Defining ourselves

Friend of mine went to his high school reunion this summer. In school he was the uber-geek, the undisputed smartest kid in his class — which you can imagine didn’t sit well with some. Even now you can tell he learned his social graces by dint of hard work, and he’d rather eat worms than suffer fools.

But he’s gone on to be a successful international businessman and he wanted to see how his old friends are faring. He had some good times at the reunion, but was startled — and hurt — that a lot of people treated him just as they had when they were all raw kids. Same jokes. Same attitudes. Same view of him even though he’d changed enormously and led a fascinating life.

Well, maybe that’s just reunions. Some go to see how everyone has grown. Others haven’t grown at all and just want to relive their glory days — glory days in which they felt safely superior to smart but awkward geeks like my friend.

Maybe high schools are just dysfunctional families writ large.

—–

The year I was 38, I discovered that a highly favored family member was doing something duplicitous to the point of criminal. She was setting up big, crooked financial gain for herself at the expense of innocent people.

I spent six months investigating and trying to talk to her about it. Finally, when the evidence was indisputable and she was still stonewalling, I went to the two biggest potential victims and told them what I’d learned. There was documentary evidence. I asked them just to look at it and decide for themselves.

They not only refused to examine the documents, but immediately flung epithets at me. These were old, familiar epithets, descriptions of me that had virtually defined my childhood. But after 20 years of peaceful adult relationships, I was shocked to hear, “Why are you always such a ______?” and “You’re always so ______.”

In their view all my years of growth and change had never happened — and never would.

Then I also realized that, although I’d virtually been defined by those pejoratives as a child and teenager, I had never heard such words applied to me by anyone I’d met after growing up. You’d think, if rotten traits were such an integral and execrable part of me, someone else in the world would have noticed.

But no. The ugly words had only been convenient definitions, assigned to enable a broken family to avoid facing real problems. And so those nasty old words remained attached to me — as my family members chose to be betrayed, used, and swindled by the child they’d long-ago defined as perfectly good and golden.

——

Self-definition — determining who were are, what we value, what courses we want to pursue, how we want to be seen — is an obvious part of self ownership.

But it’s also tricky because it’s inherently so collaborative. Or even adversarial. You can choose how to be and how to present yourself. But you can’t choose how anybody responds.

It’s also hard (if not impossible) to completely free your self-definition from definitions that got imprinted on you by others when you were young and vulnerable.

—–

Self-definition can also be tricky because we humans have a habit of being self-delusional.

In the weirdly delightful little Australian indie film Griff the Invisible, young Griff defines himself as a superhero, saving his neighborhood from the scourge of crime. Everybody else sees Griff variously as a pathetic cubicle drone, a criminal menace, or an eccentric recluse on the verge of mental breakdown.

While I was living in the Desert Hermitage, we had a couple of murders. The first victim was a cantankerous character who may have had a good heart (he kept the town nuns in produce) but who had also had run-ins with just about everybody he ever ran into. The next was a 15 year old kid whose appearance, when he began turning up on “Have you seen this boy?” posters, prompted me to blurt, “My God, you mean someone would actually want him back?”

They (and I think another person or two) were done in by another local, a young man whose chosen mission in life was to improve the community by ridding it of human “garbage.”

He didn’t seem to grasp that a serial killer — however “helpful” his intentions — might fall even deeper into the “garbage” category.

—–

You can bet that cops who plant guns and drugs on hapless marks or cops who deliver spontaneous capital punishment for the crime of unlicensed cigarette sales still define themselves as “good guys.”

And sure as God made rotten apples, members of the secret, unconstitutional uber-government no doubt think of themselves people who are “saving democracy” or “saving freedom” as they spy on “terrorists” who’ve never harmed anybody or wanted to.

So yes, people are happily delusional in their self-definitions.

—–

Other times, people are just going to see you through their own lenses and that’s that.

Even saints don’t look saintly to everybody. The pope and that great skeptic Christopher Hitchens (RIP) would have given you sliiiiightly different definitions of Mother Teresa.

To me, threeper-in-chief Mike Vanderboegh is a hero, along with his friend and fellow crusader, David Codrea. Eric Holder might see them otherwise.

Oh well.

—–

So we have the perfect freedom to define ourselves as we see fit. But everybody else has equal freedom to define us differently. And in the messiness and tug-o-war of everyday reality, our path to the freedom to be as we define ourselves lies in what we choose to do with our own and those various other definitions of us.

—–

Where am I going with this? Is all this just too totally obvious? Am I falling into the Joel trap?

No, I have a point. I felt it sticking me in the backside just minutes ago. But it may have rolled under the couch or been chewed on by a dog. I’ll have to find it and get back to you about it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, comment away and — once again! — make me look smarter than I really am.