Breaking Expectations, But Not in a Good Way
Forrest and I have this thing we like to call the “Shithead Principle”. What that means is that often, the correct course of action will mean you’re not living up to the expectations of the world around you. Whether that’s choosing to spend time with your kids instead of have a perfectly clean house or helping out a younger colleague rather than getting your work done 100% on time, the Shithead Principle will often lead to people looking at you and thinking you’re lazy, or unmotivated, or disrespectful. But it’s not any of those things. It’s realizing that sometimes there are more important things than checking off all the boxes. And the most important part of that is not justifying yourself, not wasting a minute somehow trying to make it ok that you live in a messy house or your work had to wait until after that conversation.
Because if we keep trying to justify these choices, we’re giving weight to the idea that there is something deficient in choosing to spend time with our kids or helping someone else out. We’re acting as though the point of our work is to check the boxes rather than help people, when in reality, a clean house means nothing if your kids are disconnected from you, and a business can’t run if new workers aren’t brought up to speed. But not apologizing makes you seem like even more of a Shithead.
Forrest and I run into this quite often because, given our personalities, we’re always riding that line. We want to be good, responsible adults, but we also realize that a lot of the lessons we learned as children aren’t worth wasting our time over. And when we’re working on making our community better, sometimes we have to learn to ride that line. We have to be willing to push back against authorities that are making easy choices instead of good choices. We have to speak out against policies that hurt our neighbors, whether that be due to poverty, race, homelessness or anything else. We have to be present in the small moments to offer freedom for kids to be kids, letting them be loud or raucous in a world that wants nothing more than to just not be bothered.
After these moments, when we have the be the shithead, I usually feel like crap. I second-guess myself. I wonder if I used the right words or said the right thing or if this overwhelming feeling of vulnerability means that once again I got it all wrong. But those are just feelings. They come and then, if I let them, they go. And in the end, I find that my instincts – to care for other people, to make space for them in our community – those instincts guided me well. My work to learn and grow changed me and I can trust that change in the moments I need it most. So while I may look like a shithead, I’m not really acting like one.
When have you had to break other’s expectations to do what was right?
