One day when I was a senior in high school I got called into the office of the Dean of Girls (weirdly quaint title). I was being “awarded” an F for the day in all my classes, having gotten caught skipping school to attend a peace march.<\/p>\n
Funny thing. I skipped school a lot that year, mostly just to hang out somewhere that wasn’t around my increasingly intolerable family, town, or school. Don’t recall ever getting in trouble for it, except that one time when somehow my parents and the dean discovered that I had gone (gasp!) to an anti-war march.<\/i><\/p>\n
For this dereliction of my conventional duties, I was sternly castigated. I remember only one sentence of the dean’s rant: “Don’t you want your parents to respect you?”<\/p>\n
With the capital-A Attitude of a disaffected teen, I snarled, “I don’t care if they respect me!”<\/p>\n
It was a conversation ender.<\/p>\n
As soon as I left the dean’s office, I had one of those “wish I’d said” moments. The scared child within my surly teen self wished she’d cried, “They won’t respect me no matter what I do!”<\/p>\n
That was true. It was far more true at that point than “I don’t care.” Because of course, I did care, passionately, about what the people in charge of my life thought of me. It was just that I had already learned that I couldn’t be true to myself and earn their respect at the same time.<\/p>\n
The “wish I’d said” version also would have been a cry for help, a plea for understanding. My 17-year-old self still hoped — desperately — that some authority figure would realize that something was terribly, terribly wrong in my family and swoop in to do something helpful.<\/p>\n
Instead, I slouched out of Miss Moffatt’s office simply having given the impression of being a defiant little jerk.<\/p>\n
Only a long, long time later did I realize I’d actually said the right thing when I blurted, “I don’t care if they respect me.”<\/p>\n
The idea that uber-authoritarian Miss Moffatt would ever have cared, let alone ever seen anything beyond a need to discipline me, now seems laughable. The idea that a government employee dedicated to enforcing authority might ever have sympathized and taken my part, equally laughable.<\/p>\n
The idea that a person in her position might have “helped” is horrifying — in the “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” sense.<\/p>\n
Looking back, it simply makes sense that neither Miss Moffatt nor my parents would respect someone like me. And I’m glad they didn’t. Because if I’d have toadied to gain an illusion of grudging “respect” from those people, I’d have ended up losing a very important part of myself.<\/p>\n
Not wanting or needing their conditional “respect” was the right and mature thing.<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
It’s a hard lesson for us social beings to internalize, but earning the scorn of Authoritah can be one of the surest signs that we’re doing something right.<\/p>\n
And the next, much bigger, lesson is that when we’re doing something right, Authoritah and its and expectations diminish.<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n