Someone once told me, "People are just people." I was 16 at the time and completely sure of the wisdom of these words. I had been angry. I had felt wronged. But upon hearing these words, I put down my sword, painted a poor rendering of this phrase on some computer paper and hung it on my wall. The words had been given to me in response to my outrage at some person about something. The specifics are blurry now, but the words still echo in my everyday endeavors.
I'm what you might call a harsh critic. My critiques form words, and my words form sentences, and eventually I find myself ranting about what was at first an innocent observation. An innocent assessment about someone's answer in class, a second-too-long stare at a couple fondling in the street - I am never short of criticisms about the human race. Too sloppy, too put-together, too uppity, too lazy - need I go on? I find faults without even knowing I'm faulting. I categorize people like things and stuff them into tiny boxes labeled neatly and harshly.
Most of these people are strangers. They never know about my relentless attacks. If they are different from me - in other words, if they're more like what I would want to be - they would shrug off my attack as just another crazy girl with a chip on her shoulder. If they are like me, they might return the favor. Sometimes, though, the victims are not 50 feet away under a tree. Sometimes, I close down the judgment vault long enough to meet and actually get to know people. Once I stop judging, I start looking. I look so hard that I create not the person in front of me, but the person I want them to be.
In college, I have slipped, stumbled and crashed hard. I tell myself it is because of, well, college stuff. The papers and the tests and the parties and the falling asleep in the stacks behind a bookshelf. It couldn't possibly be me. It's that environment stuff that keeps getting in the way of the easy life for which I've been desperately searching. And all those people near and far that aren't living up to my standards - well, they need to step up their game! I'm just an innocent bystander in a world of people who aim only to disappoint.
So here I am, left with lukewarm coffee, a half-finished paper and an angry heart. I become so easily annoyed at perceived imperfections in strangers; I become so easily enraged at the perceived failings of people I was certain would prove me wrong. I spend more time trying to calm down and concentrate than I do on paying attention to anything in the first place. I cannot focus on a simple existence - that one I've been looking for - when I complicate things with my expectations. I've raised my stakes so high that I've jeopardized my happiness in the process.
All this self-loathing and guilt stuff didn't just appear to me in some kind of nightmarish ghost-of-the-past dream. It has lingered in the back of my mind ever since I got enough nerve to look outside of myself at other people. The reality frightened me. Coming from a household where a doting mother made me and my sister feel more than special, I was afraid someone might actually be more special than me. I quickly wrote off anyone that threatened me - 'yeah, well, her sweater doesn't match' - or elevated them to some divine status they could never maintain.
I've been alright with this little, black, mean hole in my heart for some time now, marking it is a quirky character trait of mine. But it is not quirky; it is painful. What happened to "people are just people?" What happened to the universality of college kids just struggling to make it to the weekend? I wasn't allowing anyone the benefit of the doubt, which meant I was depriving myself of any certainty, too.
I decided about an hour ago that maybe I could start examining myself instead of allowing this black hole to continue expanding. Being the jaded and cruel critic isn't all it's cracked up to be. It turns out that no matter how hard I try to put down the world, it always seems to crop back up. There are people out there. Just regular, simple people. You are probably one of them, and so is the person sitting next to you, as well as the people outside. I'm going to try to be one of them too, one day, so my 19-year-old self can start decorating her apartment walls.
Mary Scott's column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at m.hardaway@cavalierdaily.com.
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