The way you know that you have reached adulthood is when you say for the first time: “I messed up. I am very sorry. I am ready to accept the consequences and I will do what I need to do to make things better.”
A student came up to me last week and said, “I can’t hand in the composition because I haven’t written it. If you will be willing to accept it after the spring break, I will really appreciate that, but if not, I completely understand.”
Then, another student approached me and said, “I didn’t write the composition because you refused to help me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I wrote you an email asking for help, and you never responded.”
For me, it is a point of honor to respond to students’ emails the moment I receive them. I go out of my way to make myself available to students who ask for help. Which is why the suggestion that I dismissed this person’s email made me hot behind the ears.
“You had a month to write this composition,” I told the student. “You see me in class twice a week. You and I have spoken outside of class on two occasions. Only this morning, we exchanged several messages. Yet, you never mentioned any email or the problems you were having with this assignment.”
“Well, I don’t know,” the student said, as the words “I’m such a lousy liar” pulsated on her forehead in huge neon letters. “I asked you for help, and you refused.”
An adult realizes that antagonizing the person you are interacting with by inventing a veritable calumny (because that is how I see a suggestion that I refused to help a student) is a very stupid way to proceed. By placing the blame onto the other individual by accusing them of your own screw-up brings the momentary relief of not needing to admit your mistake. However, you always end up paying a high price for this meaningless avoidance of discomfort. People lose all respect for you and nobody takes you seriously any longer.
It is sad to see people who are well into their twenties but who still employ the kindergarten strategies of saying, “I didn’t do this bad thing, and even if I did, it’s all your fault because you made me do it. And if you didn’t make me do it, then somebody else did because it cannot possibly be my fault.”
Clarissa's Blog 
“I messed up. I am very sorry. I am ready to accept the consequences and I will do what I need to do to make things better.”(Clarissa)
Perfect, something I still work at daily. Unfortunately some days the child in me is pretty strong. 😉
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Man, I’ve been an adult for a very long time……… When I was taught about “apology”, I was taught that I should always accept responsibility, and then do everything I could do to make it better if possible. I was taught never to make an excuse, and that explanations were often excuses. This can be a very good thing, but it can also be a really *bad* thing, because
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Sorry, my computer randomly refreshed the page and my half-written comment got posted! I apologize for that. Clarissa, if there’s any chance you’d be willing to delete this disclaimer and combine the text from both of these comments into one comment, that’d be great. Otherwise, I’m very sorry about the confusion and the half-finished comment above. Please accept the second half of it here:
… because sometimes excuses are necessary and reasonable. It took me YEARS to figure out that it was OK to say that I had messed up due to circumstances beyond my control. Everything was (by my [flawed] definition) my fault. And that’s really not true.
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I don’t know, I really hate it when students waste my time by recounting to me even the very real stories of tornadoes, delayed flights and mortally sick relatives that have prevented them from doing the assignment. What does it change for me to know whether they had a good excuse or a bad excuse? The work is still not done. This is why I never listen to excuses. And I’m a lot more likely to give extension or second and third chances if a person doesn’t waste my time with stories of woe.
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Well yes, and no. I hate hearing excuses, some of the time, but for me, the line between “excuse” and “explanation” is really confusing. For this reason, actually, I very rarely disclose my Autism to people in my real life (though I’m sure far more people than I’ve explicitly told actually know). This is because it feels like an excuse to not be exactly the way they expect me to be (NT), when in fact, much of the time it’s really simply a piece of information that they can use when interacting with me or making decisions concerning me. It’s not an excuse for bad behavior (and never has been – if I screw up, I screwed up, and I will attempt to fix it to the best of my ability), it’s simply an explanation for why I don’t want to go out clubbing with them (etc), or why I had to ask them to repeat what they just said, because my brain missed a word and I have no idea what just happened.
But even so, it’s still an excuse. Is there ever a difference?
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I had the opposite cultural circumstances. As I’ve mentioned here before, my society was very authoritarian, so if any of the authorities said you were guilty, you were, even if you weren’t. Once they pronounced you guilty, that was it. Game over. The point was never to say anything that raised their ire.
The authorities generally didn’t believe reasons, when they were given any. My capacity to invent reasons was very poor, perhaps as a result.
“Where is your hymn book?”
–“I’m not sure. I bought it with me as I do every day.”
That was the kind of “reason” I used to give, on the basis that the authority wanted a response but wasn’t going to pay attention to its content.
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Yes, it’s a different cultural environment.
Once, I was talking to a friend and told her that I had an article rejected by a journal.
“Why?” she asked.
“It was poorly written and unconvincing,” I explained. “I did a shitty job.”
The friend was horrified. “No, you did a great job!” she started convincing me about an article she’d never seen.
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Yes, the American culture of thinking positive as if your whole existence depended on it is inimical to my upbringing and my instincts. I don’t need the phony positive, “You go gettem gal!” proclamations.
These can be very negative in effect for a number of psychological reasons:
1. You need to appraise where and how you’re making progress, if any, and if not you need to stop doing what you’re doing and try something else. Self esteem has no direct correlation to success. So stop working on self esteem and develop skills, awareness, etc.
2. We need negative experiences as much as we need positive ones. Negative experiences are the roughage in our diet, that keeps all the positive ones moving along in the right direction, so that one doesn’t become casual or presumptuous.
3. Real environmental obstructions to success do exist — and these cannot be addressed adequately if self esteem is assumed to be the sole determinant of success. (For instance, my father once told me I could not speak English effectively, and ever since then I have been in doubt as to my ability to communicate important issues effectively.)
—–
In relation to all of this, I had an American Internet acquaintance, who kept pushing this “you think positive!” line, and after several years I told him to back off.
He then conducted a very bizarre Internet campaign against me, suggesting that I was low in self esteem and inclined to reject positive support.
That’s what you get from ideological dogmatists.
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“Self esteem has no direct correlation to success”
– That, of course, depends on the definition of success. It has no direct correlation to amassing tons of money, for example, but in my system of values, that has nothing to do with success anyways. Of course, the definition of self-esteem also varies from one person to another. I define as healthy self-esteem the absence of a desire to engage in masochistic, self-sacrificial activities and the capacity to enjoy life, especially through the manifestations of one’s body.
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Sure, but I kind of meant “self esteem” in that very, very narrowly defined sense of thinking positively about oneself no matter what. That was the context for my critique of this other fellow, whose attitudes I found bizarre, but later came to realise were quintessentially American.
Actually, it takes a lot of genuine self esteem, or what some psychologists term a strong ego, to get to the bottom of what isn’t right about a situation. One can only engage in genuine analyses if one is not going to crumble easily. Genuine self esteem should be about openness and honesty with oneself.
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Oh, that kind of “self-esteem”! The one where a person’s entire existence is threatened by the possibility that they might not be absolutely perfect every second of their lives. 🙂 Yes, that’s a very pernicious idea. It’s the same as the super annoying “Love yourself the way you are.” It just always put my teeth on edge to hear that. Bleh.
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It’s a pernicious idea because it blocks communication and distorts everything. There are a lot of experiences I am interested in that have a negative side. I want to know what people recoil from, as well as what attracts them. However, if it is seen to be a negative reflection on myself whenever I notice that somebody reacts in a less than positive way to something, that seems to be an injunction not to notice what I’ve already seen.
And people get into all sorts of recriminations on the basis that I’ve observed something negative. WHO does it reflect negatively upon, they want to know. The negativity becomes a hot potato nobody wants to hold. It’s like the example I gave the other day: If you see a nazi, then perhaps you have an evil nazi in your heart that only wants to see a nazi.
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