It's been a while since I've blogged... life is what happens while you are busy doing other things. Last night, I made a tremendous discovery about myself and the world at large, and I think it might be the perfect solution to what I see as an epidemic. I have discovered that the internet... actually the world at large, is wrong. They are wrong about all sorts of things. Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong.
But the real discovery is that I think it might be my fault!
Now clearly, dear readers, I will not leave it at that. I will not just accept blame for the whole world being wrong and move along with my day. .
In my "stepping into the arena" series, I have talked about the journey from where I was to where I am. I talked about my drive for perfection, my fear of failure, and my journey to overcome those things my embracing by vulnerability. Just last night, I was rehashing some of the things while working on a different work-related project. In this project, I was talking about these walls of perfection that women (generally) put up. The facade of perfection, which is a tricky thing. Very rarely do we cut our grass because we want our grass to be cut... we cut our grass because we don't want the neighbors to think that we are disgusting and lazy pigs who don't cut their grass. A new haircut is almost entirely pointless unless someone tells us they like our new haircut. We build up the walls, brick by brick, with the images of perfection with hopes of approval by others. That is who we are... it's what we do. Sometimes those things are about living within the social contract. Sometimes those things are about making ourselves feel acceptable. Very often, those things are about wanting the world to validate us.
Here is the truth: If I don't cut my grass, it doesn't make me a bad person... so why would I feel like I bad person if I didn't cut my grass? Who I am and my validity as a human being is not gauged on the condition of my front lawn...but I feel like it is.
So, I build these walls of perfection and I search for the world to validate me... and sometimes someone comes along and kicks one of my bricks. This internet is a classic brick kicker. I'll give an example.
I post things on the internet and I wait for the rest of the world to come back and comment. But, more often than not, the internet and in their shiniest brick-kicking boots to tear me down, or worse, not comment at all. My defenses go up and I get angry. I am tempted to write out in long form exactly why I am right and tear down the people who disagree to make them feel as small as they 'make" me feel. Internet-1, me-0. In the past couple of weeks, I have watched a few internet-related activities, and I'm starting to see a pattern. These things, the internet-based arguments, are 100% over things that don't really matter. I'm likely going to have to quantify that.
I have a strong set up social and political beliefs. Equal rights is a prime example. In the deep core of my being resides a conviction that LGBT individuals should have the right to marry whoever they want. It is a cause that means the world to me. If, on the day of voting for Amendment One in North Carolina ( which I clearly voted against), my daughter had taking very very ill and was hospitalized, I would have opted to be with her in the hospital over voting. I'm sorry for that LGBT community, but it's the truth. Equally, if a friend of mine had been dying, or a friend lost a child or a spouse, or some other situation of equal tragedy had happened to someone I love, I would have not voted on that day. I have equally strong beliefs about other things. Vaccination, proper pay for teachers, the rights of the maligned, the improper use of religion in government. I am a person with strong convictions. But if any of those things were to come head-to-head against a tragic loss or a situation that required unimaginable strength in someone I love, I would pick to be there for the person I love. Period.
So, the things that really matter come down to the new test... I'll call it the " If you knew" test. If you knew that the person you were about to engage in an argument with has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer... if you knew that person's mom passed away last night.... if you knew that they were going to miscarry tomorrow....if you knew that their husband just got laid off.... if you knew that last night their boyfriend hit them.... if you knew... would you continue to argue with them over this issue? If the answer is no, than that thing, that issue, doesn't really matter.
So, why is the internet being wrong my fault? It's my fault because what I have done is look to the internet to validate my walls of perfection, which we have established, are bullshit. 100% of the time, when people are getting snarky with each other on the internet, it's because the issue doesn't really matter, but worse, it's because the Original Poster didn't go looking for support... they went looking for a group of people to validate their picture of perfection.
Never...never never never, will you find someone who put on Facebook that their mother passed away and someone coming along with a snarky comment. Never will you find someone who posts on an internet forum that their child was diagnosed with Cancer with nasty comments coming back to them. You would never find a troll comment on a news comment area against a child who was killed because of abuse ( the parents or abuser, perhaps, but not the child). Why? Because when we see real vulnerability, we know it and we open our arms up to it. We know when people need to be supported... but we also know, deep down inside, when they are just looking to be validated. And there is a difference.
What's interesting is that many many people confuse the two. They think that because they believe a certain way and others don't, that means they are not being supported. They are wrong. I didn't breastfeed, and when someone would come to me and tell me that breastfeeding is best, my defenses went up. They were invalidating me... they were telling me that my walls of perfection weren't perfect enough, and I was defending my perfect walls. My response was to say they weren't being supportive... but that's not true. They weren't being unsupportive... they just weren't validating my walls of perfection. They were telling me my grass was too high.. and I was taking it as a personal assault.
Any person who goes looking for support will find it... any person who looks for validation under the guise of support will be inevitably disappointed.
So, the next time the internet is wrong, I'm going to do a few things. First, I'm going to do the "If I knew" test to determine if I really feel the need to engage with this person. Second, I'm going to test the weight of being vulnerable verse the weight of need to be validated... and test it honestly ( likely against the " what would I give up against this" test). Things can matter, but not against the weight of things that really matter. Lastly, I'm going to try to see the difference between to two before assigning blame to others and being so quick to assume that it's someone else's fault.
Because, in that light, the internet has never really been wrong. I have been.
