Some life lessons

Once again, I've seen a lot of low-level drama swirling around. At work, in the volunteer work I do, other places. I'm never directly involved in the drama but it seems that I suffer from the effects anyway. (I don't know. Maybe I just am surrounded by people with a need for drama/tragically thin skins/I don't know what, or maybe I'm just more sensitive than some people to what I see as drama-mongering.)

Anyway, I got to thinking last night about things I've learned over the years, things that I remind myself of, that help keep me out of drama - or at least help me shrug and accept that "life is messy and people are weird." I actually tried to catalog them:

1. The only person whose behavior you control is you. I remind myself of this regularly. I don't always succeed - when I have a bunch of people melted down in tears and yelling at each other around me, it's hard for me not to melt down in tears, too, just because I'm SO FRUSTRATED with them and I hate dissention. But on a bigger level, I remind myself of this and I'm proud of myself for knowing it because:

2. There are certain things - call them ethics, morals, integrity, your reputation, whatever - that you just have to stick to, no matter what the consequences. When I (mentally) square my shoulders and say, "I don't care if X is slacking off and it means I have to pick up some of X's tasks, those tasks still have to be done" instead of being kind of "poor me" about it, just saying to myself, "You are a responsible person and this is the kind of thing responsible people do." Or, likewise, something I said in Ivory Tower Fiber Freaks - we were discussing a (now deleted, but it's there in Google Cache) blogpost by a professor at a B-school who essentially said, "I busted a bunch of students for plagiarizing. While my administration praised me for it, I got the lowest merit pay raise of my career the following year, and I think it's because my busting of the plagiarists made my evaluation scores go down...so I'm not going to bust plagiarists any more." After first voicing dismay about the whole situation, then I decided: sometimes you just have to accept certain things as (no pun intended) the cost of doing business. If I were in a similar situation, I'd take my lower pay raise and shrug and say, "But what I'm doing is more important." Because:

3. It's (usually) not about you. There are really two interpretations to this that I use. First: there are some things in life that are more important than how you feel about a situation, or your emotions. I learned this the really, really hard way when I was leading the teenaged youth group. I'd get complaints about stuff - some of it petty, some of it potentially serious. And don't get me wrong, those complaints HURT. I went home a few times and cried. But I also realized that being there for those kids was more important than how I felt, more important than whatever blows my 'self esteem' took from people who didn't like smudges on the Fellowship Hall floor or lights inadvertently left on in bathrooms. Again, you just square your shoulders and tell yourself that the only person getting no complaints is often the person doing nothing of import, and you go on. (And you do listen to the complaints seriously enough to learn if there's anything you need to change).

But secondly: It's not about you when people talk. Sometimes people say stuff - sometimes quite hurtful stuff - when they are hurting themselves. And while there have been times I've said (or wanted to say) "And what do you mean by THAT?" a lot of the time I can write off what they said to the fact that they're hurting. I hurt too, sometimes. And sometimes I say stupid stuff I shouldn't because I'm hurting. (I do try to apologize when I do, but I don't always manage to. Saying you're sorry is sometimes the hardest thing to say). I remember reading somewhere the phrase: "Small input, big reaction: there's something else going on in the reactor" and I try to keep that in mind.

4. Sometimes people say stuff they don't really mean. This is kind of a tough lesson for me because I came from a family where people didn't say crazy stuff out of anger or hurt or threaten things they weren't going to follow through on. (But likewise: praise was not empty or unearned). A tough lesson I've had to learn as an adult is that some people just need to blow of steam verbally, and in some cases you have to learn to discount what a person says by a certain amount. Again, I think this is where I think a lot of people are "bringing the drama" compared to how I think.

5. If you don't have a "dog in the hunt," keep your mouth shut. Or, as one of my research students says: Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt. But it's not just to avoid appearing foolish that I've learned not to say stuff in situations where I don't have an investment. For one thing, I've found you can learn a lot more about where interpersonal relations are going, what the underlying problems in a group are, etc., if, instead of trying to formulate what you're going to say or looking for a point where you can stick your oar in, you just stand back and keep your own counsel and watch other people. (And not least: if the people with low/no investment in a situation don't speak in a meeting, the meeting often ends earlier.)

6. Don't participate in gossip or tale-bearing. I'm generally the last one to know "the dirt" because I do this - but on the other side of things, I generally keep a higher opinion of people. And also, I find, in a lot of cases stuff that comes up as gossip around me is so often the result of miscommunication or something said in a moment of anger or pain...that the person didn't really mean what they are said to have said. Also, I find that not participating in gossip tends to make one less of a target of it.

7. Throw away your 'calculator.' This is something my dad said to my brother and me ALL THE TIME when we were growing up - because, like most siblings, we'd fight over
a. who got the bigger piece of cake
b. who had the worse chores to do
c. whose tennis shoes were nicer/more expensive
d. who got better birthday presents...
with each of us trying to find some way we'd been wronged, and deserved restitution.

And the truth of the matter is, sometimes you just have to stop worrying about "fair" and worry more about "important." It's not "fair," all the volunteer work I do, when other people seem to sit on their hands. But, much of it is work that I think is important and if I can do it - and if no one else is going to step up so it goes undone - well, what's more important is the work getting done or the service being provided, and what's really "fair" in the long run matters less. (Or, as someone else on Ravelry said: "'Fair' is a place where you go to see pigs and pies.")

8. But: sometimes you just have to say "No." And people have to be able to deal with that. I think I related how I gave up the chairship of a campus committee because it got so stressful and ugly - and how all I ever heard were complaints and people wanting me to bend the rules "just for them." I told the rest of the committee that it was making my blood pressure spike up (Well, based on my having one unusually high-for-me reading during a random check-up during that time) and I had to give it up. The committee survived, they found a new head. (But not after trying to suck me back in: seriously, they asked me to schedule the meeting for them to find a new chair. And I said no, it was partly the issues surrounding scheduling that were making me crazy). But you need to pick your battles. I figured it was easier and probably better in the long run to say "Yes" to teaching Principles I - because there are a lot of good reasons for my doing it, and other people in the department are having to bear other burdens - but I am reserving the right to say "No" to something else in the future.

9. Some stuff isn't worth fighting over. It just isn't. As long as you're not compromising your morals or integrity or whatever, sometimes, if someone is being (forgive me) a total ass about a situation, it's better to let them "win" and just walk away.

10. Some people enjoy drama and upset. You do not have to get drawn into their game and try to avoid being manipulated by them. Try to surround yourself with people who have more valuable ways of spending their time. Learn to see through the drama-mongers. (I've often said the reason I never cared for soap operas is that I had enough people around me in real life whose lives seemed to be soap operas.)

11. My "good enough" and other people's "good enough" are often two different "good enoughs." I tend to be a perfectionist and am super self-critical. For example: the pastor's wife and I are working on revitalizing the Sunday-night programs for older kids. I had some possible curricula picked out and I showed them to her, apologetically saying I hadn't looked that hard and hadn't read them in as great detail as I might have liked. But she was super enthusiastic and happy that I had thought and hunted even as much as I did for stuff. And the whole thing with the Full Professor - everyone I know tells me now they "knew" I'd get it, but I really doubted a lot of the time, I can always see how I didn't work hard enough or push enough or spend enough hours in the lab or the field or whatever. (I think in some cases it's a lot like the old saying, "familiarity breeds contempt." I "see" myself all the time, I am privy to what's going on in my head, whereas other people mainly see my actions and what I say...so they don't know about all the (in my estimation) mixed-up, stupid stuff that goes on in my brain...they don't know, for example, that I like to come home at the end of the day and put on my SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas and watch cartoons, or that if I'm really upset I will occasionally eat a couple of spoons of Nutella straight from the jar, things like that. They don't see all the weird stupid stuff about me. Of course, I also don't see all the weird stupid messed-up stuff other people do, so maybe I hold some people in higher esteem than they hold themselves...but at any rate, I often say, "Other people see things in me I fail to see in myself.")

12. Don't forget to take time for yourself. And your family. And your friends. I realized that after going out last Friday and spending part of a day hanging out with Laura. And as one of my friends who recently lost both parents told me: You will never regret taking the time to visit people you care about. And also: you are a person you should care about. One thing I want to work on this fall is giving myself permission at night to plop down and relax if there's something I really want to see on television, or if I have a very absorbing book I'm reading, or whatever. And do things like not jump up and answer the phone if it rings. Or feel obligated to go do stuff I don't need to do and don't want to do.

13. Don't forget who you are. Don't forget or shortchange the things that make you, you. This goes along with both #11 and #2 above. As I said, I feel better and stronger and more able to take whatever's thrown at me if I remind myself regularly of the important things - that I'm a responsible person, that I'm someone other people can depend on, that I'm honest, that I'm faithful, that I stop to think about whether something is right or wrong before I do it, that I'm intelligent... But I also think for me it's important to remember where I came from - I have lots of pictures of family around my house, I have certain "touchstone" memories of my parents and grandparents and growing-up time that are things I think of as things that define me as who I am. And it's also important to me to continue to do the things I value, the things that I think of as setting me apart a little bit, of (maybe even) making me kind of special - the things like the quilting and knitting and continuing to try to learn to play the piano and reading books that are outside of my main field of study but that are on topics that interest me, and so on. It's so easy when I get busy and stressed for me to begin to feel like I'm losing myself, almost like I'm starting to turn a little invisible, and hanging on to those things can help pull me back to the course I should be on.

So anyway. I think of something I read in a book once, about a woman who lived in a cabin out in the wilderness, and how another woman - who was, at that time, somewhat lost - wound up at the cabin. And after a few weeks the woman who had come to the cabin talked about how great it was, how if she could only find a place like that, she could become like a saint. And the woman in the cabin said to her something like, "It's easy to be a saint up on the mountaintop, and very hard to be one down among people. But ultimately, the place where good people are needed is down among the people." (I'm paraphrasing heavily there, and not saying it very well. I guess what I mean is that as much as I'd LIKE to withdraw from the world, and to be somewhat of a hermit...I can't, really. There are things I need to do. And maybe lessons I need to learn (still) from my fellow messy, difficult humans.)

There. Now I feel a little better. (I hope this coming fall is less stressful.)