Consequences of Misjudging a Life

Papers, books, hand tools, thumb tacks, screws, plant hankers, drinking classes, sewing notions, clothes, shoes and other stuff here and here and here, all over the house, in fact...There are times when the stuff around our small house gets so high and scattered that it drives me to actually do a bit of straightening up. Neatly stacked piles, my mother used to say, is the perfect definition of straightening up; and I was always-well, almost always-an obedient son. So, I made a bunch of neatly stacked piles out of the chaos last week. In gathering a bunch of papers together I came across a couple of them I remember composing in early 2007 (yes, they were hanging around that long!).

I had just come off another episode of sticking to my well honed teaching principles. The professional acumen developed over the preceding twenty-six years got me in trouble with several students who complained to some folks in administration who called me on the carpet for using the principles I favored. For behaving as a professional educator, for being so calmly articulate in the defense of my practice and for having the audacity of pointing to the defects in the pedagogy and course design they were demanding I use, I was refused further teaching at this college. This was not the first and if I were ever to continue in higher education I doubt it would be the last. So, I was thinking about forever leaving The Academy for something else. A career counselor I consulted suggested I write down what I considered the most congenial working conditions and what kind of life I thought I was leading and wanted to live as conversation starters leading to the types of employment I could expect would best work for me.

I placed the most congenial working conditions in seven points (which I will list without comment):

1. The work must intrinsically hold elevated levels of intellectual stimulation.
2. There must be high frequency of professional and social conversation.
3. The job should allow for creative communication through a single medium or through many media.
4. The position must have sufficient autonomy for me to do what I think is professionally correct.
5. The employer must highly value shared commitments where my commitment to the firm is shared equally with commitment to family and to community.
6. The employer must highly value reciprocal commitments where a firm reciprocates my commitment to its mission by its commitment to my professional development, advancement, compensation and longevity.
7. My job performance must be evaluated on how and what I am doing and the results produced rather than on mere compliance to a supervisor or a manager.

However, it is the life statement which is of far greater importance for it sums-up a dilemma enormously affecting my entire now forty-eight year adult existence.

I wrote:

“I've wanted to live a principled life. From a child's eye, I saw both my mother and my father as principled people. I have been formed and informed by my consistent perception of their principled actions founded in Forgiveness, Courage, Honesty, Integrity, Joyfulness, Compassion, Kindness, Commitment, Consideration, Creativity, Respect, Dignity, Enthusiasm, Morality, Justice, Fairness, Generosity, Gentleness, Patience, Graciousness, Helpfulness, Hopefulness, Humility , Idealism, Love, Purposefulness, Responsibility, Gratitude, Tolerance, Trust, Understanding, Wonder and Wisdom. As a consequence, I have developed a keen sense of right and wrong, of ways of being and ways of working best situated to help others help themselves. I have also cultivated insight into the fitness of structures within which people live, work, and play having the best opportunity to gain peace, love and understanding within themselves and with others and to acquire virtuous lives they themselves wish to cultivate and virtuous lives organizations say participation should develop.

And the reality of life since high school, some forty-one years [at the time of writing this statement] is that I have lived the principled life I wanted. However, keeping the faith of principle has put me at odds with 'the real world' where people, organizations and structures force decisions counter with the consequence that when given conventional parameters of living a successful live, I must say I am a definite failure.

Indeed, the parameters of life I've taken as the goals and measures of success, and, thus, of self-worth, are not those of a principled life but exclusively monetary/employment based, i.e., sustained professional employment and advancement with an upward slopping compensation and a substantial retirement nest egg. They have been given me by the communities within which I have lived, the society at large, and yes, my father-insisting out of deep love that I must be solidly on a permanent career path by age twenty-three else I will be a failure the rest of my life. But, with a deep rooted inability to reject or modify principle in favor of having to make a living subservient to wrong headed supervisors, adversely working organizations and destructive structures and with having the freedom to do so provided by a supportive family, I have a record of sporadic employment, barely any income and no contributions to a nest egg. In other words, by these standards, I am a failure as a human being and as long as I live failure will be a constant companion. No wonder I have always had a sense of being worthless!

But, I want to embrace the way I am, committing fully to a principled life, releasing the power to act accordingly without self-censure. To do so I need to somehow re-frame emotional anchors allowing me to switch from my community's imprint, the society's expectations and my father's demands to a self-acceptance, a self-love, of a who I am. Simultaneously, I need to develop and interiorize the goals and measures appropriate for my principled life. ”

Indeed, the crushing shame of worthlessness brought about by my own misjudging of my life through the years has resulted in a pattern of depression compelling me to withdraw within the four walls of whatever house I am in. More, I self-medicate with food over-eating so much that at one point decades ago I blew up to three hundred pounds. I once described the pattern as: feeling so worthless I hide in the house overeating, gaining a good deal of body weight which re-enforces being worthless...eventually after months have passed, I get up off the floor working through the self-hatred eating less and losing weight...after dropping a bunch of weight I feel capable enough to go out of the house...the more I go out, the more I am propelled to look for work, mostly teaching work...eventually I land an appointment...I do what I know to be professionally right, proper and necessary for the mental well being and the intellectual and the academic growth of the students I am given regardless of organizational imperatives, supervisory dictates or falling in line with what other teachers are doing...by standing on professional and personal principle I upset the expectations of a few students who complain to supervision...supervision is upset at me for being uncompliant with their wrongheaded methods and for upsetting the paying customers ...supervision, then, does not renew my appointment sending me out onto the street...I feel a failure, retreat to the four walls of whatever house I am in, self-medicate, gain weight, eat more, gain more, fell more useless...then months later I get off the floor working through the feelings of worthlessness, lose weight, feel capable enough to go out of the house, and so on.

When I wrote the life statement I had retreated into the house, began to overeat, started to gain back weight lost in the last round. However, writing the summary brought to the fore hazy thoughts on the matter I had been having. Indeed, writing it down clarified the dilemma under which I had been working all my adult life: a deep desire to live a principled life yet measuring life success and self-worth with grossly inappropriate criteria, ultimately misjudging my life entirely. Having gained the insight, I began to work through the bad feelings, ate less, went out of the house, engaged the community and gained teaching opportunities, which, I'm afraid ended the same as others. Unfortunately, I had yet to translate insight into a re-framed emotional predisposition, an altered psycho-dynamic, putting myself back into depressions with all its attending pathologies.

Intellectually I have placed my life in the proper perspective as a principled person. But, l continue to struggle greatly to re-set the emotional predispositions, my psycho-dynamic, to feel the power of a life so lived, to be not disturbed by irrelevant criteria of success, to fear no longer any judgment of others, or myself, of a failed life based on monetary/employment criteria. It has become quite obvious to me that this struggle will continue the rest of my life.