Flash back to the scenario I described two articles ago, in which one of my high school cross-country teammates led a pre-race pep talk by screaming about sexually assaulting our opponents. In that moment, I said nothing and simply walked away. It’s fortunate that he received disciplinary action, as so much hideous conduct in my home community goes unpunished. But sometimes, that memory still keeps me up at night. I didn’t say anything.
I couldn’t tell you when it started, but I’ve seemingly always been a vociferous person. As my mother tells me, from my first interactions with other children in preschool, I have leaned toward an outgoing manner of existence. Typically, I’m only reticent when deep, often troubling thoughts consume me, or when I feel great sadness. Given this, for the sake of humor, I’d bet that a lot of people would probably want me to feel sad more often. I am fully aware, as I was not always, that even simple conversations with me can turn into what feel like lectures or sermons. I am aware that this can lend parental and pedantic overtones to my dealings with other people. I am aware that this can make me unapproachable or discourage potential discussions in which I participate. While this does not preclude me from meaningful conversations and connections, I could likely have more of them if I toned it down by a few hundred percent. So why don’t I? Why is it hard for me to say little? I’ll give you my best guess at a rationale.
The sciences have commanded my attention since third grade and my heart since seventh grade. When people ask me what I’d like to do with my life, my response goes something like this: “Well, I’d like to go to medical school, but I’m doing something with chemistry for my B.S. If medical school doesn’t work out…something with chemistry, preferably with overlap with biology.” It’s true; often, during lectures in my science courses over the years, I’ve felt like jumping out of my chair and onto my desk and shouting at the rest of my classmates, “DO YOU REALIZE HOW AMAZING THIS IS? I MEAN, THIS IS OUR UNIVERSE!” I do have a passion, and that passion includes concepts that deal with coulombic forces on the nanoscale and molecular orbital theory – a specific idea in quantum mechanics – to explain the stability of chemical bonds. Details abound. The minutia make all the difference. Hence, when I treat a subject, I feel compelled to leave no detail behind, which equates to quite a lot of content and often a dry mouth. There’s a running joke in my family that states, “When Daniel describes a two-hour movie, it takes three hours.” While I’d like to playfully argue against it…it’s basically true.
Scholastic intentions aside, the lack of discussion characterized many of my early and influential relationships. I lost my first friend, someone named Justin, because he thought I liked someone named James better than him. In reality, I spent most of the time that I did with James because he and I really like to do SRAs, but I still considered Justin a better friend. However, I never told him this, and the chips fell. For all of the time I spent essentially in fear of my father, I think it would have been even a small bit easier if we had engaged in more discussions about how I felt. But I was too afraid to say something unacceptable to him, and I remained silent. In grade school, relationships lived and died by rumor and gossip. Never did I speak up when I heard pointedly false information designed and propagated to hurt and ostracize someone, unwilling to get involved as someone so averse to conflict. When the fire of my crush on someone spread rapidly throughout our class of 54, I allowed our micro-society to remain awkward by not standing up, owning my emotions, and countering by speaking positively. In high school, gossip turned to discrimination and hatred, to character defamation and insults of an incredibly personal nature.
Additionally, I encountered much ridicule for my stature and mannerism: the 4’10” try-hard. But it was around this time that I began to respect the power of language and the value of participation in the surrounding discussion, however cacophonous. I stood up for myself and directly addressed those who looked down on me because they literally looked down on me. I caught and killed rumor whenever I could and always tried to speak to people’s virtues. Please understand that, as my connections with my classmates strengthened, it became more painful to see them in unjust distress. I talked more and more about the importance of respect for everyone, even those whom we don’t want as friends. And yet I still sequestered myself away the most frustrating instances of injustice, the regular, unhindered demeaning of women and minorities on my sports teams, in the cafeteria, and through the halls. I don’t enjoy conflict, but I do agree with those who say that silence is an aid to those who use their words to inflict pain and make the world exclusive. Needless to say, I regret my supine strategy. I regret my failure to act.
After the experiences during my gap year, I had to remake my identity, to intertwine it with something more concrete than The Scholar and The Athlete, both of which I lost upon returning home from college. Who I am is a manifestation of the interplay between empathy, strong feeling, and the thoughtful desire for a more positive world. Naturally, my core philosophies materialize in most all life circumstances, as I’m sure do all of our pillars, and it’s quite easy for me to point them out. I realize that not everyone wants to hear profound conversations about what individual experiences mean or how they help us to continue maturing, but this kind of dialogue runs within my mind constantly. All someone needs to do is to tap into that stream of thought, and out comes the torrent.
I lived through too many situations in which the failure to speak up, the succumbing to timidity or the reluctance to take on the challenge of combatting evil, meant pain and disenfranchisement for other people, including myself, for me to simply say the minimum, regardless of the present circumstance. When a friend comes to me for help or seeking solace, yes, I will devote my full attention to their predicament, analyze it, and try to come up with advice or observations that might aid them in accepting the misfortune and living positively beyond it. Some have told me that, in some of these instances, people just want a venting receptacle, someone to listen to them and share the burden of life’s sufferings without receiving any advice for the future. I completely agree.
I do. And, yes, that means that, even as I’m currently trying to be better at perceiving the difference between situations that require the differential roles, I will fail some of the time. However, I still believe that running the risk of saying something when my companion doesn’t want to hear it is more favorable than not saying something, not investing myself, when they actually need it. It’s not that I can’t perceive it myself. I’ve been unreceptive to many pieces of advice that my mother – God bless her – has offered me because I simply wanted to vent to her, to dump out my frustrations in order to lay them bare, dissect them, and continue living. But conversely, I also know how it feels to reach out for a friend, for anyone, who might be able to help me in a time of crisis and to find people who simply say the minimum, simply agreeing that my life is horrible and apologizing out of sympathy, or even to find no one at all.
Little compares to this feeling in loneliness and despair at life’s immutable continuity. If given the choice to find myself in one of these two situations, I would cheerfully accept the former. And because I try my best to treat people the way I’d like them to treat me, I reject comfortable silence. I speak up.
