TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

#79 – Being a Guy – Part 2

#79 - Being a Guy – Part 2

In the interim between parts one and two, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Thinking and talking with other folks, the ones who read what I wrote and had some things to say in reply. Not to devote a lot of time to the subject but it felt extremely gratifying to write something that not only made sense to other people but also prompted them to respond.

The point I was trying to make, but didn’t get to previously, was that the whole myth of being a man is very simple and that women have it exponentially more difficult what with all of the negative media perceptions they are bombarded with is patently false. Sure, being a guy seems simple, but let’s talk about some of the stuff they don’t warn you about when they issue you your genitals.

First of all – they don’t warn you about how much you’re going to be expected to absorb, put up with, be hurt by and yet not let anyone know because you are of the male gender. That’s not a genetically implanted concept, that’s taught. It’s not something that I’ll spend an entire book worth of text explaining that it all comes from the cave man days where men were the hunters and the soldiers and they were expected to defend the republic at the cost of their own life if necessary. Stoicism, the Spartans. “Be a man” – ever really think about what that statement involves?

But let’s not go too deep just yet – just getting started, after all. My role as a guy wasn’t defined by cave men or written down somewhere for me to read and decide to adopt. It was defined, ironically enough, by the males and females close to me in my life. Hear that? Females had a part in it too. Nurturers, my hind foot. Roles are defined for you, before you’re old enough to realize you have a choice, by the people around you. They pour into you all the hopes, fears, joys and prejudices they chose to adopt in the space between the time they started breathing on their own and when you came into the picture. Some of them are reasonable, others are not.

I’m glad to be a guy – wouldn’t want to be any other way. No joke, I’ve got a list in my head of reasons that I’m glad to be a guy. I might get around to publishing it one of these days. But being of the male gender is pretty much in the can at conception. Being a man, well, that’s a different story. Everyone has their own version of how to get there and even with that kind of diversity it’s no guarantee that the road you took was really the best one for you. There was a thin line between being rewarded for being “sensitive” and being told “Suck it up – be a man”. Whenever I was told that, I wished that there was a Pause button on the universe that I could press and then ask the person telling me that: “Can you explain to me what that means really?”

There appears to be a place in my life that skewed slightly. Not enough so that you’d be able to accurately describe it but enough so that you always felt out of place in among the activities of your peers. I described it before as male bonding; I think a lot of the rituals you learn and carry throughout the course of your life are learned at the age before you start developing into an adult. I’m not exactly sure how it works for girls but there’s a certain list of things that boys do before they become men that I’ve never been a part of and I’ve always felt a bit off as a result of.

What am I talking about? I’m not really sure. I think of all the things you accept about young men. The things they discuss, the things they fear, the things they love and/or hate. Being around other people during your formative years, you absorb these things and they become part of your basic human knowledge set. Almost the same way that all the germs you pick up as a kid become part of your immune system. If you live your life completely separate from germs and bacteria, sure you’re never that sick but the first cold or flu you get might kill you.

I think had I been around that stuff more often growing up, my emotional immune system would have been better developed. The silly stuff that most people accept and take for granted about their lives wouldn’t be such a huge anchor around my neck. I wouldn’t be wasting my time talking about it, documenting and trying to understand it. I’d just accept it all, move on and talk about something else. Instead, I’m observing this stuff at a distance and writing it all down – the Jane Goodall of male human behavior.

So – since I’ve written down some of these things, gotten them out of my head and onto the table where I can look at them, they hold a lot less emotional power over me. I’m comfortable with the fact that even though I didn’t have a typical childhood, I think it puts me in a better position to be pragmatic about the way I allow other people to see me. Sure, I’m not the typical guy but that’s the point. In discussing the issue with a friend, we both came to the same conclusion via alternate routes. We didn’t grow up in the typical, red-blooded All-American kind of way but, that’s okay. We are different but we are not alone.

So, all of the above having been said – here are some concepts that I wanted to get down on paper (e-paper?) and share with you. They may not make sense immediately but don’t worry about that – I had to wait 28 years before all of this made sense.

Mentors

Here’s a weird one: the people you learn the most from are the people you least expect to teach you. The years after I became a legal adult in this state were weird ones. Almost all of the support structure I grew up with suddenly evaporated and I’ve spent the last ten years trying to either re-establish that support or find new ways to get it. Is that too vague? I had to stop going to my parents for advice. This wasn’t my choice, mind. It wasn’t theirs, either. It just was the end result of a lot of problems; none of which I was responsible for or had control over.

I have ten years of time and distance to see now that I was nothing more than the bird that was kicked out of the nest. Whether you have your wings ready or not, chump – you’re headed straight at the ground, so start flapping. Is it right? No. Is it fair? No. It just is. Stephen Covey, when he’s not spending time looking like a supervillan or a cult leader, said something interesting. Real leaders, he said, are the people who can manage their reactions and responses most appropriately. I saw the truth of his statement but didn’t understand it until years afterward. I didn’t know how to manage my reactions; I’d never been taught that it was even possible. I’d been spending years of time with people who held it in until they started throwing silverware or packing their stuff and screaming at each other in the middle of the night that they were moving out.

So the mentors were people I just picked up along the way. Or maybe they were simply put in my path by someone who thought I could use them. They weren’t family or friends or even people I knew. I picked them up after the fact and after I learned how to identify, engage and learn from them. It took time to do all of this, illustrating another point that I will get to in a second. After I was able to find them, I was able to filter down what they were saying into something that I could use. It took time and patience on their part. It took a lot of head-banging-against-brick-walls on mine.

Your mentors will manifest themselves over time and not necessarily when you think you need them. That’s part of learning to manage your reactions, of truly understanding that the universe is moving on its own timetable and when it’s ready it will move with you. Find them, engage them (that means talk to them) and learn from them. None of this is stuff you pick up right away, so don’t forget to be patient with yourself. On that note, let’s talk about another important truth.

Change

I don’t want to waste your time with a recitation of a Bob Dylan tune or Ecclesiastes chapter 3 as interpreted by the Byrds. Change, learning how to change when the time is right, learning how to hang back and relax when it isn’t, is a very important skill to learn. Coming from my background, I developed a very can-do/will-do attitude for a variety of reasons. I wasn’t always a good kid and my parents impressed upon me the benefit of being the person to take responsibility to change myself. Don’t ask.

That translated into a lot of other areas (all of them) and I became a very driven, intense person. I wasn’t patient with myself and only slightly more patient with other people. You can only go so far like that, I’ve learned. How did I learn? Again, don’t ask.

Victor Hugo, the author of Les Miserables said, “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come”. And that became a very powerful statement to me only recently. What about that idea before its time came? Was it any less of a good idea? That opened my mind up to another branch of thought – how long had I been battering myself against something when it just simply wasn’t the right time?

There’s something unspoken about all of that – who says when the right time is, who do you identify the right time, etc. I can’t even speak about those things, it gets too philosophical. All’s I know is, I’ve been killing myself trying to make things happen when they weren’t ready to do so. It was like wadding up a washing machine load of wet laundry and then trying to carry it up a hill. I know you’ve done it before, try to take an entire load of laundry (dry laundry, that is) and move it out to where you’re going to fold it. Pick the whole wad up and then with this ungainly thing you have your arms around, waddle to the living room or wherever. Socks and underwear drop off – you leave a trail of clothes between you and your starting point. With any luck, they don’t need to be washed again.

Sometimes problems are like that, too. You’ve got a wad of wet laundry in your arms – you’re dropping socks to the floor, the clothes are soaking your shirt front. It’s extra heavy because the clothes are all wet. You want to drop it but you can’t because it’ll make the problem worse. Bad illustration, I know, but it’s what keeps popping into my head every time I get really stressed out. Like Sisyphus rolling that stone to the top of the hill, only it’s wet laundry, instead of a rock. You have to keep everything together, no one really cares why you’re doing it. All you really get for your trouble is a wet shirt.

That’s what trying to make things happen before they are ready is like. A lot of effort, very little motion and no, repeat NO (as in NONE), thanks. That’s not people being insensitive or indifferent, that’s life slapping you upside the head going, “Why are you trying to make things difficult?” So, I got the message – I need to learn how to help get things get done, not how to make them happen on my own. I’ve started down that path, if I ever feel like I’ve gotten half-way there, I’ll drop you a line to tell you where to look.

Right and Wrong Vs. Being Effective

I used to walk around with this big chip on my shoulder – about how I was ready to do the right thing even when that was hard to do. How self-absorbed can you get? Yet another manifestation of my big ol’ self-esteem issues. Again, it was taught. It was the way I learned to solve problems. Problem is, just being right isn’t enough in the adult world. As a man, as a husband, I’m finding more and more that you’re going to be thrust into situations where you’re never right no matter what you do.

You start to feel like an animal in a trap after a while. No matter where you step, those jaws are going to snap around your shin. You’re going to have people on one side going, “You shouldn’t be stepping into those traps” and people saying, “I coulda showed you how to avoid that” on the other. You won’t find anyone (or if you do, it’s extremely rare) to say “Hey, you know you’re about to get your leg broke, right?” That’s the kind of person you really need but he’s never around. Sometimes you’re mentor fits in this category, but not always.

So, after beating my head against this particular barn door, after wearying countless individuals with my “But I wasn’t wrong!” speech, I finally started to grasp the truth. Started to grasp that in terms of thinking, I was stuck in this two dimensional plain with all the limitations that this implies. From that, we get the additional concept of Effective versus Ineffective. Winning versus losing. This is why you hear the aforementioned bald-headed Mr. Covey say, “Think Win-Win”. Mental judo; you don’t block the hit, you don’t punch harder…you just deflect the energy.

With that opens up a whole new dimension in thought and I can take a lot of emotional energy out of what would otherwise be Shakespearian epics full of angst and drama. I’m not worried about right vs. wrong on a lot of things any more, I’m just concerned with what is effective (or not). If it does what you needed it to do, you were effective. If not, you need to re-examine your strategy.

Were I some sort of slick self-help huckster, I’d develop some one-word “system” that shows you how you, too can become a productive member of society. It doesn’t work that way. I hate insincerity. With that in mind, let me just say that a lot of what I’m talking about could easily be taken as “Tim is so Zen, he’s one of those happy and successful people.”

I’m not.

I’m just a guy. A man. A confused person who’s really still just trying to figure out just where he fits in with the whole plan. To that end, I started writing down what I was thinking about or just simply talking about my opinions. The end result of that is that I’ve had to develop a thick skin because people don’t always agree and that makes for a lot of bad noise and angst. Sometimes it’s helpful, too. Let your ideas run across the road like a squirrel. If it makes it to the other side, you’re on the right track. Just remember, like squirrels, ideas sometimes have to cross that road several times and may not always see the other side. In that case, be prepared to revise your strategy.

Strategy Revision – There’s a good thing to talk about. As we talked about before, human activity about solving problems, you have to be prepared for the day when your solutions stop working. You may not recognize it right away, either. You might bang your head against something for a year or 15 before it finally occurs to you that you need to change, why and how. When that flash of the obvious comes, you also have to be prepared for all these people who were trying to tell you, “Uhhh…we’ve been saying that for a while now.”

Being humble helps, when that happens.

So, who is Tim? Are we anywhere closer to that? Not really – we’re getting there. It’s taken me 28 years to get here and almost a month to come to the other side of this happy little essay. There’s a lot of ground to cover and sometimes it seems like I’ll never get there. But maybe I don’t have to. James Thurber said that nobody should even attempt to write their memoirs before the age of 40. I’m sure I don’t intend to do that, but maybe I can get a couple of chapters written now.

- Tim Woolery, 6/09/2005