Why does it matter? I wonder. Why do we care?
I am thinking of all the tiny ways in which we make it our business to correct each other, all the time, all the incremental little wrongs we perceive that have nothing whatever to do with whether or not we will live or die, or legal infractions, or anything of any obvious significance, except that we must say so, we must point out that each and every one of them has transpired and make sure every perpetrator understands exactly the nature of each transgression so that s/he may be prevented from ever disturbing our individual senses of rightness in this manner again.
And why?
I am thinking of someone I know and love gingerly, having loved deeply in the past and been bruised for it, someone who is compelled to attempt to correct every single time we others live our lives in any way different from the way this person would direct if put in charge, any way at all. This person cannot avoid doing this, has made a career of almost nothing but this (and a very successful one), is aware of the oddity and unpleasantness to others of this compulsion when it slops over the edge of sought after professional advice on specific topics, yet it's just that, a compulsion, a behavior which cannot be stopped. It is of no consequence to this person whether the adult child wears blue or red today, but the child looks better in red, so this person must say so even though the child's favorite shirt is blue. This is the level of correction and compulsion to correct that I mean. It is constant. It is unremitting. It is as if there is no difference between the child learning to choose pleasing colors and the child learning to balance a checkbook, pay rent, live up to adult obligations whose execution can affect others known and unknown along the whole gamut of consequence from shallow scratch to abject ruin.
There are lots of people like this in my family. There are lots of people like this whom I met in my various jobs in offices and stores. And beyond the people who cannot stop themselves from doing this all the time, and feel actual physical stress each time they try, it seems almost everyone does have something, just one or two little correction buttons, little "pet peeves" s/he must voice every time each is broached. I'm thinking of a conversation I had in a medical setting I can't even remember precisely, with a person whose name, face and function have also receded from my mind long ago, but whom I remember distinctly I felt for some reason compelled to correct.
"Are you feeling nauseous?" this person asked.
"Well, I hope I'm never nauseous," I replied, somewhat annoyed. "But I am frequently nauseated."
I pronounced that last word quite clearly, with intent: "nau-zee-AY-ted." And I have no idea, when I think about it, why I felt compelled to respond this way, what possible difference it could have made to me whether this person made the best possible word choice when it was clear that s/he only wanted to know whether I felt sick to my stomach. Do I think on some base, lizard level that anyone who doesn't know the difference between "nauseous" and "nauseated" is likely to prescribe morphine instead of penicillin or make some equally grave medical error? Certainly no rational part of me believes this.
I have a lot of little buttons like this, more than most people, but not I think to the point of needing medication. There are small particularities I care very much about because I can see consequences down the road, like how my groceries are packed + my slamming on my brakes to avoid hitting a squirrel = eggs splattered all over the back of the car, potentially. I can get a little nutty over things like that. It's best just to let me pack my own bags.
Some people seem to really suffer over every detail, however. They seem to live very precisely, with very precise parameters defining their own comfort and sort of happiness and very precise expectations of how other people must serve them and interact with them. They will tell you exactly how to speak to them, even when and how much, exactly how to touch the things you sell them as well as how to wrap them, exactly what is best for them, and exactly what is best for you, and heaven help you if you try to argue with them about even that last bit, even if logic and experience are on your side. And there are other people like the one I gingerly love who will just constantly be telling you how to live your life on the minutest level -- because they feel it is their duty? because some part of their personal biology is wired this way? who knows? -- and it will so upset them when you don't follow their advice that they will avoid you to avoid being hurt by the inevitable consequences they can foresee of you wearing the wrong color T-shirt to that gallery opening, even if they would readily admit these consequences to be trivial if they took a moment to rationally examine them.
What is this? Is this fear? Is this love? This is what it is to be a control freak, right? But why? What on earth is the evolutionary purpose of this tic?
And then there's me and my instinct to pity these people, even though I'm just a few more "pet peeves" away from being one myself perhaps. Why do I assume they must be miserable?
Is this one of those natural selection things where we just have to have in the great pool of diversity a handful of designated correctors, whose job it is to go around and try to align everything to a specific vision, each operating you understand from a unique personal vision, with the overriding truth being that only one or two out of a hundred or a thousand of these corrections both minute and grand will actually take?
Meanwhile, I am so dizzy from hormones today that I can barely sit up, and yet I am compelled to write about this. I think it's because I've been throwing up all week, and that made me think about nausea, and what is nauseous in this world, and who feels nauseated. Funny, huh?
Little things. Little things connect to other little things and make big things. Sometimes, though, little things are just little things.
Recent Comments