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Giving
Up “I Suck"
I burned the applesauce. It was more than a month ago now,
but I still consider it to be recent because I haven’t yet
managed to finish scrubbing the burned stuff off the bottom
of the pots, meaning we are short on large pots in the house.
We had gone apple-picking, trekking somewhat far afield based
on the promise of especially good cider doughnuts, and instead
serendipitously discovering a place that grows my absolute
favorite type of apple—winesaps, a very late apple that I
have trouble finding this far north.
So I had a bushel of winesaps, and I was going to make and
freeze applesauce. But I hadn’t done it in a while, and my
pots were thin-bottomed, and I set the flame too high, and
then I got distracted.
By the time I caught it, burned flavor had completely permeated
the lot. They were ruined.
I stood in the kitchen, paralyzed for a while at the thought
of the sheer waste and weighed down by disappointment. To
get moving again more than anything else, I resorted, in small
bursts, to whoever would listen, to my usual mode of frustration
release.
“I
suck!” “I am so dumb.” “What a frigging idiot.”
I didn’t actually mean these things. I mean, I had done a
dumb thing, but I didn’t actually believe it was any particular
reflection on my inherent nature. I have my neuroses and insecurities
like everyone else, but generalized lack of self-esteem has
blessedly never been one of them.
But it certainly wasn’t the first time I’ve said such things.
I pretty much only do it when I’m annoyed or frustrated at
something specific I’ve done, especially something that’s
mostly affecting me. I can generally manage a more adult and
productive response to being constructively criticized or
when circumstances call for an apology to someone else.
But sometimes these habitual self-deprecations are just like
a pressure valve, like shaking my fist at a noninteractive
God. Although my near and dear ones will sometimes chime in
with “No you’re not” or “No you don’t,” I tended to react
with mild exasperation. I didn’t actually need reassurance.
It was just a way of letting off steam. It didn’t really worry
me much.
But this time I paused and realized my baby daughter was sleeping
in the next room. And I had to give it a little more thought.
Even though it doesn’t point to anything too dire in my case,
I find it highly likely that the fact that I do this has a
decent amount to do with the ways it’s acceptable for girls
to get mad. Rather than curse, shout, throw things, or blame
someone/something else (not all of which are wonderfully healthy
either, of course), it’s much more acceptable for girls and
women to blame themselves. It goes along with crying when
angry instead of shouting.
I saw habitual self put-downs do rough things to my friends
growing up. Since the most common pitfalls I saw were “I look
fat,” or “I’m ugly,” I have long refused ever to say them,
even when occasionally I felt that way. (Odd, then, that I
let the broader ones through, but these things don’t make
sense.) I helped friends throw scales into lakes (OK, I did
that once), talked them through depressions (not on my own),
and challenged them when they assumed they couldn’t do math
or physics or the SATs.
Such comments become a way-smoother, a verbal bowing of the
head, that we are expected to use to make ourselves seem less
threatening as we step out of being passive and nice all the
time.
I remember undertaking a project with some friends to rid
ourselves of the feminine habit of saying “Excuse me” or “I’m
sorry” when someone else bumped into us, tripped us,
or pushed through a door in front of us. It was the flip side
of pointedly holding doors open for our guy friends sometimes,
and it reached much deeper. It was weird to even realize we
were doing such a bizarre thing. Even weirder that we still
did it after we noticed it.
Underconfidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I’d rather
not feed into it in children of any gender.
So I’ve undertaken a self-improvement program. Parenthood
does that to you, I suppose. People quit smoking and cursing
and strengthen crappy work ethics for their kids all the time.
I ought to be able to give up hyperbolic self-flagellation.
It has been, as you might expect, moderately challenging.
Not being inclined to take up breaking things or misassigning
blame, but also not wanting to bottle up frustration and blow
my life-long record of low blood pressure, I’ve found myself
stopping, chewing on my tongue for a minute, and quietly feeling
annoyed and miserable without putting irrelevant words to
it. Sometimes I twist the sentence coming to mind to be about
the action instead of about me. Sometimes I don’t.
It doesn’t feel particularly Zen or like I have discovered
new wells of confidence. But that’s OK. I’m not doing it for
me.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
www.mjoy.org
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