My daughters like American Girl Doll products including the series of movies that give life and back-story to the dolls and their lives. The most recent was a movie titled Chrissa Stands Strong. The story tracks the life of Chrissa as she is uprooted from her home and lands in a new community and more importantly, a new school. There she must face the trials and tribulations of being the new face and eventually encounters bullying from a group of queen bees, the “mean girls.”
My daughters like to identify with the characters in the movies drawing on the title characters and their assorted cohorts, but when our third child announced that she liked the main queen bee of the movie, Tara, we knew it was time to pull the plug.
Who was your bully? I can summon a long list of assorted bullies from my past, the main one being a boy named Robert B. who was a grade higher than me, and who took endless delight in snapping me with towels in the locker room, punching me on the play ground and even one episode where I was kicked in the balls as I was standing beside my hall locker. I am a forgiving soul but I have to tell you I hope that sonofabitch dies a horrible mean death. ☺
Honestly though, I think I was terrorized a lot as a child: ranting father, older brothers, school yard bullies and an assortment of psychopathic children encountered in after school programs left indelible scars on my gentle psyche.
Let’s face it. I was a wimp. I was what you might call athletically challenged. I had no facility for running, throwing, or kicking and had a genuine fear of being pummeled. It wasn’t that I didn’t know that I wouldn’t recover. I had been knocked around enough to know that you take your lumps, you put on an ice pack and within a few days the bruises and bumps would disappear. But this knowledge alone was not enough to overcome my fear of, well, pain.
In all likelihood my situation was acerbated by the fact that we moved every two or three years ensuring that I was the perpetual new kid that got prodded and tease and humiliated. At some point, sick and tired of being the world’s punching bag, I started taking Tae-Kwon-Do lessons.
I was talking about this in therapy the other day when the therapist pointed out that my experiences had lead me to fight fire with fire. As I grew older these skills were needed less and less. However, I never fully let go of those old feelings. Sadly, the solutions that had worked for me as a teenager, i.e. fighting back, no longer worked as an adult. The net result is, well, that at some point, if I am frustrated enough or tired enough, or just plain fed up, I will contemplate hitting (or occasionally spitting.) Worse, as I am tired or frustrated in those situations, I seldom take the time to contemplate anything and have been known to lash out.
Get that? Character defects are one-time assets that now no longer aid us and in fact cause us harm. I know this. I have heard it talked about in twelve step rooms for years. Things like over confidence can get you the job but it can also cost you the job later on. There are really too many examples to name there here, because really any asset is a defect of character waiting in the wings.
I don’t have a lot of good solution here. I had to ask my wife what the twelve step solution to assets/defects run amok was and she said (matter of factly) “The seventh step prayer:”
“My Creator,
I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad.
I pray that you now remove from me
every single defect of character, which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows.
Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do your bidding.”
I think like anything the first step is recognizing the problem, giving it a name and realizing that I have been working in the dark here. Realizing that my behavior was born of these past experiences was a slap on the forehead moment for me. Feelings of inferiority or the need to explain or justify myself are also linked here and I is going to take time to sort it all out. It is a weird moment when you realize your particular brand of crazy was learned. Weirder still to think that those character defects might be useful to god (as the seventh step implies). Though frankly I will be glad when I am rid of them. Because my character defects are now my bully.
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3 comments:
I don't understand that line of reasoning. God is good. Perfect. And you believe he created you. Then how are the defects defects. I know this is that age old question. And you might not mean capital G God. And I'm being too literally. Or black and white. Which is for me my asset/defect. Heavy handed chop segue. That's what i don't get about that whole I am second campaign. Why does God need to be first if he/she is God. I don't 'have any answers. Only questions. As for my bully. Dean Fucking Reed. Dude dropped a tonka truck (1970s Tonka too, meaning made with steel!) on my face. He terrorized our block. I eventually confronted him. And bested him in a fight in front of the entire neighborhood which oddly enough cemented my rep as a kid who didn't take any shit which is still a big part of my personality. Funniest part about my fight. After I beat him. Which was really quite easy. He was a gold brick. And to be fair, he had / has his own demons, he was held back a grade, thus older and larger than the rest of the kids and was using his bully ways as a coping mechanisms, He ran home and told his Mom who literally chased me up the block to my house with a broom!
"God is good. Perfect. And you believe he created you. Then how are the defects defects. I know this is that age old question."
You're not kidding! (About the age-old question thing.) And, what I hear Señor Icon saying here is, that his defects--hell, we can call them "features," as in, how the software developing team tries to convince you these "extras" aren't just bugs they couldn't troubleshoot--is that his features aren't feeling good right now, and are maybe causing additional suffering.
Of course I am writing this from the honest perspective of someone who lives with, well, for lack of a better word, a spitter. Someone who yells first and thinks later. I totally see that he does it out of fear and shame, the way when you step on a cat's tail it turns around and hisses.
The funny thing is that my cat Pyewacket is so paranoid about someone stepping on her (exceptionally long and silky and probably very sensitive) tail is that she'll now hiss and spit at you if your shoes even get within a two-foot RADIUS of her tail.
I don't think it makes her very happy. And I'm pretty impressed and inspired by your bravery and honesty and WILLINGNESS in facing the feature (not a factory setting, but one in place for so long it's probably started to seem like an integral part of your functioning)--by your turning the power of your fierce artistic intelligence onto it, and trying to figure out what fuels it, and how to reroute the wiring. Maybe I'll actually succeed in doing the same with my own "features," such as compulsively being in other people's business while procrastinating deleteriously on taking care of my own.
Thank God in Her infinite wisdom for not only giving us defects/features...but also giving us intelligence, curiosity, and most of all our beautiful, irreplaceably so, human adaptability.
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