Problems with authority
I've got problems with authority. I question it. I strive to not blindly follow any convention. Sometimes I will still go along with established convention, but only after it's met with my scrutiny. I'm an odd duck. I'm not a leader, but I'm not a follower, and I'm yet still not a true loner.
I used to be a loner. I felt that my ideal of being myself meant that I couldn't be around many other people, or accomplish anything within a group. I also didn't care what anybody else thought. I learned, in time, that groups are important, and I do care what other people think, because I want to change the way that certain things get taught to new members of said groups, aka children. I don't want children to have to grow up learning the same stupid crap that I had, and still have, to unlearn. Which is problematic, because if these children don't have anything bad to unlearn, they'll never learn how to unlearn bad habits. An odd perspective perhaps, but one I've found valid.
A step back. I believe that everything, or nearly everything, is learned. Emotional expression, if not the emotions themselves, are learned. That includes all the obvious things, like how we judge others to how we judge ourselves, but it also involves more subtle things, like how to deal with the unknown. How much have you been exposed to things that other people around you weren't ready and willing to take care of the hard parts you didn't yet know for you? Did you have to cope on your own a lot, or did someone always care and make sure to teach you lessons? You'd think having a parent/mentor who was always there to help you figure things out would make for a better educated person, and perhaps a more mentally stable one (at least, that's what I understand is the conventional logic, and even what I generally lean toward), but a person who always had that might be at a loss for how to deal with situations where they don't know the answers, and others around them don't either. A person who didn't have that would have learned different lessons about life, and maybe not the ones we expect. While they'd learn to figure things out for them self, they might also have learned that they couldn't ask for help, because they wouldn't get any, and would just waste time trying. They also wouldn't learn effective ways to communicate their ideas to other people, never having experienced something being communicated to them in an effective way.
I learned to distrust those in authority. I went to public school, and I was picked on by bullies a lot. My mother had taught me to be myself and speak my mind. Being myself, I was different from other people. And I told them so. At first I did this simply in naive friendliness, and didn't understand when others took offense to it, and beat me up for it. Over time, I grew bitter, and would intentionally mess with those who messed with me for my being myself, saw them as mentally and morally weaker for caving into social pressure, and so on. In short, I became a smart ass. I still got my ass kicked.
Now, while all this was going on with my peers, the adults at school branded me a troublemaker. At first I excelled in my classes with some combination of intellect, stubbornness and perfectionism. Within a few years, I grew bitter at school as well: when I would have problems with my peers, I was blamed, and frequently, punished for being attacked physically by them. I once got suspended for a week after I got jumped by about five kids who where my same age, but larger than me, and the recess monitor saw me attacking one of them back, but not the previous ruckus. I was battered and bruised, and the kid I was hitting had a fat lip, yet I was still the aggressor and at fault. None of the other kids got punished. So I stopped doing what these adults asked of me in class. I still learned, but I refused to do homework I felt was beneath me. I got many poor grades, but I never stopped learning. It just wasn't the lesson they wanted me to learn. I was learning that, while they had 'power' over me at school, it was a power that meant nothing. It extended to the boarder of the school, and in time, I would never have to visit the school again. There power to stop me would be ended, and the consequences of school authority did not extend anywhere else in the world. My 'permanent record' was a joke.
But, once out of school, this stopped being true. Authority means something in the real world. Not all it should, but much more than the impotent finger waving of the school principal. At work, your boss's opinion matters, and if you ignore it and disrespect it, you don't advance, no matter the quality of your work. If your work does not redeem you, you get fired. If you ignore the authority of law (at least, in a way that flaunts it at law enforcement people), then you get fined or go to jail. If you flaunt the fact that you are above and beyond the authority of your peers, you look like a jackass, and you earn a reputation for being arrogant, unmanageable, not worth the bother.
And I work from home now, largely on my own cognizances. I can't afford to disrespect my boss and my peers, because I am, in many ways that matter, my own boss. Disrespect for the authority of those around me is a hard lesson to unlearn.
I used to be a loner. I felt that my ideal of being myself meant that I couldn't be around many other people, or accomplish anything within a group. I also didn't care what anybody else thought. I learned, in time, that groups are important, and I do care what other people think, because I want to change the way that certain things get taught to new members of said groups, aka children. I don't want children to have to grow up learning the same stupid crap that I had, and still have, to unlearn. Which is problematic, because if these children don't have anything bad to unlearn, they'll never learn how to unlearn bad habits. An odd perspective perhaps, but one I've found valid.
A step back. I believe that everything, or nearly everything, is learned. Emotional expression, if not the emotions themselves, are learned. That includes all the obvious things, like how we judge others to how we judge ourselves, but it also involves more subtle things, like how to deal with the unknown. How much have you been exposed to things that other people around you weren't ready and willing to take care of the hard parts you didn't yet know for you? Did you have to cope on your own a lot, or did someone always care and make sure to teach you lessons? You'd think having a parent/mentor who was always there to help you figure things out would make for a better educated person, and perhaps a more mentally stable one (at least, that's what I understand is the conventional logic, and even what I generally lean toward), but a person who always had that might be at a loss for how to deal with situations where they don't know the answers, and others around them don't either. A person who didn't have that would have learned different lessons about life, and maybe not the ones we expect. While they'd learn to figure things out for them self, they might also have learned that they couldn't ask for help, because they wouldn't get any, and would just waste time trying. They also wouldn't learn effective ways to communicate their ideas to other people, never having experienced something being communicated to them in an effective way.
I learned to distrust those in authority. I went to public school, and I was picked on by bullies a lot. My mother had taught me to be myself and speak my mind. Being myself, I was different from other people. And I told them so. At first I did this simply in naive friendliness, and didn't understand when others took offense to it, and beat me up for it. Over time, I grew bitter, and would intentionally mess with those who messed with me for my being myself, saw them as mentally and morally weaker for caving into social pressure, and so on. In short, I became a smart ass. I still got my ass kicked.
Now, while all this was going on with my peers, the adults at school branded me a troublemaker. At first I excelled in my classes with some combination of intellect, stubbornness and perfectionism. Within a few years, I grew bitter at school as well: when I would have problems with my peers, I was blamed, and frequently, punished for being attacked physically by them. I once got suspended for a week after I got jumped by about five kids who where my same age, but larger than me, and the recess monitor saw me attacking one of them back, but not the previous ruckus. I was battered and bruised, and the kid I was hitting had a fat lip, yet I was still the aggressor and at fault. None of the other kids got punished. So I stopped doing what these adults asked of me in class. I still learned, but I refused to do homework I felt was beneath me. I got many poor grades, but I never stopped learning. It just wasn't the lesson they wanted me to learn. I was learning that, while they had 'power' over me at school, it was a power that meant nothing. It extended to the boarder of the school, and in time, I would never have to visit the school again. There power to stop me would be ended, and the consequences of school authority did not extend anywhere else in the world. My 'permanent record' was a joke.
But, once out of school, this stopped being true. Authority means something in the real world. Not all it should, but much more than the impotent finger waving of the school principal. At work, your boss's opinion matters, and if you ignore it and disrespect it, you don't advance, no matter the quality of your work. If your work does not redeem you, you get fired. If you ignore the authority of law (at least, in a way that flaunts it at law enforcement people), then you get fined or go to jail. If you flaunt the fact that you are above and beyond the authority of your peers, you look like a jackass, and you earn a reputation for being arrogant, unmanageable, not worth the bother.
And I work from home now, largely on my own cognizances. I can't afford to disrespect my boss and my peers, because I am, in many ways that matter, my own boss. Disrespect for the authority of those around me is a hard lesson to unlearn.