But gently, please. It’s been a while.

Hello nice people. I feel like I have been talking at you, not to you, for a while and I thought I was fix that tonight.

Sorry if that freaks you out. I mean well, but I have boundaries issues,.

My default (and preferred) mode when I am communicating with others ^[1] is casual, informal, and direct. I detest what I see as artificual barriers between people and I bristle at the very thought of having a lot of rules to follow (what some call “etiquette” and I call “bullshit”) instead of simply connecting with one another directly.

Seems like an odd philosophy for someone with huge issues connecting with others like myself, I suppose, but I never said everything about me made sense.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I’m just an informal kind of person, dear reader. It’s how I’m made. I understand why some people like to have manners be about following a set of rules to the best of your ability but those people are a lot more order-oriented than I.am.

It’s part of my creative mindset. The creatve mind instinctively wants to minimize the rules and maximize potential for connection. It’s those connections that are the basis for all creativity and creative people want there to be as many potential connections as possible at all times.

Hence the need to maintain an “open mind”. Open to what? Connections.

Therefore, the sort of stuctured, ordered, filed presses and folded life of the “a place for everything and everything in its place” type person seems stifling and artificial and quite frankly horrifying to a creative type like me.

But to them, my rule-minimizing life would seem like madness, chaos, and anarchy. They need all that order in order to feel safe and in control. Their whole lives are patterned about this need for structure and so, for them, a trip to my mind would be like being abandoned on some layer of Hell.

Pandemonium, perhaps. Or Bedlam.

The world needs both types, of course. And nobody is all one or the other. There are things about which I am intensely fussy (language and logic being the biggest ones) and I am sure that even the most buttoned down order oritented bookkeeper has a creative side lurking somewhere.

One of the differences is in faith in your own judgment. For orderly types, often the worst thing they can imagine is being asked to make a judgment call.

By that, I mean a decision for which there is no proven, tested, reliable method by which they can derive the right answer. They would have to rely entirely on their own understanding and perception and make a gut-level decision.

To them, that sounds impossible. How could they get the right answer – let alone KNOW it’s the right answer – if there is no set procedure to apply? What kind of madness is this? Are they expecting you to have magic powers?

These are the people with a lifelong hatred of English class. To them, being asked an open ended question like “What do you feel is the main theme of the story?” or “What is your favorite character and why?” is like being asked to do the impossible and then being punished for not doing it.

And it is impossible… if you can’t see outside your frame of reference.

What English teachers need to tell said people is that these questions are meant to test your ability to articulate and express your thoughts. That’s why it’s called English class – it’s where you learn to use the English language.

Therefore the actual answer to the question is secondary. The primary idea is to give you a chance to practice expressing yourself.

And that’s entirely possible and not unfair at all.

English teachers tend not to understand the orderly mindset well enough to tell kids that, though. They often don’t know it themselves.

Ironically, they lack the ability to articulate it.

Now gentle readers, I have heard that somewhere there are English teachers who tell the kids that there are no wrong answers then tell kids their answers are wrong.

That is such a deep and horrific betrayal that it makes me want to beat these teachers senseless with a whiteboard.

Seriously. At the very least, the teacher ought to get a pretty stern talking to for playing such a dirty rotten trick on the kids. If I was the principal of that school, I would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

But I think that at least in some cases, the people claiming to have had these teachers are describing how it felt, not how it was.

I don’t blame them for this. It can be very hard to tell the difference sometimes. I myself often confuse the two and start thinking that how I feel – that nobody cares about me, that everyone resents me for being a burden, and so on – represents how it really is in the world when I know that it’s not true.

I might not always be able to feel the love, but it’s always there. The sun still shines in winter, after all.

And I can see how someone with a different mindset than mine might be so overwhelmed by this feeling of the cruelest injustice that they hate English class, the arena for this traumatic experiences, for life.

That’s what gym class was like for me, after all. Constantly being asked to do something that all the other kids could do but for me, it was impossible. People saying “Just do this!” and me asking “But how do I do that?” and them saying “Just do it already!”.

And boy, do I still hate gym class. With a vengeance.

But I also wonder about the logic of declaring something to be impossible when those around you are doing it.

I mean, gym class might have seemed impossible FOR ME, but I never thought it was impossible period. That would have made no sense.

But then again, maybe I can only see that because I have the kind of creative, flexible mind that can see outside the walls of social reality.

In which case… dammit, I just dunno.

Maybe we just need to get bettter at recognizing that different kids have different needs and different learning styles and different strengths, and teach them accordingly.

Or maybe I, too, am limited by my own mindset, and so I can’t see the solution.

I just know that it seems like a crime that so many people I have known have gone through this kind of trauma.

Surely we can do better than that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.