I have a category called “nontoxic love challenge” for this blog. It’s about wanting be a nicer person. Why is that so hard?
I have an internal “bitch switch” that turns on to say something negative and critical (silently, in my mind) about almost everyone I see (with the notable exception of Angelic Daughter, who is the most perfect, kind, tolerant, patient, resilient, and compassionate person I have ever known). My mind habitually issues negative judgments about hair, clothing, style of walking, choice of apparent mate, subject of overheard conversation, you name it. I’m a human eye-roll. I have to make a conscious effort, a real expenditure of energy, to block those negative, judgmental thoughts, and replace them with something affirmative, or at least mildly compassionate.
When I walk into a room, I start performing or trying to be entertaining. I don’t make much of an effort to learn about my audience. People take one look at me and accurately assume “that bitch thinks she’s better/smarter/more talented than me.” I actually owned, though thank God I never wore, a t-shirt that said, “I’ll be nicer if you’ll be smarter.” For a moment I considered buying a different one that said, “I’m silently correcting your grammar.”
Oy. No wonder everyone who ever had me as a manager hated my guts. No wonder I’ve never had more than one good friend at a time, and those friendships never last.
I have always been most comfortable in settings where I knew everyone was smarter than me. In academia, for example, where I’d be in roomfuls of physicists, engineers, Shakespeare scholars, astronomers, orchestra and choral conductors, biologists, or mathematicians. It was easy to be interested in those folks.
But why is it so difficult for me to be even minimally interested in most other people? Not even interested enough to discover how wrong I am in my assumptions, and how smart and talented those people are? Isn’t that part of what “loving thy neighbor” is all about? I’m sure that many people who’ve been subjected to my social performances have had an immediate, negative reaction. I don’t blame them.
I blame Mom (of course, Dr. Freud). Her criticisms of me were unbounded: hair, clothes, weight, jobs, and husband. I simply cannot remember a single occasion when my mother expressed genuine approval of anything about me.
I don’t think I’m alone, unfortunately. I think this is a nearly universal experience of the mother-daughter relationship. When a man wins a major prize, like a televised singing contest, or an Oscar, they very often thank their parents, and often call out the unwavering support of their mothers.
I don’t recall seeing a woman award recipient moved to do the same. Please send me a link to a video, if you know of one, that will prove me wrong.
But another explanation seems more plausible than Freudian mother-blaming: my lack of interest in others, my impaired social skills, where I try to be entertaining to others instead of interested in them, my inability to perceive these traits as undesirable, and my genuine bewilderment about why so many people seem to dislike or avoid me, might indicate an undiagnosed neurodivergence. Not a genuine disability, but some kind of brain difference that could explain why, socially, I just don’t get it.
There’s a fantastic book called “Look Me In the Eye” by John Elder Robison. It’s about his life as a person with Asperger’s Syndrome. His descriptions of mutual misunderstandings, of his tendency toward non-sequiturs in conversations, of the invisibility of his disability, and most of all, of his realization that he could learn to give people what they expected of him (even if he thought it was stupid), resonated with me. It’s just taken me a hell of long time to realize that I could learn to do that too, and a lot of effort to actually want to do it. Putting on a one-woman show and then “leaving the building” is so much easier.
I don’t wan’t want to walk through what’s left of my life wrapped in the barbed wire of negative, judgmental, or patronizing thinking. I’m much too old for that shit (and much too old to still be blaming my mother for it). I’m determined to make the effort to see good and positive things in people and to have compassion for their circumstances, the details of which which, in most cases, I don’t want to know. But now, I want to want to know. I want to be more interested.
So, tell me about yourself!
In the meantime, I remain,
your trying-to-shut-up-and-listen-for-a-change,
Ridiculouswoman