Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.
—-
There was a woman that came into my work for help quite often. She is difficult, combative even. She talks to herself about how crazy you are right in front of you as if she’s talking to an invisible friend who agrees that you suck. She laughs at bizarre and inappropriate times and I’m sure most people are glad to see her leave when she is done in their business or agency. One day, after she started to get to know me, in the middle of a totally unrelated conversation she suddenly looked me straight in the eye and said “You’d be crazy too if 15 guys raped you in the park when you were 12 for looking at them wrong.”
Snap.
My world will never be the same. I will never look at people the same way. I spent the rest of that week just looking at everyone around me and wondering “If I knew what you’d been through, would I be amazed by you?” The homeless man with the cans, the checkout lady at the store, the family walking in our neighborhood. Everyone was suddenly in vivid color.
It was like the universe knew I had been cracked open and it flooded me with more. There are cycles but at this point I think I’ll always be little broken. Open. I don’t know that I could stop seeing people if I tried.
I started a new series here on The Good Men Project called SnapShots. It’s about those moments when you suddenly see someone in a way you never saw them before.
When I saw that quote tonight I realized that is the essence of the series. That’s what I hope people will see in the stories.
I look around and I see so many people living mindlessly and sarcastically. I see beautiful stories with hateful comments and pithy judgments, as if there is a competition of who can be the most smartly cynical and belittling. As if there is a prize for who can cut others down the lowest.
I see this online, I see it in stories of what is happening in the world, I see it at the store. But lately I’ve been spending most of my online time on The Good Men Project. So what I’m seeing is men. I know that women have a reputation among some people as being catty and cruel, but that’s never been my experience. I know that some people believe men are generally jerks or at least insensitive. That has not been my experience either. Until now. Let me be clear, the men around The Good Men Project have been generally thoughtful and respectful to me. It’s other men I see them being jerks to.
What’s up with that?
I mean my brain understands the dynamic that the closer to breaking down society’s stereotypes we get the more freaked out people who have been taught them will be. But, this is supposed to be a safe place for men to express all of the parts of them, most especially the parts of them that most people don’t think about or that society rejects. Being the broken open, hippy dippy, gluten free earth muffin that one of my friends calls me, or maybe being the budding Buddhist I am, I think that when people say rude and hurtful things it’s an indication that they are suffering. Hurt people, hurt people. Some people hurt others, some people hurt themselves but being hurtful is almost always an indication of pain.
Being the optimist I am I believe that we can create safe places. I believe that we can create a safe place at The Good Men Project for men to be authentic and not be put down for not knowing everything or for “being a special snowflake” or for not being *insert stereotype here*.
I know what I’m saying isn’t anything new. I am happily not the first, or even among the first million people to point out that people are struggling in ways we may not see. Nor am I the first to suggest that kindness is the path to a better self, life and world. This article, and these SnapShots are just my little drops in the bucket. If enough of us put our time and our energy and our words toward treating people with kindness and seeing people, eventually the bucket will overflow.
This isn’t about telling anyone what to do, we are all at our own place along our own path. But I want to offer a few thoughts, for everyone. If they feel right take them in, if they don’t obviously leave them be.
For the next 24 hours really look at the people around you. In your family, at your work, in your communities, on the internet, on the news, look at people and take a moment to wonder if they have struggles you’d never guess. Think about how you would treat them if you knew they’d suffered greatly or overcome something huge. Then at the end of the 24 hours think about yourself. You are the one person whose struggles you truly know. If you knew that someone else had gotten through what you have been through, would you be amazed by them?
Try out following a nuanced version of Thumper’s mom’s advice. Instead of trying to only say “nice” things. Try to say only respectful things. You can disagree with someone thoughtfully. You can express a different opinion or even anger without attacking people or cutting them down.
Talk about being kind. In person, online, wherever you are talking to people, talk about kindness. Talk about how hard it is, talk about how good it feels, talk about how the world needs it in small and giant ways.
Be Kind.
—Photo [Main] ~maja*majika~/Flickr
—Photo [Inset] deeplifequotes/Flickr
If they shared the battle, then others would know. Not every battle is worth fighting. We absolutely do get to judge others, and they absolutely do get to judge us. It isn’t just humans who do that, it’s a part of natural instinct. Every creature on earth judges every creature they encounter. That’s pragmatic. This OP is not.
“Hurt people, hurt people.” No doubt there. Francois de La Rochefoucauld once said “We pardon to the extent that we love” (Mind you, La Rochefoucauld had also said “It is less dangerous to treat most men badly than to treat them too well… The intention of cheating no one lays us open to being cheated ourselves” so make of that what you will). It’s hard (or well nigh impossible) to love everybody completely equally, all the time. Inevitably, the person who takes a hand offered in kindness is going to engender more love in the one who is offering it, than… Read more »
I actually appreciate that the boards on The Good Men Project are far tamer and more intelligent than the boards on most other websites I frequent. It’s one of the reasons I keep coming back. 🙂 I had to read this sentence a couple of times before I understood it: Hurt people (adjective), hurt people (verb). So true. I know I have lashed out more than a few times at others, due to hurts in my own past, and present. And many times the people I hurt, did nothing to hurt me, at least not directly. (I’m working on that.… Read more »
That’s something I think about a lot. Are people in more pain now than in the past. I’m sure there are times in the past with more pain and some with less on a general scale. But what I wonder is if our culture of busy keeps us from feeling our pain too often so people are able to avoid dealing with the pain in more different ways than in the past. Including letting their pain out on people online.
@ Veronica Grace “But what I wonder is if our culture of busy keeps us from feeling our pain too often so people are able to avoid dealing with the pain” I’ve heard people suggest the opposite. In the past, people were so busy just struggling to survive that they didn’t send much time thinking about fulfillment. Maybe it’s a combination of having too much time to dwell on pain and a vehicle to unleash it. I’ve written things before as a catharsis and simply pressed the delete button. When I was younger, it was the heavy bag or in… Read more »
I met a family last week that consisted of a grandma holding a 2 year old boy accompanied by the boy’s father…while they talked about their concerns about the boy’s delayed speech they mentioned that his mother just passed from breast cancer…they broke up talking about how they would raise this kid without his mother and it really killed me inside, too…I just put my hand on the grandma’s arm and my other hand on the kid’s back (and tried to be reassuring to them)….they teared up when they said they diagnosed her cancer when it was too far gone…I… Read more »
Oh yeah, it’s those moments that make me realized how overwhelmingly blessed I am in so many ways.
There was a woman at work who wore no underwear, short skirts, and loose fitting low cut tops. She would sit with her legs spread. When talking to men she would lean over their desks to make sure they could see down her blouse. She hit on every man there. She told me that she was on Prozac. A female manager told me that she was telling the female managers that she had been raped so that she could get sympathy. They didn’t believe her because of the way she acted. I was the only one to believe her. I… Read more »
John, It occurs to me that I see comments the users never see because we try to moderate the comments to be productive and aimed at the ideas not at the people. So for those of you who read the comments you may be wondering where I got this impression. Though I do see some that have gotten through into the comments I see comments that are never approved that just make me sad. That is really insightful, I think you are very correct about people’s perceptions of how someone acts when they’ve been sexually abused and that it does… Read more »
Your overall point is good – but I think making commentary about the commentariat of GMP based on information we don’t actually have access to is a little unfair.
Maybe the men who are supposedly making unhelpful comments need the treatment with the “be kind, you don’t know what they’re going through” standard?
Of course they deserve to be treated kindly. That was one of my main points.
I hope that information about specific comments aside that people will consider being kind to each other.
Hi Veronica
Yes,be kind .
Thank’s for a good well written article.
Thank you(o:
I think about this very subject all the time. Loved this post!
Thank you!