I've been thinking about clues lately. Life clues. When I talk to a student who says, I have no idea what I want to do with my life professionally we start talking about clues -- where to look for the signals that might contain some helpful information.
Envy is a clue, I'm convinced. When I notice envy, it means that I feel like I'm missing something, and I want it, and the person I am envying has got it. Noticing the envy and seeing it as a clue is helpful in two ways: it takes away the destructive impulse, the impulse of not liking the person I'm envying, and makes me curious, helps me ask what I'm missing, what it is I want, and lets me see that person as a teacher who has managed to get what I want.
(This is true about everything except love, I think. Maybe also about body shape. You can envy someone those things without learning much about how to get them for yourself.)
I think dislike is a clue, too. I don't dislike very many people. I can think of only two right now. There are people I don't respond to much, one way or the other. There are people I think are silly or time-wasters or abrasive or grouchy or insecure or something else, whom I don't want to pursue as friends, but I don't particularly dislike them. But the two I dislike are mystifying. There's nothing wrong with them. I should like them, on paper I would probably like them. I want to like them. I am ashamed of disliking them. But I can't seem to rise graciously above my little petty silly voice. NBT points out that these people are a lot like me, and I think there's truth in that. There's something I don't like in myself that I see in these two people, and I can't forgive it. I am trying to figure out what to do with this hypothesis, how to make this a clue I can use. Do you have any ideas?
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UPDATE: Two things occurred to me after I posted. One is that, oh yeah, there's another person I dislike. Haven't seen her in years, but I am no more charitable about her because of the passage of time. The other is that I now have a hypothesis. I think what I don't like in these people is something I don't have great words for. It's partly smugness. And it's partly inauthenticity. I am bugged because I don't believe that these women are what they are pretending to be. They're trying to convince me that they are fabulous and happy and at some level I don't buy it. And usually that evokes sympathy and empathy from me, because who among us has figured it all out? But what I see in them I am afraid is a terrible mirror of me. I am trying hard to be honest, most of the time. I work at being vulnerable even when it makes me afraid and I would like to convince everyone who knows me that I am fabulous. I don't want to be smug. I think these things are hard to reconcile, because right now I'm really happy. I can't believe my luck, and I don't know how to be graceful and true about that. That's my current hypothesis about these particular people and why they provoke an unreasonable dislike, I think. False humility, or inauthenticity, or smugness. Something like that. I think it's my Achilles heel, what I dislike most in myself.