Being Kind to My Own Worst Enemy

I am surrounded by adversarial meetings. Deans v. faculty. Provosts v. faculty. Faculty v. faculty. Assistant and Associate Deans v. Provosts v. Faculty. Everybody on campus v. the state’s university system and its various governing bodies. Tuesday. Thursday. Friday. My wife, who works in student life at a local university, has these every day with students who are called up for you-name-it disciplinary actions ranging from chemical offenses to theft to assault to squatters taking up residence in one of the halls on campus. They’re just. so. heavy.

We’re exiting the week feeling like we’ve been run over by a truck.

This kind of heaviness has registered with some of my higher-ups, such that they’re planning on building a giant, multi-million dollar fitness center so that we can work out our grief on the treadmill or pickleball courts. This is not a bad idea, but it was described recently by a well-meaning member of the administration as a way to deal with faculty and staff stress over work. Many of us in that meeting looked at each other and wondered, almost aloud, whether administrators might just make decisions that didn’t generate unnecessary stress in the first place. I digress.

Maybe there’s nothing wrong with being an adversary sometimes. In the face of injustice or annihilation, an adversarial approach can be necessary and even prophetic. But it can easily slide into untreated, un-metabolized grievance. For me, grievance is different than grief. In fact, grievance may be unrecognized grief.

I’ve learned in recent years that if one is angry and treats the anger, it’s like you’re treating a symptom rather than the core condition. What is that core condition? Sadness. Disappointment. Fear. Grief. Sometimes that core condition is absolutely with the outside world. There are plenty of injustices to choose from, each of which is grieving. Each feels like a war (and, let’s be honest, sometimes is a war).

More frequently than we might think, the grief is with ourselves. It is disappointment with ourselves that we don’t have the courage or easy ability to leave. It is the sadness over a career’s worth of choices that have merely empowered systems to exploit us. It is the fear of an uncertain future. When that grief goes unchecked, the grievances add up in all sorts of self-loathing and internal contempt. Those feelings may be expressed outward at the apparent (and real) injustices in the world and our relationships. This is like a civil war spilling over the borders of one’s personal nation, sending a throng of emotional refugees across our boundaries for others to deal with.

I won’t pretend that detecting the difference between external and internal griefs is easy or that the lines aren’t blurry. They absolutely are. But after week’s like this one, I think we have to start simply and locally. We have to learn to love the adversaries within us, too.

Where can we begin to be kind? And how?