Lessons Learned

I’ve figured out over the last few years that I learned some lessons too well.

As in, I never re-assessed. I learned something about how to be in the world but didn’t consider that the world (or I) may have changed in a way that made it obsolete. I also didn’t really think about the likelihood that I may have picked out the wrong lesson in the first place. Imagine: leaning on these lessons means my current happiness is partly dependent on the analytical and emotional intelligence of fifth-grade me!

Fifth grade was a tough year. My best friend had moved away over the summer, and it turned out that the rest of “our” friend group had been putting up with me for her sake. I was cut free. No one wanted to sit next to me in class, and no one ran out to the blacktop with me at recess. A confident kid up to that point, I didn’t know I had built a reputation as a know-it-all (the irony!). By the end of fifth grade, after a whole year of observing the particular ways my classmates teased and excluded me, I understood: I always knew the right answer or the right thing to do, and I’d tell you all about it, whether you asked me or not. And that was super annoying.

After figuring out the problem, I strategized. In the fall I would go to a middle school where two-thirds of the kids had never heard of me. I could start over. I had learned a lesson--my confident, in-charge self was insufferable!--so I left that self behind, as best I could. When I started sixth grade, I stopped correcting other kids when they got an answer wrong or broke a rule. I hid my best test scores and tried not to use my high-octane vocabulary. I was trying to be humble, but I actually slowly taught myself to be invisible.

Because of this or in spite of this, I had a pretty good time in middle school. I made lifelong friends, but I didn’t understand it wasn’t necessary to squash myself to do it. All these years later I suspect I didn’t even succeed in being a “new me,” but I wasted energy second-guessing everything I said and did, and I lost some of that precious confidence I’d had. I’m easier to get along with since I realized I was an annoying know-it-all, but my “lesson learned” put the emphasis in the wrong place. The lesson should have been about empathy and perspective, not about my own worth.

My husband saw that my middle school experience had taught me another lesson: if I listened to others’ complaints and changed myself to suit them, I would be happier. He tried to warn me about it once.

“You’re really bad at taking criticism.”

How could he say this, to me of all people? Me, who was always ready to listen, who constantly evaluated comments from friends and strangers alike to figure out what part of my personality needed tweaking next? We didn’t resolve the argument at the time. His comment just turned into a hard nugget tucked down into a pocket of my gut. Years later, some other discussion pulled it out again. 

“What do you mean I can’t take criticism?” I said. “No one tries harder than I do to acknowledge my own problems and try to fix them.”

“Exactly my point,” he said. “You don’t take criticism well because you take it all to heart. You should pick and choose.” (Wow, all the years I wasted that corner of my gut being angry about his “accusation”!)

There’s an obvious analogy here with writer’s critique groups. I remember the first fiction writing class I took. After I submitted my work, every comment from my teacher and classmates felt like an order rather than an insight. By the time I had incorporated all the suggestions, my story didn’t feel like my story any more. Now, with lots of experience, I give myself at least a few days after a critique group meeting to see which comments resonate with me. Lesson learned: only internalize and act on suggestions that make my story feel more like my story. 

The most recent “a-ha!” I’ve had regarding lessons that need revisiting also applies to writing. Remember how I used to call out classmates if they broke the rules? You can imagine, then, how hard I was on myself. I had already discovered that being a superior rule-follower led to success in school. This understanding served me well all the way through graduation, but it’s past time to let it go. Learning the rules is part of becoming an expert in any specialty, but being an expert means knowing when to break them. I’ve worked hard to learn the rules of writing YA novels and picture books. But it’s time to give myself permission to break those rules--and trust that I am enough of an expert to choose wisely as to when, and which ones.