it will give you the power to do the right thing, stick up for what you believe in, and walk away and still feel OK about everything.
It will take practice. The only way to practice is to keep sticking up for yourself, but instead of blowing your top, be collected and calm and firm. Stick to your guns, but never fire them. Communicate in a precise, controlled fashion. How do you get to the Carnegie Hall of balanced, sensible, day-to-day morality and justice without becoming a raving lunatic? Practice.
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Not angry?
LW, you say you are not angry and yet this whole nice-guys-finish-last spiel sounds like anger in action to me.
Surely we all think of ourselves as nice people. Most of the criminals I have met have gone to pains to point out that they are really nice people, and that everything is everyone else's fault. I suppose, statistically, they must be right some of the time, like a stopped clock being correct two times a day.
The answer to rude and demanding people is not to lash out at them, fun though this may be, but to realize that they act this way because they are inadequate and lacking in spiritual advancement. Seen from their own point of view, their behavior is always entirely reasonable, but that just shows how lacking in insight they are.
Just be thankful that you are not as they.
Jesus, an ancient philosopher whose teachings are little known, though allegedly influential on our President and a few others, said that when demands are made of you, you should offer to go the extra mile. Whether this instruction was intended just as a practical suggestion to avoid getting stomped on, or as means of achieving abnegation of selfish desires is debatable, but there are many people who believe the latter.
Now stop yelling at people and play nicely. You know that is what you really want to do anyway, so why fight it?