A selfish lesson of life

There comes a time in a woman’s life when she realises that everything she learned about being being sweet, well mannered and polite was all just a myth. I remember the first days in school that pretty much shaped the rest of my school years. The girls were all sitting politely in their chairs, raising a hand when they knew the answer. But often they didn’t even get the chance to show off their brilliance as one of the boys would shout out the answer. One thing was clear…the rules for boys and girls were vastly different.

As I had learned to be polite, I never questioned, never challenged this right that boys seemed to have been granted as an unwritten, but oh so clear right of birth. Later, years later I realised this was a big mistake.

As the years went by, and girls turned into young women, we on the other hand seemed to have received, or been granted, the moral responsibility of caring for humanity. The feelings of our fellow female compatriots became vastly important. But with this came rumours, innuendo and plain gossip. Girls grouped themselves in cliques protecting themselves by killing of their opponents with their sharp tongues and out-maneuvering tactics. If you were not with them you were against them and sometimes you didn’t even have a choice.
This paradox of the seemingly nurturing versus the cold and conniving side of women is not only cruel but also fascinating. Years later I experienced it again, in a social circle I was close to. Although I was probably not the centre of gossip (after all there are far more interesting things to talk about than my persona), I sensed some things were being said about me. I withdrew from the group and a year later I got my suspicions confirmed.
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What I have learned from this are a couple of things. First of all being overly polite will never work. Don’t confuse politeness with sophistication. Sophistication comes from within and works in any social circumstances. But it’s unbiased, strong and adapts to the person, not the environment. Politeness is about the expectations of others and thus the environment becomes centre of reference. It is only of recent I have come to this conclusion but more on this later.

My second learning is that the where there are groups of women, there is gossip. Unless you are a leader or a follower you will be considered an outsider. I am that outsider. I will never be a leader for groups existing without some commercial or philosophical raison d’etre, and I will never be a follower of such groups either as I detest the notion of being a pack animal. And thus I end up in the third and most obscure group, the non-group if you like – the outsider.

And so comes the reason for my story, and perhaps also the third object of learning, and that is to do with what is right for me, disregarded of how other people will perceive, feel or be affected by it. It may seem very selfish, and it is. But as I also believe we are all (with the exception of a minority of psychopaths in our surrounding) equipped with the knowledge of right and wrong (and I hear MJ saying “But Susanne, there is no right or wrong”….very well that is a different point of discussion), we can be perfectly selfish without harming our environment.

So today, on the cross trainer, my mind was dwelling on something in the grand scheme of things, completely trivial and unimportant. Something that required some sort of action towards someone in my surrounding. I was weighing up pro’s and con’s of different approaches, but I couldn’t decide. So I considered a third option, a no response, which in fact didn’t seem really fair to the person in question, but completely fair to me. And that was the moment it suddenly all dawned on me. My learnings from school, being the polite girl who thinks of other first is so much bullshit. It does not restore the equilibrium, nor does it make a wrong right again. In fact it puts things in unbalance as I keep on being unhappy and others will live with a false impression as my actions didn’t follow my mind.

A long discourse for something so trivial, but for me a great learning. Today I grew as a person…