Integrity. The first
time I remember thinking about this word was due to Billy Squier.
For those of you who had the misfortune to be born
post-80’s or outside the U.S., you may not know about the magic of somebody like Squier. If I was a musical snob, I would completely
disown that I ever liked this guy, but hey, I’m married to a guy who is
unashamed of loving Dan Fogelberg, whom, to me, is the nadir of rock. (“Leader of the Band”? Seriously?
HATE that song).
As I listen to videos via not-very-good YouTube videos,
Squier’s songs still sound as tempting and revealing as they did back in the
mid-80’s, when Don’t Say No was one
of the biggest records around. “The
Stroke” was most popular, but to my ears, “Lonely is the Night” and “My Kinda
Lover” sound as sincere as rock and roll possibly could in the 80’s.
I liked Billy Squier enough to want to go see him at the
Fort Wayne Memorial Coliseum during my junior year of high school. The only problem was the concert was on a
school night, and thus my parents said no.
Not to be thwarted, I made up a story about how my friend Kim and I were
going to a tech rehearsal for the school play, that I would stay overnight with
her, and go to school from her house the next day. Somehow, my parents bought it.
Interestingly, I remember nothing about that concert. What I do remember is being caught a week
later when my mom talked to Kim’s mom about an unrelated issue. My mother, having been raised a Southern Gentlewoman,
is not a screamer, but she has a firm and dangerous tone when she is mad. And boy, was she mad. The one statement that came through clearly
was, “It’s a matter of integrity.”
In my adolescence, it seemed far more convenient to lie,
especially to my parents, to get what I wanted.
So I did. I even said things
like, “Lying to your parents is okay, even necessary,” and honestly believed
it.
But when my mom said, “It’s a matter of integrity,” a seed
was planted. I lied to her and my dad
plenty of times after that (after all, that was just my junior year), but I was
conscious and remorseful of what I was doing.
Funnily enough, I was also lying to myself.
Ironically, this came home to roost when I was teaching high
school. I loved the punks and goths because
they were honest about what they did (drinking, getting high), what they didn’t
do (my assignments), and who they were.
I took the truthful, greasy-haired, leather-jacketed kid reeking of last
night’s alcohol over the sweet (ha!) blond blue-eyed girl who told me earnestly
that 4:20 was not a drug reference, and that’s why she wanted it on her
yearbook page.
Lying is a form of protection borne of the need to preserve
others’ projections of us. I was trying
to protect my parents from knowing that I was not the person they projected me
to be, however unconsciously. I wasn’t
as good or smart as I thought they thought I was, and I desperately didn’t want
them to know that. My students, even my
college students (even graduate students!) have done the same thing with
me. I recently realized, in one of those
lessons that needs to be experienced over and over again, is that I can’t take
this personally. As I wrote in my journal
back in 2008:
What this tells me is that
it’s [lying] not about me, the authority figure, but the person him or
herself. It may be a case of having high
self-expectations and knowing you are falling short, but you don’t want to
admit that to anyone, so you make up excuses or lie or get defensive when
people see those cracks in your armor that you thought were invisible or that
you had covered up, or even worse, that you didn’t even know were there.
Now, when Sharon Salzberg, meditation teacher
extraordinaire, talks about integrity, she means something more conceptual, as
in living your values. I wrote about that later in the same journal entry:
Maybe it’s as basic as
thinking and acting with integrity, not only toward others, but toward
myself. Sometimes I get so caught up in
doing things so that others will like and respect me, that I don’t even do the
things that I like and respect about myself.
In other words, I’m performing for others for the sake of my ego, as
opposed to thinking about what I really want in life. My ego…protects those small brittle places to
make it so that I’m not vulnerable. I
figure if I try really hard to appease my ego, than those vulnerabilities will
go away. What I’m seeing is that they
don’t; and that the ego stretches me too thin so I cycle through those dark
moments time and again—that deep-seated anger at trying to play nice and to
play strong as opposed to really getting down to business.
I need to define for myself
what acting with integrity really means.
It doesn’t mean doing what I want to do and not doing what I don’t want
to do: it means being truthful, even so
far down and deep as learning to recognize those hard truths about myself. It also means being generous toward others and
myself.
At the very least, then, I hope I can lie less to myself
about what I can and cannot do. My ego
still wants people to like me, because maybe then I will like me; thus it
thinks I can and should do all kinds of things.
I see the same thing with my colleagues.
At a meeting this week, every single person claimed to be
overwhelmed. You know what? I am not overwhelmed—not yet this year
anyway. After years of burnout, my
sabbatical taught me that taking time to do yoga, meditate, read, play in the
garden, and even watch television, keeps me rejuvenated.
Busyness is now the way we tell ourselves we are
wanted. The endless emails. The taking on of more complex tasks. I still sometimes get sucked into that, but
can often come back to the place of “No more work this afternoon. It’s time to read some young adult fiction.”
If you are feeling overwhelmed, can you step away from your
inbox, your promises to others, and keep the promise to yourself? Can you offer yourself the generosity you
would offer others?
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