Shouting (or, Advice)

It was about an hour after the evening fireside cocktail party had wound down. Some stragglers still remained, waxing about the past year and nursing a bottle of warming wine. The fire had stopped cracking now, and the candles which beset ubiquitous wreaths ran low, so the two-story Christmas that towered near the bay windows provided most of the light in the Great Hall. Two girls whose parents are yearly participants at the winter festival seem to be the only other attendees who are in their early twenties, and we gravitated towards each other in the name of comfort. I am jarred by the reality that it is so fundamentally different to talk to them.

It seems that a lot of the conversations I have participated in during my adult life--or, more to the point, more of the things that have been said while I was standing in front of the speaker--have been directed at me, as opposed to held with me. I find that I am told what to do a great deal of time, but not from a position of authority; instead--and this is uncomfortably often--people seem to speak as if they have some guidance for me, and yet I have not requested any. Moreover, we are often not speaking about anything the context of which would necessitate guidance in *any* instance..things such as standing in a line for a meal, looking at the food. Make yourself a sandwich, they'd say. Save it for later, because you'll surely get hungry. Try this wine, it's a first fruit. Your new favorite, no question. Oh, this part of the city is certainly the better, in fact that other place you're thinking of isn't worth it. Go this way. Do this thing. Trust us. These are not tips, from someone who has been there before me. Instead they are each a credo: do this, because I know better than you. It is insufferable. Because they do not.

And more than that, they cannot. Many people pretend to know what it is that I prefer, how my mind is designed, or what it is that will make me as happy as possible in the the future. I pity them that they don't realize how foolish it is to assume that I am like they are, or if I conceive of them more gently, that they don't realize that I don't care much for their opinion, regardless of how closely it aligns with my own. And it is not as if they think poorly; in fact, this is far from the case, as the collective degrees, grants, and awards bestowed upon the people who gather in any given year at this Seminar alone is unspeakably humbling. I quite often receive this sort of treatment from professors, or employers, or just from adults in general. Perhaps that is the tragedy of my relationship with some of them: I am young, they are in so many ways experts. But the failure of their pride is that because they are good thinkers, they presume that by extension they are better than I am, or that at the very least, they are more capable than I am at determining something that they simply cannot know better than I do. In some cases, they will be able to outthink me, but it will only be because the data is available for them to do it: in terms of my habits and feelings, I rightly I trust myself more than I will ever listen to an overbearing professor or a stressful boss, or than I would take the advice of even a knowledgeable stranger. 

It is not that I do not recognize their right to express themselves: surely, they have that. But do it in some other way, won't you? If you feel supervisory, then why not pay mind to your own screaming children, or admonish at all the ones who are unspeakably rude so often in your presence, or buy a hamster and tend to that. If you are feeling aggressive, then play tetherball, squeeze a bag of sand, write a haiku. If you feel as if you are better than I am, then kindly silence your impulse to demonstrate that triviality; or, remove yourself, and do it quickly.