Like a lot of teenagers, I spoke first and thought later.
We were on a youth service project, with a few adult supervisors helping but mostly watching. We were scrubbing crayon and worse off plastic chairs with chemicals that required rubber gloves to protect your hands. At some point I said something, without thinking, that was completely inappropriate to one of the female leaders.
She slapped me across the face so hard it nearly knocked me off my feet.
What I said was wrong. Full stop. Also, I would never condone hitting someone for a verbal offense. And still, right after her hand landed, I told myself I deserved it.
I need to say this carefully: that is not how abuse works. In abusive relationships, the person with power often teaches the other that they deserve the punishment. I am not defending a slap. I am describing what a teenage brain did with shame while I could still feel the sting of her hand on my face.
I carried that scene for years as one of my most embarrassing moments. I still tell it sometimes. It’s not a war story. It’s a cheap, memorable, now-funny (to me anyway) lesson in think-then-speak. It became part of how my operating system runs. Though if I’m honest, the “speak first, thought optional” habit still showed up well into my mid-twenties.
Once, my wife and I went to a live concert with her best friend and her friend’s date. I didn’t like the band. In my opinion, they had a weak stage presence and they were off-key more than once. Honestly, their music was just not my style.
Most of the drive home, I railed on them while the two people in the back seat sat as a captive audience.
When we got home, my wife told me how deeply I’d hurt her. That music had seen her best friend through some dark years. It was a lighthouse. My review definitely missed the art, but it also stomped on someone else’s survival gear.
Those moments shaped me, and became an important part of my core OS.
And then I overcorrected.
I swung so far the other way that I started hurting myself by not speaking up when I should have. I stayed with a boss for far too many years because I refused to stand up for myself. Silence felt like maturity. It was often just fear of hurting someone else, wearing a better outfit.
The slap and the car ride taught me something real about the cost of careless words. The second lesson I wrote on top of them was wrong: that keeping quiet was always the nobler virtue.
It’s been more than thirty years since the slap. I can still tell you exactly where I was standing. I can still see the room. The concert. The years I swallowed what only I could say. All three taught me something about who I want to be, but they don’t get to decide that I am the worst version of those experiences. I’m not frozen at either extreme and calling that growth.
Those moments and those years have shaped me, but they didn’t sentence me to a life of “that’s just how things are.”
I’ve written a lot in recent months about building a company I love. I ran it ahead of revenue and ran out of cash. I had to let my team go. To close my own financial gap, I took a long-term consulting engagement. I am, once again, the load-bearer keeping the company limping along . I’m the sole developer on two enterprise applications, I’m preparing two 90-minute industry presentations that I’m delivering in two weeks, and working a day job that still has to fund the lights at home. All of it feels like it needs my attention at the same time. I’m juggling six medicine balls, and they’re all on fire.
It’s a pattern I’ve revisited so many times I wish I’d learned the lesson by now. When everything is clamoring for attention, silence-as-virtue and work-harder-as-integrity start looking like the same move: don’t add friction. Absorb it. That behavior has been my default for decades.
Several years ago, we hosted Thanksgiving for my wife’s entire extended family. Seventy people crammed into a house that struggles with a dozen dinner guests. The dishes were extraordinary. They were piled high on every available inch of counter space. All the tables were put away, and the chairs taken downstairs so the family could visit where it was a little cooler. I stayed upstairs alone at the sink. I was one of those kids who always made his bed because my mental chaos requires physical order if I’m going to function. Letting the dishes sit wasn’t really an option for me.
For the next three hours, I washed. At one point my sister-in-law’s husband came and sat across the counter from me. He talked for forty-five minutes without ever picking up a towel.
That was when I first noticed the swing toward “just carry the load.” It endured for another decade after that. Some days I wonder if it ever really ended, or if I just got better at calling it strength and integrity.
I don’t have a good rule-of-thumb for when to speak and when to stay quiet. I don’t have a system that sorts burning medicine balls into a righteous priority list. What I can see, finally, is the difference I’ve been pretending not to see:
Shaped is allowed. The slap, the car ride after the concert, the three hours of dishes—those get to stay because they taught me real things.
Sentenced is optional. I don’t have to keep proving I learned the lesson by never opening my mouth, or by standing alone at every sink the rest of my life.
There’s no credible way to wrap that in a bow. I’m still figuring out when silence is wisdom and when it’s just me absorbing friction again so nobody else has to feel it. For now, the only trustworthy thing is small: when I catch myself choosing the sink while the basement fills with people, I’ll ask whether I’m serving or disappearing, once again, into a role that feels safer than asking for some help.
Shaped is fine, but sentenced is not.
No comments:
Post a Comment