Tag Archives: relationships

Unknown's avatar

People Problems

by

I knew someone once who started almost every piece of advice with, “I was feeling that same way about a month or two ago.” Whether that statement was true or not, it always got me steamed up. I don’t exactly know why. I just know that every time I heard that phrase I wanted to pick the world up and drop it on someone’s head a la Lil Wayne.

I’m in this Psychology of Personality class this quarter, which is really swell. And I enjoy it a lot. But I have a major beef with all of the personality theorists that we’ve studied so far. They all think that development is linear – that as we come across new conflicts and resolve them, we become a more full and better person. And I just think that’s silly.

Right now, we are learning about Erik Erikson. He believed that life development consisted of eight epigenetic stages. That’s just a fancy way of saying that each stage grows on top of the other and that if we get messed up in one stage, then it ruins the other stages for us. Each of these stages is marked by a conflict, and if we navigate the conflict correctly, we learn a new “ego skill” or virtue. The conflict in the first stage, for instance, is trust vs. mistrust. And if we navigate it correctly, we acquire hope. That first stage happens before we are a year old.

I don’t even know how to understand this.

These conflicts are never resolved. Aren’t we constantly dealing with whether or not to trust the world? Or take Stage 3’s conflict, initiative v. shame and doubt. This supposedly happens before you are 6. But pretty much every college student I know routinely bounces back and forth between hard-working and lazy, self-loathing bum (myself included).

I don’t think there are “teenage” problems or “adult” problems or “kid” problems in this world. I just think there are people problems.

What are your people problems?

Unknown's avatar

Refresh Yourself

by

I spent my weekend hanging out with high school seniors. Hopefully, there will be pictures forthcoming. I think there’s something really refreshing about hanging out with the life stage immediately below you. The refreshing part about it is that life stages are really fluid and so their problems are your problems except different enough that you have solutions for their problems. That’s all a bit confusing. Let me explain.

I have a brother. His name is Ty. He’s wonderful. He’s my best friend. Our relationship is pretty simple. When we were little, we fought. When I got to high school, we started to respect each other, but didn’t feel like we could talk to each other. Then when he got to high school we became equals, peers. And that’s how it is now. And we talk, quite a bit. And that’s very nice.

When we talk now, his problems are my problems and vice versa. Both of us are trying to figure out how to juggle school, extracurriculars, and a social life. Both of us are trying to figure out what our next life stage is going to look like. Both of us are trying to figure out how to be more self-confident and how to navigate relationships.

But we deal with these problems in very different ways. Part of this is because we are different people. But another part of it is because we are at different points in our lives. Right now, I have a tendency to complicate things. And so when I hang out with my brother and his friends, they make me simplify everything. And right now, Ty and his friends have  a tendency to simplify things. And so I try to help them gain more perspective on a problem. (I don’t know if that’s helpful or true, but I pretend like it is.)

And that’s all very refreshing. It’s refreshing to know that the game always kind of stays the same, and it’s just your own convoluted brain that changes. It’s refreshing to know that there are people who care about you no matter what happens.

Unknown's avatar

Aelred Haters Gon’ Hate

by

I wrote a while back about Aelred and his spiritual friendship. I like friendship; I like writing about it; and I like seeing and experiencing it. But I’ve been thinking about Aelred quite a bit. He has kind of been following me all around, pointing out good examples of love and friendship and bad examples, and keeping me on the straight and narrow. I like that about Aelred: he’s so loving and wonderfully helpful.

There’s something else I really like about Aelred, though. (Besides the fact that his Feast Day is on my birthday! Yeah, that’s right, we celebrate the life of the greatest friends of all time with our friends on my birthday!) When he was writing and teaching and being awesome in the twelfth century, there were some people inexplicably who didn’t like him. I guess this makes sense. No one goes through his whole life without having some haters. And, as everyone knows, haters gonna hate.

The common practice during the twelfth century was to respond to the haters. You did this by writing long and scathing tracts to your haters about why they were wrong and you were better. Some writers, like the always-angry-and-melancholy Abelard, spent the better part of their careers responding to the criticism from these other writers who were never going to agree with anyone anyway. Kind of a useless endeavor, if you ask me. And in Abelard’s case, it cost him to forget about this wonderful girl Heloise who was a keeper if there ever was one.

Anyway, I’m digressing and airing nine-century-old grudges.

Aelred never responded to his haters. And I’m sure, at the time, it felt like all of the world was against him because when you are a public figure and you have haters, it feels like those haters are everyone. But somehow, Aelred pulled through it. He didn’t lash out, and he kept reminding himself, I suspect, that there were plenty of people who loved him. His writing shows it.

Like with most people, Aelred eventually died, but his writing has survived. We have writing from a lot of writers from his time. The cool thing about writing from that time is that they didn’t divorce their personalities from their rhetorical voices so we, as modern readers, easily make judgments about what kind of people they were. And here’s the moral of this story: Aelred, because he was never bitter, never hateful, never spiteful and always loving, is beloved today. Readers read him and feel like they could easily crack open a fresh one with him. And so now, in 2011, Aelred’s haters don’t matter. Because haters die too, and if you don’t respond to them, the record of them dies as well.

How do you deal with haters?