Double-Edged Sword

    It is not unknown to those close to me that I feel the most productive way to get past misunderstandings or conflicts is to share my feelings and understand something of theirs - in fact, it is probably the only way I can understand people at all, and my only means of relation, which isn't unknown to most of my friends either.

    So, on one such occasion, early in the morning, when most people with proper obligations would likely be asleep, a friend of mine and I worked out our...differences...about a situation that arose a few weeks ago that had been eating at me - and given that was a night when I had nothing better to do but seethe in the mire of every bitter resentful thought I'd ever had in relation to my family (of which there are many, but objectively, there are many other thoughts associated with many other emotions as well, they just weren't at the forefront of my mind at the time), it came to the surface again and I could not hold it down.

    We did work it out, but she said something to me that made me totally aware of why I was so indignant on the topic in the first place, something I subconsciously knew was wrong for years, and which I attempt to rectify as often as I can, but until I heard it spoke plainly, I wasn't able to produce a concise explanation. Indeed, it seems my friend said in a single sentence what I had been trying to convey to her for over 3 hours.

"I'm not going to praise you like a dog for it."

    Without context, this likely means very little, so I will offer what I hope is concise. I have not had an easy life, it isn't a unique occurrence, but it isn't normal either. I grew up in a house where my mother resented me - or rather, the fact that she had me, and all the implications that brought along with it - and grandparents determined to pretend nothing was wrong, that we cared for each other deep down, and that any protest I raised about my mother was just the usual things kids say about their parents. It is not unusual for a child to tell their parents they hate them at least once - it is, however, unusual for their parents to express mutual feelings at least twice. The only reason I remained with my biological relatives was because getting an abortion or later giving me up for adoption would make my grandparents disown my mother and thus cut off a vital lifeline since we were, to put it bluntly, shit poor and barely able to afford transportation.

    For the record, my mother isn't an indecent person, she swallowed what she could of her resentment and tried to take care of my physical and medical needs to the best of her ability, in fact, that's why we ended up in the most ghetto part of town living off stale bread and cereal, because when we lived with my grandparents who owned a lot, lived in a clean trailer, and had 3 proper meals a day, we were seen as too rich for the government to give a damn about us but the fact remained we were too poor to help ourselves so a lot of the blame for my shitty childhood can be blamed on the system and not necessarily on my mother. (Although I doubt very seriously she needed to hit so hard, especially with such blunt, heavy objects.)

    So it was that, since kids are more attuned to feelings than older humans are, I grew up feeling the vibes of a mother that offered almost nothing in the way of emotional support or affection, and since I was forced to accompany my grammy to her day job every weekday since I was 2, and her day job was unfortunately a daycare where I had to share whatever dosage of affection I could manage to steal with 20-30 other kids, who I ended up deeply resenting myself for this reason, that I ended up getting in a lot of fights, and thus came home almost every day with my grandmother having some new complaint of whose hair I pulled or who I threw off the fort or how many kids I cornered in the sandbox like a rabid wolverine, and after a while, it just became easier for someone to mention when I went a whole day without terrorizing anyone - although my grammy would still mention every incident at the table because she loves to complain about her kids. I think it's genetic.

    And I never reserved this for daycare, and later, school, either. I noticed how much more everyone liked my cousin. My grandmother denies it, even today, of course, but my mother always says he wasn't always yelling and screaming and trying to hit everyone, which I've always believed to be the result of the fact that he had a parent that loved him regardless of how inebriated she became so I took out my bitterness on him as well and to this day my grandmother denies I ever did that, too.

    It isn't hard to imagine how school went for me - pretty much the same, except now I was willing to go to more extremes to inflict pain onto others for the sake of potentially alleviating some of my own. Didn't help I went to the worst middle school where broken glass and chipped wood were often concealed weapons in the halls. Even the kid who needed 2 crutches to get around could fight, and you wouldn't want one of those connecting with your jaw. I'd know. There wasn't a person in that place I hadn't tried to - quite literally - take a chunk out of, but by highschool I became sullen and stayed inside my head mostly. I would still attack others, but only in self-defense. I decided, at that age, I was tired of people. They never offered me what I wanted, although I had no idea what that was until junior year, when I experienced it for the first time - love.

    By the time I found the internet and some semblance of a refuge (although admittedly not a very secure one) from the things I hated most about people I was already used to having a glacier for a soul, I went without meaningful relationships for so long that the first couple times I experienced real friendship online it hurt, not unlike how frostbite feels when exposed to warmth, and lashed out in every direction having no other understanding how to act to new and confusing feelings. It turned out I became just as unpopular online as I already was in real life, and it was starting to make me hate myself quite a lot, and I struggled for a long time with trying to figure out what was wrong with me, why I didn't have things like emotional support or reliable presences, but there's probably another blog post in this menagerie of thoughts detailing that struggle and it would take another 6 paragraphs to go over it again anyway.

    So, along with a lot of other things I came out of that experience with, one of the things I realized was that criticism has been a pretty strong point in my life. My mother preferred to ignore me, although she would break from that to sometimes yell at me for getting into trouble in school because she hated getting calls from those people and being dragged away from other things to go talk to them in school (she danced a little at graduation because she could finally take them off speed dial and I swear I saw her giving double birds to the college doors we used for the ceremony when we were heading for the parking lot) and the teachers themselves had all kinds of complaints about me. if it wasn't my reign of terror (especially in elementary school) it was my lack of speed at work, my refusal to do some things set in front of me (I regret nothing of that one, by the way), or my outspoken dislike of some subjects such as math. The only thing anyone did like about me was that I was honest, I suppose because it made it easier to land me in a heap of trouble, but had the backfiring effect of me telling almost every teacher I had how much I didn't like them and why. (Probably the only thing in elementary school my mother was ever proud of.)

    On top of this, I at some point made the horrible mistake of getting into the creative mediums. It was music first, but as I didn't have the aptitude for reading it, it was not encouraged by my band teacher, or my mother, who majored in music at university and assured me I would never even qualify for half the classes she took. Then I tried art, thinking I'd have liked to make video games. At the time I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted in games that have ironically come to pass today. (Namely, sandbox and simulation games, as meta has always been my way of having fun) and started taking it seriously in 8th grade, only to find out largely through highschool and online interaction just how much of a beatdown that was asking for. I don't think I went a day in sophomore year without getting torn a fresh new one by either an art teacher or some prat online about everything under the sun from my poor anatomy to the content I drew (fanart, mostly) to my use of color (the usual complaint being "too much") to line thickness, and at first I lashed out at people as always, but ended up meeting a lot more resistance than before, maybe it was just because this was something I wanted to succeed at and I thought the whole firing off at people thing wasn't helping so I eventually learned to take it in stride and deal with its aftermath privately or to my friends.

    But in my adulthood, I cannot help but think I have endured too much criticism with too little praise.

    Anyone who's known me for any length of time is intimately aware the kinds of things I struggle with, even when the catalyst for those things is years bygone and what remain are shadows that still haunt me. It would be nice to be told, sometimes, by my friends at least, that I am making an effort to deal with a lot of deep-seeded issues, of which I only covered one in this post, to be told that I'm making headway, preferably as more than an afterthought so it doesn't come across as insincere. Few people bother to offer me that courtesy up-front, I can only think of two who have, and one of them was involved in that original discussion.

    That was what I felt so indignant about; that I have tried, and still put forth a great deal of effort, to resist or ignore the developed habits or instincts that have made me insufferable in the past. It takes a great deal of effort for me to drop whatever I'm on about and let someone else vent for a while. It takes a lot of self-control to compose my fury into concise sentences, I would like a little appreciation for what I have already accomplished over the years instead of being told that my effort is not good enough or that I still have a long way to go before I will be acceptable to others.

    It is this that makes me think we humans are too quick to criticize others but doling out praise rarely crosses our minds. I have been guilty of this injustice myself, and as someone who hangs out largely in creative circles, I see it from others first hand. I think more effort needs to be taken, on the parts of everyone, to balance out our criticisms with our praise.

    Why? Because imagine working hard on something like a painting, a video game, or self-improvement, and only to be told when you're doing something wrong, and never have potentially months of effort recognized. Imagine if everyone went silent when they couldn't think of anything to criticize you on. Would you not start to feel that your effort has been wasted, having not received any affirmatives from others? No, that is not conceited to desire or even except, it is human nature. We are social creatures, we need the approval of others to feel good about ourselves, it is why we desire friends in the first place, it is why we do much of what we do outside the basics for maintaining our health, it is why we become depressed if we feel unwanted.

    So, I take it upon myself to practice some things in my everyday life in an attempt to give to others what was denied me for so long.

    The first thing I do, and I view this as the most important, is to try and point out something good about someone's effort. Though I primarily practice this in the creative circles, it can be applied to many other things as well, and it helps to pay attention to he good traits about your friends when adopting this habit as it makes it so you can offer them honest approval when they're really down on themselves.

    The second thing I try to do, although my lack in some skills or fields of studies can hinder me on this one, is when I don't like something, I attempt to explain why, and offer an alternative. The latter is the hardest part and sometimes involves composing an answer for several minutes or leaving it for later. This is something I really wish more people would do, because my perspective is only one, and someone else with more knowledge about how some things work might come along and offer a better, or at least a different, one, but even so, it can be heartening for people to see that someone even cares enough to explain themselves instead of shouting in all caps about some new feature or update they hate or some use of color that hurts their eyes, or some way of behaving they find offensive.

    The last thing I try, and this is likely the hardest one for me, and one which I often have difficulty abiding by given my bent to take a view and go with it full-throttle, is to tell people that what I am saying is what I feel, what I think, and a lot of other I statements. It should be a given that whatever someone says is their opinion "by virtue of the fact they fucking said it" (a quote I picked up on a forum that tends to have a lot of nasty opinions being thrown around like spears) but this is not always apparently to everyone and I think it helps jolt them to the realization that they don't need to take all advice to heart, but there's no harm in mulling it over either.

    It is also important to realize that criticism, while it can be helpful, is often used, especially now in the age of information, as a weapon against people. There are many people who will shout it to the rooftops just to hurt someone or disguise insults and threats under the pretense of offering criticism. I assume that at least a few such individuals will come across this and since I have only ever met 2 people who are truly unaffected by what others think or say about them, I'm going to assume such people have emotions and feelings like everyone else so I offer to those people a warning.

    Criticism, especially destructive criticism, is a double-edged sword. You might be able to dish it out, but that doesn't mean you can take it. Most of my life has been spent in spite, I am no stranger to vindictive motives, I have been on both ends of them more often than is considered sane by most people, and I can tell you that while you're loading that shot you want to take at someone's weak point, there is always someone on the next hill trying to get a bead on you, and people like me - and there happen to be a great deal of us, especially online - take a sick and twisted delight from tearing into people who are just trying to be harmful. Unless you want to dedicate yourselves to being bulletproof, which I can tell you as someone who has tried is a pursuit that takes years and even then can never truly be realized, it is not worth whatever grim satisfaction you gain from hurting another person to risk alerting the ever-present snipers to your existence and potentially making yourself a target. You don't believe me? What do you think is the largest motivation of people posting articles about others on ED? Granted, not even I'm that vindictive, but it just goes to illustrate there are far nastier people out than me looking for an excuse and someone making an ass of themselves offers the perfect one.

    To everyone else, remember that block of text up there, because even if you're not like that, it should serve to demonstrate that criticism is a double-edged sword. Never offer it unless you're prepared to take it yourself, and in those instances, having a little praise on your record might encourage others to pay you the same courtesy. That is, after all, why we bother with courtesies to begin with. It can only improve our species to recognize the strengths of others as well as their weaknesses.