The last Social Studies class of 1996

Note: I nearly didn't post this as it felt too much like preaching to the choir. But my tarot single-draw last night was The Hierophant, Reversed, the ethos of which is the ethos of this post, so... the universe has spoken.

In my final Social Studies class of my fourth form year, our lovely teacher Ms M sat our class in a circle and went round us one by one, telling us each one thing she had really liked about having us in her class, and one thing that she found challenging.

This was 1996 and the class had, from memory, 32 kids in it, so it was not a small commitment. It was a gutsy and slightly edgy thing to do. Ms M rightly judged that she had strong enough relationships with us all to make the experience safe and positive. I think it made us feel special to know that she had, of her own accord and without any parent-focused deliverable or administrative box to tick, held each of us in her mind for a moment, seeking for something of value she could tell us. It felt good to have been a warm stone in this woman's hand.

Obviously I can’t remember what she said she enjoyed about having me around – who remembers compliments?! (see footnote 1). But I sure do remember what she said next, because 30 years later, it is still one of the most striking characteristics of my personality:

The thing I find challenging about you, Ms Amy, is that you think everything is negotiable.

I immediately started to say, “But don’t you think–” and she interrupted me, wagging an accusatory pointed finger at my chest: “No! This is exactly what I mean!”

Well done, Ms M. You absolutely nailed it.

Voluntary submission to unnecessary tyranny

I was, as a teenager, very influenced by Bertrand Russell’s book The Conquest of Happiness. His writing about intentional living (not language he would have used, but absolutely what he meant) really chimed, especially this quote:

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Please note the “as a rule”; he wasn’t dogmatic about this. He possibly even recognised the amount of social and intellectual privilege wrapped up in this sentiment (possibly). But the bit that really stayed with me – has resonated in my head regularly for thirty years, in fact, beat with my heartbeat, kept pace with my footfalls – is “voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny”.

I pledged to myself then and there that I would submit to as little unnecessary tyranny as possible. And I figured that the only way to find out to determine necessity was to nudge at any limit I found constraining and thought I might be able to shift. This I enthusiastically applied both to social norms and to actual rules.

I can quite see this would sometimes have been very annoying for my high school teachers. I'm sorry, Ms M. But at the same time, I learned quickly that if I asked nicely and made a reasonable case, I was able to bend the rules and cut myself a better deal a lot of the time. If you don’t want to be a tyrant, and most teachers don’t, you need a better reason for a rule than “Because I say so”. And it is hard to say to the shining uplifted face of a child who is apparently full of belief in your purity of heart, “Yes, I could make that happen, but it would be extra work for me, and I just can’t be bothered doing it for you”. (Not for nothing was Little Lord Fauntleroy one of my favourite books; I well knew the insidious persuasive force of having boundless visible faith in someone else’s goodness and generosity.)

So, thanks to Bertrand I learned early on that accepting the default settings when they really don't suit you is sometimes tantamount to allowing yourself to be tyrannised. I am grateful, even if my teachers weren't.

Side note: Once Were Warriors, Dangerous Liaisons

One of the concessions I got from the school plausibly altered the course of my life. In sixth form English we were set to study Once Were Warriors (book and film), and I very much didn’t want to. My emotional grip on the distinction between fiction and reality has always been a bit tenuous, and I don’t cope well with depictions of pain or fear in realist cinema. Witnessing these things on screen is only, I would guess, about 30-50% less distressing than witnessing them in real life, and that isn't a big enough gap. So OWW was, for me, aptly initialised. Also, it was RP16 and I was only 15 at the time, so technically I could only watch it if my mum was there.

Consequently I asked my teacher if I could please shift into a seventh form English class that was on at the same time. They were doing Dangerous Liaisons (rated M for Mmmmm Uma Thurman), which I’d already seen and loved.

The school agreed, bless them. I coped fine with the work and also with the social dislocation - in fact, I throve. This was influential on me deciding later that year (at the suggestion of a really great GP, who diagnosed my suspected glandular fever as chronic boredom) to skip my seventh form year and go straight to university. I look upon this as one of my best-ever decisions and am grateful to everyone and everything that supported it.

Most things are more optional than you think

Anyway. Back to unnecessary tyranny. We are, you will notice, voluntarily submitting ourselves to it all the time. We all accept a bunch of rules and norms that don't suit us, often without realising, or while shrugging off the cost as if it doesn't matter or there's no alternative. We buy off-the-peg without checking whether we could maybe afford tailoring to fit.

For example, I go barefoot a lot, and if I had a dollar for every time someone has exclaimed to me, “Oh, I’m jealous! I’d love to take my shoes off!”, I’d buy myself a puppy. In these situations I think (and sometimes ask, I hope non-confrontationally), “What's stopping you?” Sometimes the answer is that they work for an employer who wouldn’t countenance it, and obviously for most people it’s not worth moving jobs for (see footnote 2). Sometimes, they say, "I have ugly feet," and I involuntarily check if they're applying that same standard to covering other parts of their body.

But most of the time the reason the person doesn’t go barefoot (or wear the hat, dance at the gig, talk to the cute stranger, bring their own teabag, ask the question at the author talk, ask for the raise, sign up for the open mic…) is because they assume – sometimes automatically, instinctively, unreflectively – that the associated embarrassment would make them uncomfortable enough that it isn’t worth it.

And look, we all need to do our own cost-benefit analysis of this stuff. I’m not here to judge anyone else for feeling socially awkward or self-conscious or shy or embarrassed or afraid of being judged or rejected. I feel those things myself too sometimes (though demonstrably less than most people), and I am full of compassion for people for whom they’re really crippling. Conforming to default settings camouflages us and reduces friction in our lives, and sometimes we really need that. I have days where I wear shoes because I feel emotionally fragile. It can be a gentle kindness to myself to blend in.

I also want to acknowledge that it’s a lot easier to ignore social norms, including by asking for a better deal for yourself, when you have status and power.

But based on my own experience, everything I’ve read, and everyone I’ve spoken to, I think it's pretty rare to regret doing something legal and harmless that you really want to do, even if it's somewhat socially transgressive (maybe provided you do it relatively sober). I think most people, consciously or unconsciously, substantially overestimate the costs of behaving more freely, seeking a better fit from the world. They overestimate how self-conscious they’ll feel, and for how long. They overestimate how much other people will care or indeed notice. They overestimate how much they'll mind if it doesn't work out as they'd hoped. These calculations sit on them like chains.

The converse regret is commonplace. I still regret not talking to this amazing-looking guy I saw at Queenstown Airport last week. (Tall-African-kimono-headphones-beard-toothpick-earring man, if you're reading this, will you marry me?)

I also think people also often underestimate how great it feels to think, “I am being brave and true to myself, I am claiming my freedom, I am following my heart to pursue something I really want, I am trusting myself, I am honouring myself, I am treating myself with the utmost respect”. Social embarrassment is fairly fleeting, but that warm glow of self-regard – at least in my experience, ymmv – lasts a long time. Unchained, the soul can soar.

You can just be one of those people

We all know those very liberated people who seem to feel comfortable behaving in ways we feel we’re not allowed to behave, because we’d just die of embarrassment, but they just don’t seem to GAF, right? They don't seem to realise they ought to feel ashamed to be doing whatever it is they're doing. Either they're supremely confident, or just totally oblivious. Their behaviour implicitly proclaims that they’re simply not bound by the rules and norms that tether and constrain us.

And sometimes we kind of disdain them, sometimes they make us obscurely angry, sometimes we find them magnetically charismatic, but nearly always we envy them their freedom. They have expelled tyrants within and without. They are wearing a custom-fitted universe.

It is from time to time transformative for me to remember that if I act like I am one of those people, then I am one of them. Same goes for you. We don't have to wait to be issued with a permission slip. We can just go ahead and act like we have one, and hey presto! Magically we do. No one can hear our inner monologues with their occasional doubts and anxieties. I highly recommend giving it a go if you haven't already - faking it 'til you make it, I mean.

You might be surprised how quickly your insides change to match your outsides; it's famously easier to act yourself into thinking differently than to think yourself into acting differently. The day I started acting like I loved my body wholly and unconditionally was the day I started loving my body a tiny bit. The day I started acting like I was supremely unselfconscious about being a crap dancer was the day I became 3% less self-conscious about it. And so on.

Lifting the chains gets easier as our muscles get stronger, until one day they feel so light they might as well be made of smoke.

Find out who you are, and do it on purpose

Another quote I like, and one of a much more tattooable length, is Dolly Parton's "Find out who you are, and do it on purpose.” I like the nod to the importance of experimentation to self-knowledge.

I also like, "I have as much freedom as I take", though again, there's a lot of privilege bound up in that statement. But those of us who have that privilege can exercise it for good – as long as we're not dicks about it, freedom will beget freedom, diversity will build tolerance. No one loses from us being more free.

Ms M was right that not everything is negotiable, of course. But a whole lot more is than we're encouraged to believe, and a little bit of tailoring here and there can make all the difference to the fit.

So I will keep on trying to notice what I really want to do, and who is saying no to me and how; and trying to spot when I am voluntarily submitting to unnecessary tyranny, whether internal or external. Because such submission is, to complete the Bertrand Russell quote, “likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.”

Footnote

(1) I don't, which is why since 2o09 I have been recording them in a Google doc. I cannot recommend this practice highly enough.

(2) It would be for me. One reason I will never work for a certain organisation is that their staff have to wear shoes at work. I know because I once spent a few weeks there on a temporary basis, and on the afternoon of my first day, HR came and asked me to put shoes on “as a courtesy to others in the building”. I chose to believe someone on the floor had a really unmanageably intense foot fetish, and on that basis I was very happy to do them that courtesy.)