You can say "who cares?",
but this is part of working out one's identity, and cuts pretty deep, and
therefore should be respected, I think.
Yes, this is part of one's identity.
But it goes back to things I have said here related to the Eleanor Roosevelt quote. How I react to what people say is up to me, not up to them. That, for me, is part of being mature. Children aren't able to make that distinction. You can watch them and see that they lack the ability to let somebody say "I dare you" and not accept the dare AND not feel they are at all diminished by it. They are letting the darer run their lives.
For me, part of becoming a mature person has been refusing to let other people run my life or dictate my responses. Obviously, when the interference is physical, when someone grabs you by the arm and starts hauling you off into the woods, that's a different matter.
But when it is purely words, they can't hurt me unless I let them. Do you think Gandhi would have been upset or felt the need to spit in someone's eye if they had called him a coward? Or Socrates?
I don't claim to have reached the elevated status of either of those thinkers. But it's an aspiration. Every time I find that I have allowed someone else to dictate my response to them, so that I feel angered or insulted or offended or embarrassed when that isn't the way I prefer to feel, I think I that I have failed to live up to my aspiration. |
