When you are rude or condescending you are really telling that person: “you don’t matter to me, I don’t care how you feel and I certainly don’t want a relationship with you.”
Rudeness begets separation, a distinction between me and you; it is a dividing line that says we are separate with no hope of being anything else.
If you are foolish enough to believe that you are superior and therefore *pay no price* for your rude behavior, be warned, everyone pays a price for rude behavior. Rude behavior can be compared to a loose cannon on a ship on a stormy sea, once it is loosened, there is no way to tell how much damage the big, ugly, heavy cannon will do by rolling uncontrollably around the deck of the ship, up to and including sinking the ship or killing sailors.
If you are rude because you are angry, then you have allowed your anger to run away with you. Perhaps you believe that mistakes should be punished ruthlessly, and perhaps that is the way you live. Can you say then, that your traffic ticket should be charged to you at the highest possible rate? When you make a mistake do you punish yourself ruthlessly as you would do others? Of course not.
If any of your relationships include careless behavior that includes rudeness, condescension and a general lack of respect, then you will not enjoy that relationship to the fullest extent possible. The person who takes the brunt of the bad behavior will dislike you, resent you or dismiss you. No matter that the person may act differently than that. You cannot easily rid yourself of bad feelings evoked by someone who is disrespectful of you. So you must be aware that you foster a difficult environment.
Perhaps you are the boss, or in some other way economically dominant of those people that you would scorn and disrespect. Perhaps you believe that your position gives you the right to demand compliance from others. Of course, justice is a human construct, so you may never see justice. You may never realize what you have missed either. You may not know what kind of relationship is available to humans who are loving, giving and kind.
We are not a society that prides itself in honesty. We lie profusely and often. You may never find out what others think of you because your behavior is ugly and mean. You might end up going to your grave thinking that you were a “good manager” or “wealthy” or “successful”.
And that is truly what we would call an unconscious life.
Girl Shopping is the Best.I don’t know when it happened. It happened recently, perhaps after I read Nora Ephron’s book “I Feel Bad About My Neck”.
It may have been watching the Dove commercials…
Here is what happened: I decided that my body is okay. I will not concern myself with fixing what is truly appropriate and okay. I’m 56 and it’s okay, I am not reed slender, my breasts do not stand up. My breasts laid down a very long time ago, probably along the time I was breastfeeding my third child. So what set me free from an obsession with a young body?
I think it was none other than me deciding that I did not want to chase me. I think I decided that I am secure, my place is decided and I cannot chase the dreams of materialism. I look somewhat the same with or without 10 pounds, my neck droops, my eyelids droop and it’s fine. I am who I am.
In a broader sense, women are beautiful as they are. We offer life and love, we give, we receive, we do what it takes to take care of our families. What matter what shape our bodies take?
Let yourself believe that what you need is okay. Be gentle and supportive with yourself. Know that as you make your way to mental and emotional health and well being, you will need to suspend all “shoulds” in your life.
Call a friend, talk as much as you need to. When you are done, call your mother and / or your father. Call someone that you know loves you. Relax without purpose. Give your brain the time and the space to work through the pain, the anguish, the trauma, the ordeal. Whatever it is that hurts you, do not pursue it by talking about it over and over again or thinking about it over and over again.
Give yourself peace. Ask for help if you need to. Take the dynamic of time and make it work for you. Allow yourself the time, the support, the kindness to walk through your healing. And then walk…
I would never expect you to risk your job, just to be fair. It is incredibly unfair the way the dry cleaning industry charges for women’s shirts. Almost always the dry cleaner wants 4.99 per woman’s shirt while charging 1.99 for my husband’s shirt. Why is that? I have been told many things, for example: women’s shirts are smaller and have to be ironed by hand, without a shadow of a doubt, this is a lie! I have been told that ironing ruins rayon…do I look ignorant to you? Or the famous victim stance, which is, “we don’t have any control”. I get it, maybe you don’t have control.
Here is my problem: you – dry cleaning lady – Why are you so zealous in this chore of overcharging women? I see that it is a chore and someone must do it, but why are you so happy and so self righteous about overcharging women for pressing their shirts? You are a woman, so surely you understand the state of the world, surely you must realize that the downtrodden should liaison with each other. Women can be your chore, rather than making someone else rich on the backs of working women, be part of the women of the world.
They are the two who taught me the difference between emotional intelligence and the intelligence quotient. My father was a genius, my mother not so much, in the realm of intelligence. My mother understood every nuance of human feelings and behavior. My mother’s gifts were not valued and my father’s gifts were valued. It must have been hard for my mother to realize the social significance of her talents – it couldn’t have been easy to hear “what is you, does not count in society”. My father was a member of the cohort that established IQ testing as a scientific concept. He was in the armed forces in the 40s and 50s when the concepts were being experimented with. He was a superstar who always scored higher than others.
It is a bleak reality of that time in our country that my mother suffered so much. It is even ironic that my mother was the more successful of the two of them. It was my mother who got a job with a living income, it was my mother who supported us, not my father.
My father wandered the country eschewing things such as employment and stability, always looking to the next rainbow for satisfaction and happiness.
Now that I am who I am – I thank destiny every day that I had these two to raise me. For whatever reason I ended up with my father’s conflicted brain, but having had my mother as my touchstone, I have a deep appreciation for the emotions and for love. It was my mother who taught me the good of life.
It is for this reason (appreciation for other human characteristics) that I am able to listen to my husband. My husband taught me to reach out to those I love and tell them how important they are to me. My husband taught me to have infinite patience with those who struggle to find their way. If not for the love of my mother and father – both – I don’t think I would be able to value who we are and who we are meant to be.
What is success, but that that we individually define as success? At each point in life, we may measure this differently.
And as life situations and events change, so too does our ability to define ourselves as successful. There are times when we are loving & kind, and times when we are hateful and mean. There are times when we are financially wealthy and times when we are bankrupt. There are times when we are deeply upset by our child’s actions and other times when we are so proud of our child that we feel we can burst. There are times when we are driven to violence and other times when we can imagine nothing but peacefulness and calm.
There are times when we feel profoundly loved by another and times when we feel profoundly disconnected and alone. There will be a time in life when no professional endeavor brings success and there will be a time when everything we do professionally is positive and right.
For those folks who want to criticize others, for those folks who are judgmental and hateful, for those who would want to tout their success as a sign of superiority, they are quite mistaken in their thought process. Success is how each of us measures it, not how each of us judges it in others. Success is a function of time. No one can always be successful. We must all fail. When we fail, are we a failure? Of course we are not. We are not who we are because of an event or because of a moment in time. We are who we are because of what is pervasive in us. What motivates us? What actions do we take? What have we created? These are questions that define us.
Wealth and success are not signs of superiority, though in America, we might think that they are. Wealth and success are simply a sign of the time…
I am having difficulty recognizing the “doneness” of my youth. Fortunately, I am not resentful about it, yet there are some things that startle me from time to time.
I am not going back to school to have a different profession “someday”. I will never be the sole support of an infant’s nutrition again. I will not sweat through my kids’ driving test ever again. I will never be a stage performer or a singer. Not because my life is over – not even close, but because I recognize my limitations and I am real about them. I see that I will not start a business and become startling wealthy from my clever investments and management strategies. I am not closing the door on becoming wealthy though, I also know I can’t hold my breath.
There is no distant and rosy future. The future is now. I realize that nothing important can be put off until tomorrow because tomorrow is limited, it has constraints.
My body does not wish to cooperate with me so much. I am slow at healing and I have the thyroid disease. The disease affects me in many, many ways. I cannot shrug off the side effects of my medication because they will and they do affect me. I took a very low dose sleeping pill until I realized that I could not remember anything, whoops… side effects do pertain to me! Loss of memory is the side effect of taking this medication. My body, as it is now, is not as resilient as it used to be.
I’m not done learning, but I don’t need direction and correction. It’s not that I am not open, in fact, I am very open. I am also very weary of assumptions. Often those who are sure, have never asked a question, nor done any worthy research. So my experience sometimes leads me to impatience. Don’t come at me if you don’t know what you are talking about…
A good thing… I’ve lost the need to be unselfish or to martyr myself on behalf of others. Realizing that I have no tomorrow helps me to understand that if I want diamond earrings, I need to buy them now. If I want to indulge in flowers, I need to do it now, not later when my house is perfect, or later when I have “extra” cash. If I want flowers, I need to buy them now.
I always enjoyed being focused and building things. I built a life with my kids, near them and dear to them. I had to let them go, it is the destiny of all parents to relinquish children to their own futures. All of my building *a family* has gone into the ether, no longer useful to today. I am not regretful about losing my importance to my kids. The less important I am, the better off they are.
What I realize with my age is that, I had no other plan. It is as if my entire life hinged on raising the kids and having a career. Now that process is either complete or winding down – I had no other ideas about what to do next. Now that I am no longer self-sacrificing I do not wish to spend the rest of my life blindly stepping forward to music that someone else is playing. I want my own orchestra and symphony.
