Sunday, October 19, 2014

Perspective

Time is our friend, ladies and gentlemen. A lot of people fear growing older. They make fun of themselves for how lame they are the older they get. They dread the next birthday. But each year brings a little more knowledge, a little more wisdom, and a little more awareness. 

If you've ever gone back and read anything you wrote in your adolesence -- your diary, a school notebook, letters passed between friends or lovers -- you know the embarrassment.

In his article, "Embarrassment and Social Organization" Erving Goffman defined embarrassment as something that "occurs whenever an individual is felt to have projected incompatible definitions of himself before those present." When you look back at your old diary and cringe, it is in part because that person is not you. You've grown so much and you've changed. You are older and wiser. But that person was you. So there is conflict between the person you used to be and the person you are now. The benefit to showing embarrassment is that, as Goffman argues, an embarrassed person "demonstrates that he/she is at least disturbed by the fact and may prove worthy at another time."

In college, I wrote a story that received strong criticism from my fiction writing professor. Without disclosing the fact that I was experimenting with creative non-fiction, she didn't realize that the characters in the story were based on me and my friends, so she was very blunt in her negative opinion on the characters. It was one thing to critique the successful telling of the story, but to question the depth of the characters and the plot of the story? Bitch, it happened to me! I recoiled, offended, and dismissed her critique. 

But I kept it, filed it away, along with the story. Re-reading it, those questions she raised? Her critique of the depth of the characters? They hit home for a reason.

She called the Female Main Character (FMC) a "professional victim", noting the bad choices she continually made that led her back into a bad situation when she could have and should have known better. She asked, "Why is FMC so desperate, so easy to lie to, so prone to blame members of her own gender while taking abuse from men?" She picks apart all of the character's flaws and judgement errors and asks, "What is the matter with her?" More to the point she notes, "The story seems not to have any awareness of her psychological demons."

She was spot-fucking-on. 

The story was based on events that had happened less than two years prior. I was still processing those bad decisions and betrayals and heartbreak. I still saw myself as the victim and couldn't acknowledge the role I played in my own unhappiness. 



Writing can certainly be therapeutic, but my professor may have unknowingly spurred an introspective journey through my psyche and helped me start sorting out my problems. It's been six years since I graduated college and looking back I think of how different High School Me was from College Me and how different College Me is from Me Now. I am aware of my psychological demons now. Time cultivates perspective. We learn. We grow. Our worldview shifts. We become more aware of the world around us. We become better persons. 

So if you're embarrassed about something from your past, that's okay. It's good, actually. Because it means you have changed, you have grown. And isn't that the point of it all? You know, Life. To grow, to learn, to evolve our minds. To become healthy, contributing members of our society. This is the kind of beauty I mean when I say "there is too much beauty to quit". If I had killed myself before I hit my twenties, I would have died a different person, naive and unaware of my own psychological demons. The demons would have won. Instead, I found them. And I fucking conquered them. All in time.

So be embarrassed. Look back and laugh at that person you used to be. Because you are better now. Stronger now. Smarter now. And don't dread your next birthday, no matter the number. Look forward to it! Because time is our friend, ladies and gentlemen. 

Source: http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/4111/Readings/GoffmanEmbarrassment.pdf


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